LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
The Prestige catalog is full of guitar records from the late sixties, but most of them lean on organ trios and blues grooves. Strings! is different. Pat Martino brought a piano quintet into the studio — Cedar Walton, Joe Farrell, Ben Tucker, Walter Perkins — and made a record that moves between full-throttle bebop and slow, deliberate balladry without ever losing its center. He was twenty-three years old.
In this episode of Deep in the Stacks, we trace Martino’s path from the Philadelphia organ-trio circuit to his second album as a leader — a record that proved his virtuosity was already answering to something larger than speed alone.
THE RECORD
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Pat Martino
Pat Martino (1944–2021) came out of the Philadelphia organ-trio circuit, gigging professionally at fifteen and touring with Willis Jackson, Jack McDuff, and Don Patterson before most people his age had finished school. He studied under Dennis Sandole — the same teacher who shaped John Coltrane’s harmonic thinking — and moved to New York as a teenager, living for a time with Les Paul. All of that is in his playing: the rhythmic punch of the organ rooms, the harmonic reach of Sandole’s system, and a clarity of articulation that was already his signature by his early twenties.
His debut, El Hombre (1967), announced him as a fully formed voice on guitar. Strings! followed the same year and deepened the statement — trading the organ combo for a piano quintet and revealing a compositional maturity beyond his age. Later albums like Desperado (1970) and Consciousness (1974) pushed further into modal and free territory. In 1980, a brain aneurysm and surgery erased his memory of music entirely. He relearned guitar by studying his own recordings, and his comeback album The Return (1987) remains one of the most remarkable stories in jazz.
Martino continued recording and performing for three more decades, earning a reputation as one of the most technically brilliant and harmonically adventurous guitarists in the music. He died in 2021 at seventy-seven, leaving behind a body of work that spans bebop, post-bop, and beyond. Explore more episodes.
SESSION DETAILS
Recorded
October 2, 1967
Studio
Van Gelder Recording Studio
Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Producer
Bob Weinstock
Engineer
Rudy Van Gelder
Personnel
Joe Farrell — tenor saxophone, flute
Cedar Walton — piano
Ben Tucker — bass
Walter Perkins — drums
Ray Appleton — percussion
Dave Levin — percussion
WHY THIS ALBUM MATTERS
Strings! matters because it announced Pat Martino as a major guitar voice at age 22 and showed how completely he had absorbed the Wes Montgomery vocabulary while pushing it into modal territory. Recorded in 1967 at Van Gelder's, the album pairs Martino with Cedar Walton on piano — an unusual front-line move that gave him room to play single-line bebop runs against Walton's open voicings rather than chunky four-to-the-bar comping. Martino's stroke and recovery later became part of his myth, but the Philadelphia guitarist on this record is already in command. The album is a missing link between Wes's mid-60s Verve sides and the modal-fusion guitar work George Benson, John Abercrombie, and John Scofield would make in the next decade.
Side 1
Side 2
Prestige PRLP 7547 · Original mono pressing
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