Remembering the Great Larry Coryell

Reflections on the guitarist who would've turned 83 the other day

He blazed the fusion trail with The Free Spirits, the renegade NYC band he formed in Greenwich Village in the mid ‘60s with bassist-vocalist Chris Hill, guitarist Columbus “Chip” Baker, saxophonist Jim Pepper and drummer Bob Moses. Bridging the worlds of rock and jazz before anyone was doing that, The Free Spirits’ debut on ABC Records, Out of Sight and Sound, was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder Studio on Sept. 14, Oct. 5 and 18, 1966, just a few months after Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ Revolver came out. Released in January, 1967, it preceded the release of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced by seven months, Tony Williams Lifetime’s Emergency! by two and a half years and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by three years.

“I have to give Coryell credit,” said his Free Spirits bandmate Moses (listed as “Bobby” Moses on Out of Sight and Sound). “He was the first musician that I met in New York who was equally dextrous in both the jazz bag and the rock bag. He understood both worlds really well, and I think it took somebody like that to make the rest of us all appreciate rock & roll. I have to admit that I was a terrible bebop snob before I met Larry. I used to think that if you couldn’t swing and make the changes and play bebop, you were bullshitting. The very first time I heard Larry, he was playing bebop like Wes Montgomery, and I thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s a great player!’ Next time I heard him, he was playing a Chuck Berry thing, and really playing it well. I think that because of the fact that I saw his jazz chops first and had the respect, it made me take the rock thing seriously. So I started to listen to rock after that and found that there were things I liked.”

A Texas-born, West Coast-bred lad of 24 when he arrived in New York City from Seattle in 1965, toting a Gibson Super 400, Coryell dug Kenny Burrell and Barney Kessel while his favorite album at the time was The Incredible Jazz Guitar Of Wes Montgomery. He had great taste and unlimited potential, plus chops to burn. But something happened to alter his plans of becoming the next Wes Montgomery. By 1966, culture shock had set in, resulting in an abrupt change of course. “Everybody was dropping acid, and the prevailing attitude was ‘Let’s do something different,’” Coryell told me in a 1984 Downbeat cover story. “We were saying, ‘We love Wes, but we also love Bob Dylan. We love Coltrane, but we also love the Beatles. We love Miles, but we also love the Rolling Stones.’ We wanted people to know that we were very much a part of the contemporary scene, but at the same time, we had worked our butts off to learn all this other music too. It was a very sincere thing. And what came out of it ultimately became a very big, lucrative movement.”

“The Free Spirits was absolutely like nothing else. It was like Coltrane/Albert Ayler meets Motown, B.B. King and the Beatles. Because the songwriting was great in that band, but it was also so free having Jim Pepper blowing tenor the way he did. We were supposed to be playing rock ’n’ roll but we’d start our sets with Pepper doing a 20-minute unaccompanied tenor sax solo. Things like that were unheard of in 1965 for rock groups.”

“And Coryell was like...WOW!,” Moses continued. “He was getting feedback with his guitar long before I heard Hendrix or Sonny Sharrock or Derek Bailey do it. Now there’s probably a bunch of avant-garde guitar players using feedback, but he was the first one that I heard doing that. So Coryell was really an electic guy, but he could also play as beautiful and straight ahead as Wes Montgomery. He did a record later on called Lady Coryell (Vanguard, 1969) where he does a beautiful jazz ballad version of ‘You Don't Know What Love Is.’ So he had that whole world covered as well."

Coryell’s 1970 album Spaces, which included guest appearances by John McLaughlin, Billy Cobham, Miroslav Vitous and Chick Corea (before the formation of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and Return To Forever) was a seminal fusion offering in that burgeoning movement. He followed with such powerful albums as 1971’s Barefoot Boy and 1974’s Introducing the Eleventh House before settling into a purely acoustic guitar zone with three releases in 1976 — Two For the Road (with fellow guitarist Steve Khan), Twin House (with guitarist Philip Catherine) and The Lion and The Ram — along with 1978’s Splendid (with Catherine) and 1979’s Tributaries (with John Scofield). He subsequently tackled imposing classical pieces by Maurice Ravel (Bolero), Rimsky Korsakov (Scheherazade), de Falla (Noches En Los Jardines De España) and Stravinsky (Petrouchka).

Following a brief stint with the Guitar Trio (with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia) Coryell would enter a rehabilitation hospital to help him deal with a debilitating alcohol problem. He emerged with a new lease on life in 1984 with Comin’ Home, his straight ahead bop-flavored outing with pianist Albert Dailey, bassist George Mraz and drummer Billy Hart. Along with versions of Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” and the Rodgers & Hart show tune “It Never Entered My Mind,” Coryell performs three swinging originals, including “No More Booze Minor Blues” and “Good Citizen Swallow,” which was dedicated to bassist Steve Swallow. It was then that I interviewed Coryell for the first time. My piece, entitled “Back To The Roots,” was a cover story in the May 1984 issue of Downbeat. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship (to quote Bogart in Casablanca) that lasted until Larry’s passing on Feb. 19, 2017.

I saw Coryell perform numerous times around New York City over the years, including memorable gigs at the Blue Note, Fat Tuesday’s, Birdland, the Jazz Standard and Iridium. I interviewed him several times for various magazines, both Stateside and abroad. And I wrote numerous sets of liner notes for his albums, including 2006’s Traffic, 2008’s Impressions: The New York Sessions and 2011’s Night of Jazz Guitars. I’ll never forget his outrageously boisterous laugh, his wicked sense of humor or the kindness he showed my daughter on the couple of occasions that I brought her along to recording sessions. She was just a cute little kid back then, just starting out on violin. And she must’ve made a big impression on him because everytime I would interview him after that, the first thing he would say was: “How’s Sophie?”

Miss you, Larry!