Easy for <i> Him </i> to Play : O.C. Jazz Guitarist George Van Eps Quietly Builds Legend

Guitarists generally let you know when they’re doing something difficult: They grimace with the Spandex-rending exertion of their genius; their volume goes from intolerable to excruciating; their fingers fly wheedle-wheedle-whee! up and down the fretboard; their heads fly back, eyes closed, mouths agape, as if expecting a hot dog from God.

Then there’s George Van Eps and his seven-string guitar. The Huntington Beach resident thinks of the instrument as a “lap piano.” What that means, according to guitarist Howard Alden, is that Van Eps, with whom Alden has recorded recently, “doesn’t just play chords, but he’s aware of every single voice his fingers are playing, and where they’re moving, and each makes sense and is melodic in its own way. He’s simply set standards for guitar playing that I don’t think have been equaled by anybody.”

Simultaneously providing melody, bass and rhythm lines, Van Eps plays essentially as if his guitar neck were a chessboard with four games going on at once, yet he makes it appear effortless. Even when improvising, his playing is meticulously thought out and performed with such economy of motion that his hands scarcely seem to move. Every once in a while, he allows himself a smile.

Van Eps’ quiet excellence has made him a legend among jazz players, a legend that has only increased in the two decades since his last record release.

Now fans have a new justification for their ardor, as Van Eps is on disc again at last, with longtime fan Alden, on “Thirteen Strings” for the Concord Jazz label. The pair duets brilliantly on most of the album’s tracks. Moreover, Van Eps’ two solo flights, on Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and the Gershwins’ “Embraceable You,” are stunning examples of his spirit and technique, his lone guitar sounding like nothing less than three musicians, all swinging.

Concord Jazz is so pleased with the album that even before it hit stores in July, they got the 78-year-old guitarist into the studio to record a follow-up.

“Maybe they think I’m going to die soon,” he quips.

That’s something he has no intention of essaying in the near future, figuring he’s already cheated death by some 58 years. When he was 9, Van Eps was struck with rheumatic fever, which so weakened his heart that he overheard a doctor tell his mother, “You’ve got to be prepared. This boy will never live to see 20.”

“I can still hear that booming voice, and every once in a while I still dream about it,” said Van Eps, interviewed recently at a restaurant near his Huntington Beach home. “It was like a nightmare having that hanging over your head. I’d be counting off the years I had left. Later on when I did get to 18, 18 1/2, I’d be counting the increments. Then nothing happened!”

Van Eps was born into a musical family on Aug. 7, 1913, in Plainfield, N.J. His father was a classical concert banjoist, and his mother had once been his accompanist. By the time George came along as the last of four sons, his mother had long since left the stage, and a young George Gershwin was playing piano for his father. What Van Eps chiefly remembers about the great American composer was that when he came to rehearse, he’d bring a big bag of penny candies with him. Van Eps’ parents separated when he was 4, and the mother and sons moved to New York.

Though surrounded by musicians in his family, Van Eps himself hadn’t shown any particular musical inclination before his illness. Then, once afflicted, “I had to lie perfectly flat, just as flat as a knife, no pillow even, for a whole year. You can imagine what that’s like. I had to learn to walk all over again afterwards.”

While in that condition, a violinist friend of his brother’s came in to chat one evening, and noticed a banjo--which had been sent by Van Eps’ father--in the corner of the room. Van Eps recalled, “He sat on the foot of my bed and played ‘Alabamy Bound’ and ‘Somebody Stole My Girl.’ Then (my brother) Fred came downstairs, and they left for their job.

“But he left the banjo on the foot of my bed, and that was my undoing. Because when my mother wasn’t looking, I wiggled my way around--I followed the rules and didn’t sit up--until I could reach the banjo, pull it up and across my chest. When they got home about 1 or 1:30 that night, they came in and I played ‘Somebody Stole My Girl’ and ‘Alabamy Bound’ for them. I don’t know how--I hadn’t even been able to really see what he’d been doing--but I found the right chords.”

