“I wanted to play everything I heard,” he told Berle. “The music from the calliope at the fair, the tunes played by the organ grinder with his little monkey. I tried playing all those tunes on the guitar, and I would experiment on all the strings. In other words, the music was already in me. I wasn’t looking
for the guitar to tell me what I should look for. I already knew what I wanted to find, and I used the guitar to find it.”
“When I begin improvising with Charlie Christian,” Kessel asked himself, “what am I going to play?” Kessel realized that his enthusiasm for
Christian’s sound had made him something of a clone. "I decided that no matter how much I liked Charlie Christian or anybody else, they would remain only influences,
I began thinking in terms of absorbing these influences, rather than being absorbed by them.” - Barney Kessel
(Be a musical sponge ! Make your own musical gumbo! - Ed)
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