Les Paul简介

Les Paul生于威斯康星州沃基肖市，原名Lester William Polsfuss。美国音乐家及发明家。莱斯·保罗以在吉他方面的精湛技巧而著称，他对电吉他突破性的革新彻底改变了流行音乐的影响。他于1941年研制出第一把实心电吉他，并且发明了各种录制人声和乐器的新方法，从而一手改变了音乐的方向，有电吉他之父之称。

详情介绍

Les Paul had such a staggeringly huge influence over the way American popular music sounds today that many tend to overlook his significant impact upon the jazz world. Before his attention was diverted toward recording multi-layered hits for the pop market, he made his name as a brilliant jazz guitarist whose exposure on coast-to-coast radio programs guaranteed a wide audience of susceptible young musicians. Heavily influenced by at first, Paul eventually developed an astonishingly fluid, hard-swinging style of his own, one that featured extremely rapid runs, fluttered and repeated single notes, and chunking rhythm support, mixing in country & western licks and humorous crowd-pleasing effects. No doubt his brassy style gave critics a bad time, but the gregarious, garrulous Paul didn't much care; he was bent on showing his audiences a good time.
Though he couldn't read music, Paul had a magnificent ear and innate sense of structure, conceiving complete arrangements entirely in his head before he set them down track by track on disc or tape. Even on his many pop hits for in the late '40s and early '50s, one can always hear a jazz sensibility at work in the rapid lead solo lines and bluesy bent notes -- and no one could close a record as suavely as Les. And of course, his early use of the electric guitar and pioneering experiments with multi-track recording, solid-body guitar design, and electronic effects devices have filtered down to countless jazz musicians. Among the jazzers who acknowledge his influence are , , (whose neck-tapping sound is very reminiscent of Paul's records), , and .
Paul's interest in music began when he took up the harmonica at age eight, inspired by a Waukesha ditch digger. Paul's only formal training consisted of a few unsuccessful piano lessons as a child -- and although he later took up the piano again professionally, exposure to a few records put an end to that. After a fling with the banjo, Paul took up the guitar under the influences of , , and regional players like Pie Plant Pete and Sunny Joe Wolverton, who gave Les the stage name Rhubarb Red. At 17, Les played with Rube Tronson's Cowboys and then dropped out of high school to join Wolverton's radio band in St. Louis on KMOX. By 1934, he was in Chicago, and before long, he took on a dual radio persona, doing a hillbilly act as Rhubarb Red and playing jazz as Les Paul, often with an imitation quartet. His first records in 1936 were issued on the Montgomery Ward label as Rhubarb Red and on backing blues shouter on acoustic guitar. Dissatisfied with the electric guitars circulating in the mid-'30s, Paul, assisted by tech-minded friends, began experimenting with designs of his own.
By 1937, Paul had formed a trio, and the following year, he moved to New York and landed a featured spot with , which gave him nationwide exposure through their broadcasts. That job ended in 1941 shortly after he was nearly electrocuted in an accident during a jam session in his Queens basement. After a long recovery period and more radio jobs, Paul moved to Hollywood in 1943, where he formed a new trio that made several V-Discs and transcriptions for MacGregor (some available on ). As a last-minute substitute for , Paul played in the inaugural Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles on July 2, 1944; his witty chase sequence with on "Blues" and fleet work elsewhere (now on Verve's Jazz at the Philharmonic: The First Concert) are the most indelible reminders of his prowess as a jazzman. Later that year, Paul hooked up with , who featured on his radio show, sponsored Les' recording experiments, and recorded six sides with him, including a 1945 number one hit, "It's Been a Long, Long Time." On his own, Paul also made several records with his for from 1944 to 1947, including jazz, country, and Hawaiian sides, and backed singers like , , and .
Meanwhile, in 1947, after experimenting in his garage studio and discarding some 500 test discs, Paul came up with a kooky version of "Lover" for eight electric guitars, all played by himself with dizzying multi-speed effects. He talked into releasing this futuristic disc, which became a hit the following year. Alas, a bad automobile accident in Oklahoma in January 1948 put Les out of action again for a year and a half; as an alternative to amputation, his right arm had to be set at a permanent right angle suitable for guitar playing. After his recovery, he teamed up with his soon-to-be second wife, a young country singer/guitarist named whom he renamed , and reeled off a long string of spectacular multi-layered pop discs for , making smash hits out of jazz standards like "How High the Moon" and "Tiger Rag." The hits ran out suddenly in 1955, and not even a -promoted stint at from 1958 to 1963 could get the streak going again. After a bitter divorce from in 1964, a gig in Tokyo the following year, and an LP of mostly remakes for in 1967, Paul went into semi-retirement from music.
Aside from a pair of wonderfully relaxed country/jazz albums with for RCA in 1976 and 1978 and a blazing duet with on "Spanish Eyes" from the latter's 1980 Splendido Hotel CD, Paul was long absent from the record scene (some rumored sessions for in the '90s have not materialized). However, a 1991 four-CD retrospective, The Legend & the Legacy, contained an entire disc of 34 unreleased tracks, including a breathtaking electrified tribute to , "Cookin'." More significantly, Paul began a regular series of Monday night appearances at New York's Fat Tuesday's club in 1984 (from 1996, Les held court at the Iridium club across from Lincoln Center), attended by visiting celebrities and fans for whom he became an icon in the '80s.
In 2005 American Made World Played by Les Paul & Friends was issued. Unlike most albums featuring "famous" friends, this contained some exceptional music. The list of contributors was impressive: , , , , , and even a sampled . One of the highlights was a duet with (who Les Paul had babysat for in 1950) on "Fly Like an Eagle." Although arthritis slowed Paul's playing down in his later years, he continued to perform, with his repertoire largely unchanged from the '30s and '40s, practically up to his death due to complications from pneumonia in 2009 at age 94. At any given gig, one could still learn a lot from the Wizard of Waukesha. A remarkably gifted and farsighted guitarist, Paul’s contribution to popular music must inevitably center upon his pioneering work on multi-tracking and his creation of the solid-body guitar. It would be sad, however, if his efforts in these directions wholly concealed his considerable abilities as a performer.