Larry Carlton has spent 60 years chasing a sound. These seven guitarists showed him where to find it. Each one left something permanent inside his playing. Each one changed everything. Seven, Barney Kessel. Every great musician has a starting point, a door that opened before they even knew what was on the other side.
For Larry Carlton, one of those doors had Barney Kessel’s name on it. Long before Joe Pass arrived, and long before Wes Montgomery rewired his entire understanding of what jazz guitar could be, there was Kessel, accessible, intelligent, swinging, and quietly teaching a young boy from Southern California that this instrument had more to say than anyone had yet told him.
Carlton has been honest about where Kessel sits in his personal hierarchy. He has called him one of the simpler jazz players of that era. But, he has always been quick to add the words that matter most. Still very valid. >> Catch me. I’d never heard anybody play the guitar like that. >> That qualification is not a small thing coming from a musician of Carlton’s precision and honesty.
It means Kessel gave him something real, something foundational, voicings, feel, a sense of how jazz phrasing actually works at the most honest and essential level. What Kessel represented was a kind of clarity. Before the complexity of Pass and the genius of Montgomery arrived to expand Carlton’s world completely, Kessel gave him the grammar, the vocabulary, the basic understanding of how jazz guitar thinks and breathes and moves through a chord sequence.
You cannot build what Carlton built without that foundation underneath it. Barney Kessel was not the destination, but without him, the journey never begins. Six, Robben Ford. Not every influence comes from a hero. Some of the most important ones come from someone standing right next to you in the same generation, playing the same instrument, and doing something with it that stops you cold.
That is exactly what Robin Ford did to Larry Carlton. Not a distant legend heard on a radio, not a recording from another era, a contemporary, a peer, a guitarist whose playing made Carlton think, “I need a piece of what that man is doing.” Carlton has said it directly and without hesitation in interviews. He heard Ford, recognized something in the playing that he wanted inside his own musical vocabulary, and went after it.
That kind of honesty from a musician of Carlton’s stature is remarkable. It takes confidence to admit that someone else has something you want. It takes even more confidence to go and get it, absorb it, and make it your own without losing yourself in the process. >> This kid from Northern California, Robben Ford, that I heard him at a supper club called Dante’s.
>> What Ford carried that Carlton responded to was a particular combination of blues rawness and jazz sophistication that very few guitarists have ever managed to balance without tipping too far in one direction. Ford lived inside that tension naturally, the way some musicians simply do. Carlton heard it, felt it, and let it change him.
The mutual respect between these two men runs deep and runs both ways. Two guitarists who pushed each other forward simply by existing in the same musical world at the same time. That is its own kind of greatness. Five, Albert King. There is a kind of guitar playing that does not ask for your attention. It simply takes it.
Albert King was that kind of player. He did not seduce you into listening. He grabbed you by the collar and pulled you somewhere uncomfortable and beautiful and raw, and by the time you realized what had happened, you were already changed. Larry Carlton has spoken about what the old blues players mean to him now, later in his career and later in his life.
If there is music in Carlton’s house, he has said, it is Albert Collins or Albert King, not jazz theory records, not fusion landmarks, the blues, stripped back, emotionally direct, and played by men who understood that feeling was the entire point. >> But yeah, I was I was chasing that feeling that I had when I listened.
>> What Albert King brought to the guitar was physically unlike anything else. Left-handed playing a right-handed guitar strung upside down, tuned to his own personal open tuning, bending strings with a strength and authority that seemed to operate outside normal physical logic. The notes he pulled from that instrument did not just sound different, they felt different.
They landed in the body before they landed in the mind. For Carlton, absorbing Albert King was not about copying licks or studying technique. It was about understanding what the instrument was truly capable of when emotion was the only agenda. Jazz gave Carlton harmony and sophistication. Albert King gave him something older and more essential than either of those things.
He gave him the blues in its purest and most uncompromising form. Four, Albert Collins. Larry Carlton was 16 years old and completely confused. There was a guitarist he kept hearing whose sound he could not figure out, could not replicate, and could not get out of his head. The tone was wrong, the feel was wrong, everything about it defied the musical logic he had been carefully building inside himself.
He kept chasing it, kept trying to find it on his own instrument, and kept coming up empty. It was only years later that the answer finally arrived. Albert Collins played in an open F minor tuning with a capo. Carlton had been trying to reach a destination without knowing the road even existed. That story tells you everything about what Collins meant to him.
This was not a casual admiration from a distance. This was an obsession, a sound so singular and so deeply felt that it lodged inside a teenage boy’s ears and refused to leave for the rest of his life. Carlton has said he still gets goosebumps hearing Collins today. Decades of sessions, Grammy Awards, and legendary recordings later, and that 16-year-old reaction has never fully gone away.
>> And finally, feeling started coming back. >> What made Collins so unreachable was the combination of his unique technical approach and his absolute emotional directness. He swung hard, he played with a ferocity and an originality that owed nothing to anyone else. Carlton has said he got pretty close to that sound eventually, once he understood the mechanics behind it, but close was never quite the same as arriving.
Albert Collins was one of a kind, and Larry Carlton knew it before he even knew why. Three, B.B. King. Larry Carlton did not just admire B.B. King from a distance. In 1983, he sat down with him in a studio, picked up his guitar, and spent 47 minutes playing blues alongside the man himself. Conversations about phrasing, performances of classics, two guitarists from completely different worlds finding out how much common ground they actually shared.
