George
Van Eps
George Van Eps was
a quiet legend among jazz guitarists, one who as far back as
the 1930s pioneered a harmonically sophisticated chordal/lead
style that was eclipsed in influence by the single-string idioms
of Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. Yet Van Eps, like
his brassy colleague Les Paul, also stood apart from them as
an iconoclastic inventor, designing a seven-string guitar in
the late 1930s that adds an extra bass string. Thus, Van Eps
was able to play bass lines simultaneously with chords and lead
solos, a jazz equivalent of fingerpicking country guitarists
like Merle Travis and Chet Atkins. Van Eps puckishly referred
to his style of playing as "lap piano," and his seven-string
guitar has been adopted by a select few figures like Howard
Alden and Bucky and John Pizzarelli.
Van Eps came from a talented musical family;
his father Fred was a famous master of the ragtime banjo and
a sound engineer, his mother played the piano, and he had three
brothers, Bobby, Freddy and John, who were also professional
musicians. Self-taught on the banjo, Van Eps began playing professionally
at 11, and after falling under the influence of Eddie Lang two
years later, he learned the guitar well enough to play alongside
Lang for six months as a teenager. From there, Van Eps worked
with Freddy Martin (1931-33), Benny Goodman (1934-35) and Ray
Noble (1935-36) before moving to Hollywood to become a freelance
musician, author of a how-to guitar book, and instrument designer.
After returning to Noble in 1940-41, Van Eps worked in his father's
recording lab for two years before returning to the freelance
arena, where, among other things, he worked for Paul Weston
and took part in the 1950s film and TV series Pete Kelly's Blues.
Van Eps only made a handful of recordings
as a leader or unaccompanied soloist, including Mellow Guitar
(Columbia, 1956) and My Guitar, George Van Eps' Seven-String
Guitar and Soliloquy for Capitol in the late 1960s. A bout of
serious illness in the early 1970s, plus a 1977 hand injury
that resulted in three broken fingers, reduced his activities.
However, Van Eps returned to the studio in 1991 for the first
of three exquisite duo albums for Concord Jazz with his former
student Howard Alden, mixing venerable standards with a few
Van Eps originals, and he shared a solo guitar album with Johnny
Smith in 1994. Even in his 80s, he remained an eloquent exponent
of easygoing modern swing, dying of pneumonia on November 29,
1998.
