Before Eddie Van Halen, if one word defined rock guitar aspiration it was this one: blues. Eric Clapton’s moody sincerity was a sacred rite, his means of communing with the spirit of Robert Johnson.

Jazz, the only truly American art form, is first and foremost an improvisational medium. The very idea of producing a jazz recording with any agenda beyond taking an accurate audio snapshot might seem ...

I had the good fortune, while still a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies, to catch some of the leading lights of modern jazz—including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, ...