Having his world confined to a bed and his life expectancy foreshortened, Van Eps feels, contributed to the focused concentration that was to become central to his style. Once recovered, he wasted no time. By age 11, he was a member of the musician’s union and was playing in clubs. He made his first recordings 64 years ago, in 1927, playing banjo with his brothers, Fred and Bob, in a group dubbed the Junior Brunswick Recording Artists, the name the youths used while accompanying Broadway singer Libby Holmes on the vaudeville circuit.

Van Eps abandoned his banjo after hearing pioneering jazz guitarist Eddie Lang on his crystal radio set.

“I heard the sound of the guitar and that was it,” Van Eps said. “Oh, it sang , the sustenance was there! So when I got enough money put together, I got a Martin guitar for $40.”

That began an unabated love affair with the guitar that has seen Van Eps through tenures with big bands--including those of Ray Noble, Benny Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers--radio shows such as Burns and Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny and Martin and Lewis, films including Gershwin’s last movie score, “Damsel in Distress,” and literally thousands of recording sessions. Those include working with everyone from Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle to Merle Travis and Stan Freberg. He also recorded nine solo albums, all now collectors’ items.

In the unpredictable “chicken on Sunday, feathers on Monday” music business, Van Eps was able to make a good living. Not long after taking up the guitar, he became a staple of New York’s music scene. In the ‘30s, he was part of what musicians called “the Sacred Circle” of elite players whom all the major labels wanted on their sessions. At one point, Van Eps played in house bands of four labels, often logging nine hours a day in the studio, sandwiched around a pair of six-day-a-week radio programs.

“That was a true rat race,” he said, “having a half-hour to get from one company to another in New York traffic.”

“The thing that attracted people to hire me was that I didn’t sound like anyone else,” he says, maintaining that his unique approach to the guitar asserted itself “right from the beginning. Even when I’d been playing banjo, I wanted things to happen, voices to move, not just, oh, that’s a chord, dunh-dunh, dunh-dunh . I wanted something to go, de da da duh inside the chord, or for the bass to move a little bit. I don’t care about playing 9 million notes a second. I’m more interested in having every voice in a chord be a melody that both stands by itself and works with the others.”

While he appreciates other guitarists, Van Eps’ harmonic interests were most often spurred by pianists, and the influences he cites are his mother and his brother, Bob--both marvelous pianists, he said--as well as Fats Waller (with whom he worked), Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Roger Kellaway and classical pianists including Rachmaninoff and Paderewski.

To achieve more of a piano-like range on the guitar, Van Eps in the late ‘30s commissioned Epi Stathopoulo, owner of the then-esteemed Epiphone guitar company, to custom-build a seven-string instrument. The extra string, a low A, enabled him to add bass lines to his harmonic constructions. Nowadays he plays a Gretsch George Van Eps model seven-string that he designed.

In 1936, Van Eps and his wife, Jo (she died in 1972), came to Los Angeles for their honeymoon and liked it so much they forgot to go back to New York. Soon he was as tied up in the Los Angeles recording scene as he had been on the East Coast.

Like many of the fine jazz players of the time, Van Eps played on many pop, rock and country songs that he didn’t have any particular love for. But though his name wasn’t going on the record, and the music was often numbingly simplistic, he always approached the sessions as a challenge.

“I did thousands of lousy records for other people, but even if it was something I didn’t like, I would make sure that it was the best crap in the world. When you’re a professional studio man, you don’t brush anything off. You do your utmost to make it sound good.”

There was, however, one notable session in the ‘50s that went to the other extreme. Van Eps, Barney Kessel, Howard Roberts and six other top guitarists were called in to play on a session run by Mitch Miller, who was then head of A&R; (artists and repertoire) for Columbia Records.

“The first words out of Mitch’s mouth when we walked in the studio were, ‘I want you guys to play as lousy as you know how.’ We all laughed over that, and we said, ‘Mitch, you weren’t serious were you?’ He said, ‘Absolutely. This is a Frankie Laine date.’ ”

One of the guitarists, Allen Reuss (who followed Van Eps in Benny Goodman’s band), was a purist who had to overcome ethical constraints about playing poorly. According to Van Eps, he achieved that by giving a studio flunkie $10, with the order, “Go out and buy me a quart of something .”

