Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar

“Buck” Taylor, was a jazz bassist who worked in a band on
weekends. Mr. Taylor also played the guitar, and he and
his musician friends would gather at the house and listen
to records by Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot
Club of France, and also Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti.
“That was the kind of guitar playing he really liked,”
Taylor says. “Those were the first things I ever heard.”
At age 4 his father gave him a red ukulele with a palm
tree painted on it, on which he learned to play chords. A
while later, his father presented him with his first guitar – a
battered relic with terrible action purchased at a local fair.
“It should have put me off for life,” Taylor says. “But I
loved it and loved playing it.”
By age 10, Taylor often accompanied his father to
wedding gigs and village dances, where he would play tunes
such as “Sweet Georgia Brown” as a novelty with the band.
At age 13, Taylor was the band’s regular guitarist.
Taylor says living close to the city was fortunate
because his father often took him to see jazz concerts, and
that he and his brother would often take the train into
London and hang around the music stores. Later his brother
turned him on to Jimi Hendrix and took him to see Hendrix
perform at the Albert Hall. Shortly thereafter, he also saw
Segovia give a solo concert. Taylor said that while both
concerts were night and day musically, they were oddly
similar in that both were unforgettable virtuoso
performances that forever broadened his own musical
horizons.
“I’ve never restricted my appreciation of music to what
would fall into the category of jazz,” Taylor said. “I always
see myself first and foremost as a guitar player. It just
happens that I’ve always been in this sort of jazz tradition,
so I guess it’s accurate to call me a jazz musician. But I
see myself as a guitar player who plays jazz, as opposed
to a jazz musician who’s chosen the guitar as his
instrument.”
A major opportunity in Taylor’s professional career
beckoned in 1975, when he met Stephane Grappelli, the
brilliant French violinist who played on all the Django
records Taylor listened to as a youth. Ike Issacs was playing
guitar with Grappelli at the time, and he introduced Taylor
to Grappelli at a concert in London. Four years later,
Grappelli, who by this time was familiar with Taylor’s