Guitar Solo Transcriptions

One of jazz’s most recorded guitarists, Barry Galbraith was known for his immaculate taste as an accompanist in any musical context. His guitar studies books are still some of the most popular practice materials for aspiring jazz guitarists today.

Born Charles Jagelka, New Yorker Chuck Wayne was a jazz guitarist, composer and arranger noted for distinctive bebop style and legato technique. He became an expert in the banjo, mandolin and balalaika as a child, focusing on swing. He was heavily influenced by classical music in addition to jazz. He became prominent in the early 1940s on NYC's 52nd Street and in Greenwich Village where he made the transition to bebop. Influenced by Oscar Moore and Charlie Christian, and horn players of the day like Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker, Chuck made his way into Woody Herman's big band and later worked with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, spreading the bebop revolution with recordings like Groovin' High and Blue 'n' Boogie.

Jesse Van Ruller is widely regarded as a contemporary jazz guitar master for his fluid, dynamic phrasing and deep groove. Born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1972, he began learning the guitar at age seven.

Jimmy Raney was one of the most fluent and deft bebop players of all time, having assimilated the language of musicians such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie in such a thorough manner that pianist Barry Harris, one of the world’s foremost bebop masters, once remarked that “Man this cat (Jimmy Raney) plays like Yard (Charlie Parker)!”’

The son of saxophonist/composer Al Cohn, Joe is well known as man who can play anything on the guitar. If it's impossible, he'll do it anyway. Heralded by Pat Metheny as an "unbelievable improviser" "able to keep ideas going and flowing" and turn "sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into stories", his apparent virtuosity is complemented by a sensitivity to the narrative qualities of music.