Howard Roberts
Electric Guitar
About
Howard Roberts was a jazz guitarist, session musician, and music educator whose career made him one of the most recorded yet least recognized guitarists in American music history. In the 1950s he established himself on the Los Angeles jazz scene, winning DownBeat's New Star Award in 1955 and recording for Verve and Capitol Records, where he cut eleven albums including the influential Color Him Funky and H.R. Is a Dirty Guitar Player. He became a founding member of the Wrecking Crew, the legendary collective of Hollywood session musicians, playing on recordings by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, Phil Spector's Wall of Sound productions, and the Jackson Five. His guitar can be heard on the themes for The Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, Bonanza, and Gilligan's Island. Between 1966 and 1976 he appeared on more than two thousand albums. He designed signature guitars for Epiphone and Gibson and in 1977 co-founded the Guitar Institute of Technology, now Musicians Institute, in Hollywood.
Trivia
On Peggy Lee's 1958 hit "Fever," Roberts was hired to play guitar but the producer decided the track sounded better without it — so his only contribution to one of the decade's biggest records was snapping his fingers. He was the only musician ever seen walking out on Phil Spector, leaving a session after Spector fired a pistol into the studio ceiling. When asked what the hardest music to play as a session musician was, he answered: "Tom and Jerry — cartoons. The music makes absolutely no sense."
Early Life
Born Howard Mancel Roberts on October 2, 1929, in Phoenix, Arizona, he experienced an inexplicable urge to play guitar at age seven and convinced his parents to buy him an eighteen-dollar Gibson Kalamazoo student model. He studied with local instructor Horace Hatchett, who by the time Roberts was fifteen told his father, "Howard has his own style of playing and there's nothing else I can show him." As a teenager he played in Phoenix's African American jazz and blues clubs alongside Art Farmer and Pete Jolly. He studied the Schillinger System of composition, sweeping studio floors to pay for lessons. At twenty he moved to Los Angeles with only his guitar and amplifier, sleeping on friends' sofas and wearing the same blue suit for a year while jamming nightly with Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon, and Buddy DeFranco.
Howard Roberts Solos
1955
Electric Guitar solo - Neil's Blues - 1955
4/4 swing in F major at 144 BPM
Electric Guitar solo - The Champ - 1955
4/4 swing in B♭ major at 281 BPM
Electric Guitar solo - The Nearness Of You - 1955
4/4 ballad in F major at 60 BPM
Electric Guitar solo - Milt's Tune - 1955
4/4 swing in B♭ major at 237 BPM