“Well, Allen proceeded to get absolutely smashed,” Van Eps said. “Before he got too smashed, we were trying to decide how to make it lousy, but good lousy. The nine guys are milling around: ‘I’m going to use the thickest pick I’ve got, to be louder.’ Somebody else said, ‘I’m going to use the biggest pick I’ve got, so it’ll slap!’ Another player and I used quarters. Allen had a brand-new half-dollar with fresh serrations on it, and he used it and played the whole tune a half-tone low or a half-tone sharp.”

The resulting Frankie Laine record, “Jezebel,” went to No. 2 on the charts in 1951.

Van Eps’ own records were polished gems of his harmonic technique. The last one released was “Soliloquy” in 1971. A subsequent album never was issued, as Capitol Records had begun a purge of its non-Top 40 artists, and Van Eps, Kessel, Peggy Lee and others were dropped.

After his wife of 39 years passed away the following year, Van Eps didn’t feel the drive to keep pursuing a solo career.

“She was my best friend and my mate, and after I lost her I really didn’t feel like playing for a couple of years. We had a marvelous marriage. We did everything together. We didn’t have to have a special event to enjoy being together.

“Though I take my work very seriously, I don’t take myself too seriously, and my wife and I had that in common. She was always 100% behind me, but she had a marvelous sense of humor. I’d once been working on achieving one piano-like effect on guitar. I’m a stubborn Dutchman, and I went over and over this thing, hour after hour, and at the end of three days, she came into the den, leaned over me and softly said, ‘You know, they invented the piano.’ I nearly fell off the chair.”

His session work continued, and Van Eps devoted the final years of the ‘70s to completing his three-volume, 1,000-page “Harmonic Mechanisms for Guitar,” a distillation from 16,000 pages of manuscript he had written over his life, laying out his approach to music.

He moved to Orange County in 1977 and in the early ‘80s began performing locally with guitarist Tony Rizzi. But while jazz fans would line up in the snow to see him play in New York, he often found a much cooler reception on his home turf.

When Jascha Heifetz was living on Balboa Island, his neighbors would dismiss him as “that fiddle player,” Van Eps said, and respect for serious music may not have grown much since then. Local clubs expect musicians to play for peanuts, while patrons request popular rock songs and aren’t happy “unless you play so loud it distorts their vision,” he said.

At one Van Eps/Rizzi gig that has entered local legend, they were playing in the lounge of a county Italian restaurant when a couple of patrons started a very loud game of pool. Drowned out, Van Eps stopped playing. The noisemakers finally noticed Van Eps staring at them and told him, “Go ahead and play. You’re not bothering us.”

He has no immediate plans to perform again locally, though East Coast tour dates are being arranged for him and Alden.

Now a New Yorker, Alden grew up in Huntington Beach, and was an indirect student of Van Eps, absorbing his records and manuscripts and studying under onetime Van Eps student and Texas Playboys vet Jimmy Wyble. Only 32, he has four solo albums on the Concord Jazz label. Recording with Van Eps, he said, was a dream come true.

“At first I was little intimidated,” Alden said. “But he’s a very humble, modest person, and also just very friendly and supportive. It wound up being very relaxed for both of us. The thrill about playing with George was all I would have to do is play a melody line, and instantly there’d be this huge beautiful orchestration below it, because he’s such a wonderful accompanist as well as a soloist. Then his two solo pieces were a real thrill.”

Van Eps has no particular qualms about going on the road at age 78, and has no intention of retiring while he’s still able to play. He is, however, looking forward to taking more time for himself soon, so he can learn to really play the guitar.

“I’ve spent my life teaching others how to do this and how to do that,” he said. “Now I’m going to teach myself, because one lifetime isn’t long enough with an instrument as complicated as the guitar. I’m not singling out the guitar. All instruments are hard, terribly hard. It depends on what you demand of yourself, what you expect of that instrument. If you want to be the world’s best anything, now that’s an ego trip, but if it’s just curiosity, if you want to really find out what makes an instrument tick, that takes a long time.”