Reluctant Return

Where does a jazz guitarist go after he forms his own trio, makes records, plays top clubs, and wins the title of best guitarist in Down Beat magazine's international critics' poll for two years running? If he is Tal Farlow, he goes off to live in tiny (pop. 1,200) Sea Bright, N.J., where he reads, putters, takes up his old trade of sign painting, and disappears from the jazz scene for a decade. Why? Economics offers one explanation: many of the intimate, congenial rooms where Farlow liked to play had folded by 1957, the year he vanished. But his reasons went deeper. A lanky (6 ft. 2 in.) North Carolinian, Farlow did not find big-city life appealing; he could never quite convince himself that picking at a guitar in a nightclub was his true calling. "I just couldn't take it seriously," he says.

Not that he gave up the guitar when he moved to Sea Bright. He built a studio in his waterfront house where he combined music and electronics in the development of such gadgets as a minicomputer that adds a simultaneous sound an octave below whatever he plays. But except for a few local dates and some jam sessions with friends, he did no performing. "Time just went by," he drawls, "and I didn't take any engagements--and if I remember correctly, nobody asked me."

Now someone has. Last week Farlow, 46, finished a seven-week stand at Manhattan's new Frammis Restaurant, where his playing was as dexterous, polished and imaginative as ever. He reeled off his solos in long, sinuous lines that looped and darted like barn swallows, sometimes fragmenting suddenly into chords, or climaxing in silvery star bursts of notes. He even accompanied the other members of his trio (Pianist Johnny Knapp, Bassist Lyn Christie) with virtuoso flourishes: at several points, he played an amplified bass line on one string while strumming unamplified chords on the other.

Most nights, a sampling of the city's other guitarists turned up at the Frammis to admire and learn--even though much of what Farlow does is technically wrong. Self-taught, he applies his large, bony hands to the instrument in completely unorthodox fingerings; he plays only the top four strings with the fingers of his left hand, for example, while holding down the other two with his thumb. His lack of formal training--he still cannot read music--never bothered him; for a long time music was merely an avocation. He had already opened his own sign-painting shop in Greensboro in the early 1940s when radio broadcasts and recordings by Guitarist Charlie Christian lured him into jazz. Even after he had traveled northward with bands and played in New York with Red Norvo and Artie Shaw in the 1950s, he kept on painting signs.

Now, with his successful return to jazz, he seems ready to yield at last to its appeals. He is sorting through a batch of offers to make records and to play other club dates from Boston to Los Angeles. When asked if he is finally ready to regard music as his calling, he gives what for him is a positive answer: "Yes--probably."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.