LEARNING PIANO AND GUITAR side by side, Gareth Williams was coming up with some interesting possibilities for both. He wasn’t finding out anything musically new – jazz players had been using these ideas for years. But Gareth wasn’t growing up in downtown New York, or Chicago, or Kansas City, maybe with experienced jazz musicians living round the block whose doors he could go and knock on for advice. He was a Welsh schoolboy, making up a jazz education from whatever he could find.
He bought a booklet by Joe Pass, a famous American jazz guitarist, and found that it opened another door for him. Pass didn’t follow a music-school rulebook about what notes should go with what chord, he used his ears to make a rulebook of his own.
