7. Jean-Luc PontyIndividual Choice
It’s always a horrifying moment when someone listens to your music and says, "Oh, have you heard of…" and you’re waiting for it and they say "John Martyn" and you’re like "YES!", but there are so many artists where you’d go "Noooo…". In Jean-Luc Ponty’s case I’d never actually heard his music outside of some more famous jazz recordings and the stuff he did with Zappa. When me and my band were getting this record together, Rob my drummer was like "you have to hear this" and he played me ‘Computer Incantations For World Peace’ and it was crazy, it was like listening to someone play violin in the way that I play violin, but I hadn’t identified that in him until then. So I absorbed a lot of that, and it made me a little more confident to play solos, rather than conceal the fact that I have a weird sideways vibrato, because there’s Jean-Luc Ponty who also has no vibrato, so let’s do it.
