Les Paul

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Les Paul (born Lester William Polsfuss, June 9, 1915, died August 12, 2009) is the legendary guitar virtuoso and unparalleled musical visionary. He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar. As a player, inventor and recording artist, Paul has been an innovator his entire life. His early experiments with overdubbing, delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention.

Before his attention was diverted toward recording multi-layered hits for the pop market, he made his name as a brilliant jazz guitarist. Heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt at first, Paul developed an astonishingly fluid, hard-swinging style of his own.
Among the jazzers who acknowledge his influence are George Benson, Al DiMeola, Stanley Jordan, Pat Martino, and Bucky Pizzarelli.

In 1952, Les Paul introduced the first eight-track tape recorder (designed by Paul and marketed by Ampex) and, more significantly for the future of rock and roll, finally saw the release of the the gold-top solid body electric guitar that bears his name. Gibson’s Les Paul Standard went on to become one of the most popular of all models of electric guitar.
The list of musicians associated with the Gibson Les Paul include Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Mike Bloomfield, Eddie Van Halen and Jimmy Page.

Over the ensuing decades Les Paul has remained active on all fronts. He recorded a Grammy-winning album of instrumental duets with Chet Atkins. From the mid-Eighties through the mid-Nineties, he performed weekly at Fat Tuesday’s, a New York City Iridium Jazz Club.

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