Ronnie Singer: Forgotten Jazz Guitar Legend

A while back I had written about Ronnie Singer. For those of you who don’t know, he is sort of a gap in the jazz continuum that might’ve altered how jazz guitar developed had he lived. Because his sound is similar (he is using the same guitar as Jimmy, the Gibson ES 150 and he uses similar slurring techniques), you might at first mistake him for Jimmy when you listen to him. But his approach is a bit more direct and active and, unlike almost any other jazz guitarists at the time (save Jimmy), much more fluent in the “real deal” vocabulary of bebop and its proper execution. For example,…