John Abercrombie, leading guitarist

Born: December 16, 1944;

Died: August 22, 2017

JOHN Abercrombie, who has died aged 72, was one of the most distinctive guitarists of his generation. In a career that began while he was still studying at Berklee School of Music in Boston in the mid-1960s, Abercrombie played with musicians including composer and orchestra leader Gil Evans, prominent drummers Chico Hamilton, Billy Cobham and Jack DeJohnette, and saxophonists Charles Lloyd, Gato Barbieri and Jan Garbarek. He also enjoyed a long relationship with the premiere European jazz label ECM Records, with whom he recorded from 1974 onwards.

Born in Portchester, New York, Abercrombie started playing guitar as a 13-year-old rock n’ roll fan. Inspired by Chuck Berry, the Ventures and Elvis Presley, among others, he felt that playing music would help him to, at once, stand out from the crowd and gain acceptance from his peers.

Leaving high school with no real idea what he wanted to do, he enrolled at Berklee and came under the influence of his teacher and mentor, fellow guitarist Jack Peterson.

Peterson encouraged Abercrombie to go out and play in local bars and restaurants to gain experience. One of the regular places he played was a lounge bar where, in providing background music, he could play whatever he liked. More importantly, it was owned by the same people who owned the jazz club next door. The two premises shared a kitchen and on his breaks Abercrombie could go through to the jazz club and hear top names including John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at close quarters.

Abercrombie stayed on at Berklee from 1962 to 1967, mostly, he told The Herald in 2009, to avoid being drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. When pianist Horace Silver brought a band that included the Brecker brothers, Randy and Michael, to the club next door, the Breckers got to hear Abercrombie. They later invited him to New York to audition for the pioneering jazz-fusion band Dreams.

First, however, Abercrombie went on the road with organist Johnny “Hammond” Smith. The confidence he gained playing jazz standards and blues with Smith helped him to land the gig with Dreams, whose drummer, Billy Cobham went on to play with the hugely successful Mahavishnu Orchestra.

From Dreams, Abercrombie moved on to work with Chico Hamilton before Cobham, having left Mahavishnu, invited him to join his band in 1973. While playing with Cobham, Abercrombie started doing gigs with Jack DeJohnette, who introduced him to Manfred Eicher of ECM Records. After a year of correspondence, Eicher invited Abercrombie to record his first album under his own name for the label, Timeless, with DeJohnette and another Mahavishnu alumnus, keyboardist Jan Hammer.

Soon Abercrombie was appearing on ECM releases with saxophonist Dave Liebman, trumpeter Enrico Rava and guitarist Ralph Towner, with whom he toured Scotland in the 1980s. A label with a strong marketing concept, ECM enabled Abercrombie to record without worrying about commercial success and encouraged him to follow the advice given to him by Gil Evans: “Be yourself.”

Having played through what he described as a “monolith” of a reverb system and at high volume with Cobham, Abercrombie preferred to make his point more quietly once he joined ECM. One example of this was the trio he formed with DeJohnette and British bassist Dave Holland, Gateway, whose Glasgow Jazz Festival appearance in the mid-1990s was another rare professional visit to Scotland for a man who came here several times to investigate his family roots.

Speaking to The Herald in 2009, Abercrombie said he still liked to play new music as much as possible. “I still like to play new music," he said, "although a lot of the work I do tends to be with musicians I’ve established quite long relationships with, and I still like a challenge – as long as it’s not too much of a challenge. I’m happy to work in different areas of music, be it orchestral or ethnic, but I prefer to keep it simple because that way, you can keep the essence of what you do intact.”

His last appearance here was on a 2009 tour with saxophonist Julian Arguelles, whom he met while playing with the great Canadian-born trumpeter and ECM colleague Kenny Wheeler. The most recent of his more than 50 recordings for ECM, Up and Coming, featured his own quartet and was released earlier this year. He also lived up to his aim of being remembered for having a direct connection to the history of jazz guitar, while expanding some musical boundaries by recording with musicians from around the world including Brazilian guitar virtuoso Badi Assad.

Abercrombie is survived by his wife Lisa, whom he married in 1986

ROB ADAMS