1. Joe Pass was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on January 13,1929.
29 Facts About Joe Pass
1. 2.
Joe Pass's father, Mariano Passalacqua, was a steel-mill worker who was born in Sicily.
3.
Joe Pass received his first guitar and started creating music when at age 9.
4.
Joe Pass stated his first guitar was a Harmony, and that he had asked for a guitar for his birthday.
5.
Joe Pass began playing for neighbors, and learned chords from his father's Italian friends.
6.
Joe Pass attended guitar lessons every Sunday with a local teacher for six to eight months and practiced for up to six hours per day, rapidly advancing in skill level.
7.
Joe Pass was finding paying gigs at dances and weddings in Johnstown as early as age 14, playing with bands led by Tony Pastor and Charlie Barnet, honing his guitar skills while "learning the ropes" in the music industry.
8.
Joe Pass began traveling with small jazz groups and moved from Pennsylvania to New York City.
9.
Joe Pass would continue to perform with big bands until 1947, when he enlisted and served in the US military.
10.
Joe Pass developed an addiction to heroin after his tenure in the military had ended.
11.
Joe Pass lived in New Orleans for a year, playing bebop at strip clubs.
12.
Joe Pass later revealed that he had suffered a "nervous breakdown" in New Orleans due to virtually unlimited access to drugs that enabled the musician to engage in severe benders.
13.
Joe Pass spent much of the 1950s in and out of prison for drug-related convictions.
14.
Joe Pass released his studio debut Sounds of Synanon on July 1,1962.
15.
Joe Pass recorded and released a series of albums during the 1960s under Pacific Jazz Records, including Catch Me, 12-String Guitar, For Django, and Simplicity.
16.
Joe Pass played on Pacific Jazz recordings by Gerald Wilson, Bud Shank, and Les McCann.
17.
Joe Pass was a member of the George Shearing Quintet from 1965 through 1967.
18.
In December 1974, Joe Pass released his solo album Virtuoso on Pablo.
19.
Joe Pass performed with them on many occasions throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
20.
Joe Pass performed for the final time on May 7,1994, with fellow guitarist John Pisano at a nightclub in Los Angeles.
21.
Live at Yoshi's, this release was colored by sad circumstances: both bassist Monty Budwig and Joe Pass were stricken with fatal illnesses.
22.
Joe Pass's playing style was particularly noted for his ability to simultaneously play melody, harmony and basslines at extremely high tempos.
23.
Joe Pass's single-note playing style is similar to the instrumental stylings of classic bebop and hard bop, drawing comparisons to the tones and timbres of wind instruments used in jazz music, such as the saxophone and trumpet, as well as other string instruments such as the piano.
24.
Joe Pass employed a variety of different picking techniques such as fingerpicking, hybrid picking and "flat picking".
25.
Joe Pass cited Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum and Coleman Hawkins as influences during this time.
26.
Joe Pass was later influenced by the piano stylings of Oscar Peterson.
27.
Additionally, Joe Pass experimented with a Fender Bass VI 6-string bass on his 1963 album Catch Me.
28.
In 1963, Joe Pass was gifted a Gibson ES175D arch-top electric-acoustic guitar that had twin humbucking pickups.
29.
Joe Pass weaves his own fast-moving chords and filigree work so nimbly that it is hard to believe fingers can physically shift so quickly.