Over the past four decades guitar virtuoso Jackie King has played with
some of America's greatest musical artists, providing sterling accompaniment on
various occasions for the likes of Ray Charles, Tony Bennett and Big Joe Turner,
and matching his six-string skills on stage against Jerry Garcia, Stevie Ray
Vaughn and Eric Johnson. But where King has really earned his sizable reputation
as a brilliant and fleet-fingered improviser has been in the realm of jazz, and
since the early 1970s, he has spent most of his time working with legends like
Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt and Jimmy Witherspoon.
For nearly two years now, however, King has been performing and touring
steadily with Willie Nelson, the greatly-loved maverick of country music, and if
this partnership seems somewhat incongruous it actually makes perfect sense when
one considers how much jazz and western swing have influenced their respective
musical developments. While many of Nelson's fans may have been made aware of
this only when Willie released his recent homage to pioneering jazz guitarist
Django Reinhardt, the all-instrumental disc Night and Day, for King, jazz has
been his mainstay and true calling throughout his career.
Jackie King's jazz mastery comes to the fore once again on The Gypsy, his
brand new album, which features his good friend Willie Nelson's inimitable
vocals and guitar licks on half of the disc's ten tracks. Described by King as
"a love letter to the deep-rooted connection between jazz and country music,"
the album finds the guitarist within the cozy yet inspiring confines of his
regular quintet as together they nimbly swing through a set of choice standards
dear to the leader's heart. As Nat Hentoff writes in his liner notes to The
Gypsy: "Listening to the music here is like being present at an after-hours
session among friends who share a mutual interest."
