DANNY GATTON, THINKING PERSON’S GUITAR DEMON

A quick encounter with mastery...

Ten seconds. Can you spare it? Radical idea but really, that’s all it takes to get pulled into the world of superlatively talented and criminally under-documented guitarist Danny Gatton. Let’s use the first 8 measures of Gatton performing the Beach Boys classic “In My Room.” The link below is live; a much cleaner studio version can be found on Gatton’s excellent major-label debut from 1991, 88 Elmira Street.

This is all the cliches rolled together. Guitar as live wire. Hot knife through butter. Express train to the spirit realm. Hear just a sliver of a tune and you know: Here is a musician who has an undeniable, instantly audible authority of tone, a rare quality of presence. A mastery conveyed primarily in sound, the magnetic trait that separated Dexter Gordon, say, from the herd of tenor players.

No matter how many notes Gatton plays or what order they’re in, what comes across is something more than mere command of the technical considerations of the instrument – it’s closer to a dramatist’s control of the implication and shading and small gestures, the slight devices that can give the notes meaning. He approaches the lullaby melody of “In My Room” from the sound first, increasing the heat just by the way he leans into and sustains a single note. Then when he begins to improvise, he doesn’t rip your face off with shredding; instead, he works methodically, stretching and inverting the graceful outlines of Brian Wilson’s theme as though examining it from several angles. Until it becomes a new and alive thing.

Gatton was a beloved figure in Washington D.C. music circles in the 1980s and ‘80s; he committed suicide in 1994. He led several blazing bar bands featuring musicians far more accomplished than those who typically toil in bars. These players had to be ready for literally anything; a typical set might include “In My Room” or the swing-era standby “Harlem Nocturne” or tunes from the deep catalogs of blues, rockabilly, country and jazz – as well as deliriously inventive mashups of those and other roots styles into something he called “Redneck Jazz.” Gatton recorded regularly for independent labels; among the gems waiting in his discography is Relentless, a hard-swinging 1994 collaboration with organist Joey DeFrancesco.

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