JIM HALL
Genres: Post Bop, Hard Bop, Post-Fusion Contemporary, Cool Jazz, Classic Fusion, Third Stream, Pop, Art Song, Folk • United States

Jim Hall, the jazz guitarist, who has died aged 83, had a restrained, elegant style, rich in subtlety and nuance and expressed through the amplifier in a sound both mellow and carefully modulated. With his bald head, horn-rimmed spectacles and studious manner he presented a somewhat professorial figure on stage. During his long career Hall played with most of the leading jazz figures of his time, notably Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins. His recorded duets with Evans are gems of finesse and mutually-inspired invention; Rollins’s boldness he underpinned with constantly shifting rhythms and textures. Over more than half a century of recording, in whatever line up, he succeeded in maintaining an unwaveringly high standard. James Stanley Hall was born in Buffalo, New York, on December 4 1930. He described his family as “hillbilly WASPs from around Ohio and the Great Lakes”. A publicist once claimed that he came from a musical family, read more...