Guitar Masters Provide the Best of Two Worlds : Music: Country gentleman Chet Atkins and high-tech wizard Stanley Jordan share the bill for a Wednesday night concert at Humphrey’s.

One’s a mature country gentleman with several guitars named after him and a laid-back style that mixes equal parts jazz and country. The other’s a high-tech kid, a product of the computer age whose playing blends esoteric theory and seemingly impossible techniques.

About the only thing Chet Atkins and Stanley Jordan have in common is that they both play guitar, and play it well.

But that bond is enough for Atkins, 67, and Jordan, 32, to be members of a mutual admiration society.

“He’s a quality guy, highly educated,” said Atkins, who shares a bill with Jordan for two shows Wednesday night at Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay. “At the end of the show, we play a couple of songs together, maybe a standard and a blues.

“We’re from two different eras. His is an entirely different style. There used to be a guy at Gretsch (the guitar company) who did some of what Stanley does,” Atkins continued, referring to a technique Jordan calls “tapping,” where he taps the strings against the neck of the guitar with both hands to create the illusion of multiple guitars.

Besides his appreciation of Jordan’s musical assets, Atkins, a music industry veteran, recognizes the marketing benefits of associating with Jordan. Atkins hopes to expand his audience.

“My agent thinks its a good package because Stanley is into jazz, he’s younger and more modern,” explained Atkins, whose drawl is as lazy as the summer afternoons in his native Tennessee.

Of Atkins, Jordan said, “As a younger guy, I’d heard of Chet, but I hadn’t heard his music so much. But I had heard everyone talk about him as one of the main guitar players in one genre of music. I have tremendous respect for him. Since playing with him, I’ve come to respect him even more. He’s kind of a symbol for me: My goal is to some day be thought of like people think of him. He’s really brought a musicality to the instrument that goes beyond technique.”

With more than 70 albums to his credit, Atkins’ name has become a household word--in households with many different tastes.

To his oldest fans, he is an awesome country picker and occasional fiddler and singer who spins down-home yarns between songs. Rock ‘n’ roll listeners discovered Atkins through his albums with Dire Straits’ guitarist Mark Knopfler, the latest of which--”Neck and Neck”--was released last year. And Atkins crossed into jazz territory with the 1985 album “Stay Tuned,” in the company of jazz fretmen George Benson, Larry Carlton and Earl Klugh.

With such commercially viable alliances, Atkins might be accused of pandering to the masses, but he says he never plays music he doesn’t like.

“I was very hungry at one time, I got fired from a lot of jobs. And I decided it would never be that way again,” said Atkins, who lives in Nashville with Leona, his wife of 44 years. “I decided I would play things that appeal to the public and to musicians.

“ ‘Neck and Neck’ is very commercial, but not a day goes by that people don’t tell me they love it. Reviewers call it schlock, but it makes me a good living, and it’s the music I like, so I’m not ashamed of it. I like good melodies.”

Atkins has been a valued commodity in the music industry dating back to the 1940s, when he made his professional debut playing guitar on Southern radio stations with country bands such as Wally Fowler and the Georgia Clodhoppers (who eventually became the Oak Ridge Boys).

Looking to country guitarist Merle Travis as his main role model, Atkins developed a distinctive finger-picking style in which he uses his right thumb for bass notes and three fingers on his right hand to play melody lines.

While pursuing a prodigious solo recording career, Atkins became a music industry heavy through the 36 years he spent scouting talent and playing on sessions for RCA. He signed Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, produced several of Elvis Presley’s most famous songs, including “Heartbreak Hotel,” and added guitar parts to several Everly Brothers hits, even though his efforts to land them for RCA failed.

Atkins, who has been working on a new recording with country guitarist Jerry Reed--their third together--prefers a live setting to the exacting studio approach used for his last several albums.

“A live show is much better,” said Atkins, who is normally backed by his four-man band on stage. “You can make perfect records now, and everyone is into that, including me. But the live performance is the thing, because you can’t go back and correct your mistakes. You lay it out there, and there it is. It separates the men from the boys. If you play a bad note, it’s one-half step to a good one, and the audience thinks it’s intentional.”

Along with several guitar-oriented numbers, Atkins usually fiddles his version of “Shogun Farewell”--the theme music for this year’s public television documentary on the Civil War.

“I’m pretty damn good, let me tell you,” he said. “They’ll be throwing babies in the air when I get done.”

Where Atkins comes off as a good ol’ country boy, Jordan, who is appearing solo on the Humphrey’s stage, approaches music like the cerebral Princeton grad that he is.

Along with his tapping techniques, which he often applies to two guitars simultaneously (one on a stand, the other slung over his shoulder), Jordan is deeply interested in the theoretical and scientific aspects of music.

One of his favorite songs from his last recording, the 1990 “Cornucopia,” is titled “Asteroid” and features an ethereal collection of sounds layered into a spacey musical quilt. Jordan generated the sounds electronically, and he didn’t even play guitar on this particular song.

“I’ve been studying granular synthesis since I studied computer music at Princeton,” said Jordan, who is divorced and lives in Brooklyn. “You create sounds by adding together thousands of brief sounds. It’s a form of additive synthesis, based on the particle theory of sound, not the wave theory. In the same way that light can be described as waves or particles, sound can, too.”

Jordan’s next release will be a live recording of a 1990 date he played in Japan with regular band mates Charnett Moffett on bass and Kenwood Dennard on drums. Jordan just signed a new deal with Arista, and his first recording for the label is due next year.

Jordan’s shows Wednesday night can be expected to range from idiosyncratic versions of standards such as “Willow Weep for Me” and “Autumn Leaves” to extended improvisation vehicles like “Cornucopia” to his numerous original compositions.

No question, Jordan, who has released four recordings since “Magic Touch,” his 1984 debut, is a phenomenal guitarist who frequently plays things no one else can play. But his intelligence and controlled technique tend to overshadow raw emotional impact. In some ways, Jordan is closer to a one-man classical orchestra than a died-in-the-wool, hard swinging jazz man--a characterization he freely agrees with.

“Prokofiev, Stravinsky--I love the effect of a huge orchestra where the sound is incredibly complex and very rich,” Jordan said. A song like “Asteroids,” he added, is “kind of like that--a modern-day version of a lot of the orchestral techniques.”

Chet Atkins and Stanley Jordan will play shows at 6 and 8:30 Wednesday night at Humphrey’s. Jordan will open both shows. Tickets are $20, and will be available at the door.