Master Guitar

The excerpt below is from the article on Kansas City jazz guitarists. The entire article can be found here.

 

JAY EUDALEY
For Jay EuDaley, "jazz is an attitude... a way of playing and thinking, unrestricted by rules and repertoire."

His mind and ears were opened to this attitude as a teenager by listening to George Benson, then Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino, Joe Pass, and Jim Hall. Along the way, he soaked in the jazz idiom, not transcribing solos or copying licks, but listening intently. "I was looking for paradigms, patterns... how were they thinking?"

Although he's been a musician all his life -- Jay was playing Hawaiian style guitar on a ukulele by the age of two or three -- it wasn't until his twenties that he decided to become a professional musician. After "an early mid-life crisis," he dropped out of college, where he was a philosophy major, and became serious about studying guitar.

This decision led to enrollment at the UMKC Conservatory of Music, classical guitar studies with Doug Neidt, and jazz guitar lessons with Danny Embrey. "Danny was somebody who played the way I wanted to play," Jay says.

Embrey soon moved to Los Angeles, but he referred EuDaley to the legendary John Elliott, with whom he studied for seven years while working as a full time musician and spending time on the road. Jay is now a successful teacher himself, with over sixty students a week filing through his studio at Guitar Source.

Since 1985 EuDaley has been the house guitarist for the Saturday afternoon jams at Harling's Upstairs with Rich VanSant and Diane "Mama" Ray. His current CD is Channeling Harold.