That session exists on film, and watching it you understand immediately what B.B. King gave Larry Carlton that no jazz guitarist ever could. A single note, that is the answer. B.B. King built an entire career, an entire musical philosophy, and an entire generation of followers on the power of a single, perfectly placed, perfectly bent, perfectly felt guitar note.
He did not need volume, he did not need speed, he did not need complexity, he needed one note placed exactly right with exactly the right amount of vibrato and exactly the right amount of silence around it. That was the whole lesson and it took Carlton years to fully absorb what he had been hearing since he was a teenager in Southern California.
Every analyst who has ever written seriously about Carlton’s playing has noted the same thing. Somewhere beneath the jazz harmony and the session sophistication and the beautiful chord substitutions, there is a blues feeling that holds everything together and keeps it human. That feeling has a name and it is B.B. King.
Carlton reconciled two worlds inside his playing, the harmonic sophistication of jazz and the raw emotional directness of the blues. And B.B. King was the man who made the second half of that equation possible. Without him, the music is clever. With him, it has a soul. What that 1983 session also revealed was something rarer than technical admiration.
It showed a deep mutual respect between two men who had arrived at the guitar from entirely different directions and found that the instrument, at its most honest, pointed toward the same place. Carlton brought his jazz vocabulary and his studio fluency. King brought decades of lived experience and a tone that no one in the history of electric guitar has ever fully replicated.
Together they made something that neither could have made alone. B.B. King is documented across every serious account of Carlton’s musical development as a defining blues influence. Carlton has listed him alongside Joe Pass and Albert Collins as a guitarist he returns to for pure emotional sustenance. That is not the language of influence, that is the language of love. Two, Wes Montgomery.
There is a moment in every serious guitarist’s life when they hear something that makes them put the instrument down and stare at the wall. Not because they want to quit, because they need a moment to process the fact that someone, somewhere, has taken the same six strings and done something with them that seems to operate in an entirely different dimension.
For Larry Carlton, that moment came with Wes Montgomery. Carlton has placed Montgomery at the absolute center of his jazz education. Alongside Joe Pass, consistently and without qualification across decades of interviews. As a teenager in Southern California, he listened to Montgomery obsessively. The octave playing, the chord melodies, the way Montgomery could build a solo from single notes to octaves to chords and make the whole thing feel like one continuous thought.
None of it sounded like technique, it sounded like conversation, like someone simply talking in the most musical and beautiful language imaginable. What separated Montgomery from every other jazz guitarist of his era was the combination of harmonic depth and pure physical warmth. He played with his thumb instead of a pick and that choice gave his sound a roundness and an intimacy that nobody using a plectrum has ever fully replicated.
Carlton absorbed that tonal philosophy deeply. The sweetness in Carlton’s own sound, the warmth that made him the most sought-after session guitarist in Los Angeles throughout the 1970s has its roots in what Montgomery proved was possible on an electric guitar, but it was not just the sound. It was storytelling.
Montgomery understood that a guitar solo was not a display of ability. It was a narrative. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had tension and release, question and answer, darkness and light. Carlton took that lesson and built an entire career on it. From the landmark solo on Steely Dan’s Kid Charlemagne to 30 years of recording under his own name.
Every time Carlton constructs a solo that makes you lean forward in your seat, some part of that construction goes back to Montgomery. Carlton has said directly that Wes Montgomery was a jazz guitarist in the truest and highest sense of that phrase. Coming from a man who has spent his life carefully distinguishing between jazz influence and jazz mastery, that statement means everything.
Montgomery was not just an influence. He was the standard. One, Joe Pass. A radio, a teenage boy, an afternoon in Southern California that changed the entire direction of life. Larry Carlton heard Joe Pass on a Gerald Wilson big band broadcast and something inside him locked into place permanently. Before that moment, he was a boy who played guitar.
After that moment, he was a musician with a destination. Carlton has returned to Joe Pass in interview after interview across six decades, always with the same quality of feeling in the words. Not admiration from a distance, something closer and more personal than that. He has listed Pass alongside John Coltrane and Albert Collins as the musicians he returns to for pure emotional sustenance, the ones that still produce goosebumps decades after the first listen.
That reaction does not diminish with time for Carlton. It deepens. What Pass represented was a kind of complete musical intelligence that Carlton has spent his entire career chasing. Pass could play unaccompanied and make you forget an entire rhythm section was missing. He could play through the most complex harmonic territory with a fluency and ease that made other guitarists feel like they were still learning the alphabet.
Carlton has said directly that Pass was a jazz guitarist in the truest sense of that phrase, placing him in a category that Carlton deliberately and honestly does not claim for himself. That humility in the face of Pass is its own form of reverence. Joe Pass was the beginning of Larry Carlton’s jazz education, the first great teacher he never met, and the standard against which he has quietly measured himself ever since.
60 years of sessions, recordings, and concerts later, Carlton still gets goosebumps. That is what a timeless guitarist does. He stays with you forever. Seven guitarists, one lifetime of listening. Larry Carlton absorbed every single one of them and turned it into something completely his own. Subscribe, leave a comment, and tell us which guitarist surprised you most.
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