Kitaristi Les Paul kuoli 94-vuotiaana.

Kitaristi Les Paul kuoli 94-vuotiaana.



August 14, 2009
Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94
By JON PARELES

Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body
electric
guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-
century
popular music, died Thursday in White Plains. . He was 94


The cause was complications of pneumonia, the Gibson Guitar
Corporation
announced.


Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He
played
guitar with leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong
to
Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar
amplification,
and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body
electric
guitar, although there are other claimants. With his electric guitar
and the
vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack
recording and
new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.


Mr. Paul's style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic
richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock 'n' roll. For all his
technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose
main
goal, he often said, was to make people happy.


Mr. Paul, whose original name was Lester William Polfus, was born on
June 9,
1915, in Waukesha, Wis. His childhood piano teacher wrote to his
mother,
"Your boy, Lester, will never learn music." But he picked up
harmonica,
guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager and started playing
with
country bands in the Midwest. In Chicago he performed for radio
broadcasts
on WLS and led the house band at WJJD; he billed himself as the Wizard
of
Waukesha, Hot Rod Red and Rhubarb Red.


His interest in gadgets came early. At 10 years old he devised a
harmonica
holder from a coat hanger. Soon afterward he made his first amplified
guitar
by opening the back of a Sears acoustic model and inserting, behind
the
strings, the pickup from a dismantled Victrola. With the record player
on,
the acoustic guitar became an electric one. Later, he built his own
pickup
from ham radio earphone parts and assembled a recording machine from
a
Cadillac flywheel and the belt from a dentist's drill.


From country music Mr. Paul moved into jazz, influenced by players
like
Django Reinhardt and Eddie Lang, who were using amplified hollow-body
guitars to play hornlike single-note solo lines. He formed the Les
Paul Trio
in 1936 and moved to New York, where he was heard regularly on Fred
Waring's
radio show from 1938 to 1941.


In 1940 or 1941 - the exact date is unknown - , Mr. Paul made his
guitar
breakthrough. Seeking to create electronically sustained notes on the
guitar, he attached strings and two pickups to a wooden board with a
guitar
neck. "The log," as he called it, was probably the first solid-body
electric
guitar and became the most influential one. "You could go out and eat
and
come back and the note would still be sounding," Mr. Paul once said.


The odd-looking instrument drew derision when he first played it in
public,
so he hid the works inside a conventional-looking guitar. But the log
was a
conceptual turning point. With no acoustic resonance of its own, it
was
designed to generate an electronic signal that could be amplified and
processed - the beginning of a sonic transformation of the world's
music.


Mr. Paul was drafted in 1942 and worked for the Armed Forces Radio
Service,
accompanying Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith and others. When he was
discharged in
1943, he was hired as a staff musician for NBC radio in Los Angeles.
His
trio toured with the Andrews Sisters and backed Nat King Cole and
Bing
Crosby, with whom he recorded the hit "It's Been a Long, Long Time" in
1945.
Crosby encouraged Mr. Paul to build his own recording studio, and so
he did,
in his garage in Los Angeles.


There he experimented with recording techniques, using them to create
not
realistic replicas of a performance but electronically enhanced
fabrications. Toying with his mother's old Victrola had shown him
that
changing the speed of a recording could alter both pitch and timbre.
He
could record at half-speed and replay the results at normal speed,
creating
the illusion of superhuman agility. He altered instrumental textures
through
microphone positioning and reverberation. Technology and studio
effects, he
realized, were instruments themselves.


He also noticed that by recording along with previous recordings, he
could
become a one-man ensemble. As early as his 1948 hit "Lover," he made
elaborate, multilayered recordings, using two acetate disc machines,
which
demanded that each layer of music be recorded in a single take.