The Road You Thought Was Wrong Was Yours All Along — A Weekend Reflection on Identity in Jazz

At some point in the study of jazz, every serious musician faces a version of the same question: Am I playing the right kind of music? Am I going in the right direction? Should I be more modern, or am I too far from tradition?

These questions feel like technical questions. They aren't. They're identity questions. And they deserve an honest, unhurried answer.

The Blur Between Modern and Traditional

We tend to think of "modern jazz" and "traditional jazz" as clean categories. They aren't. Jim Hall — often categorized as a traditional player — was already doing something harmonically radical for his era, using what he called "false voicings" that left other transcribers scratching their heads. George Benson, sometimes dismissed as a pop crossover, carries some of the most modern harmonic concepts in jazz guitar. Lage Lund started his career playing in an almost pure Benson style and won a Monk Competition while doing it — then moved to New York and transformed his sound into something far more angular and abstract.

The point isn't that labels are meaningless. It's that the artists we most admire rarely fit neatly into them. They followed something — a pull, an instinct, a sound they heard in their head — and they became categorizable only in retrospect.

The Sound That Comes From the Hands

There's a story about Kenny Burrell that captures something essential about this. A guitarist was sitting in an audition at UCLA, listening to someone play in another room. One chord — just one chord — stopped him completely. It wasn't a voicing he hadn't heard before. It wasn't a technique he hadn't seen. It was just a sound. He turned around, and it was Kenny Burrell.

That sound didn't come from theory books or technique manuals. It came from hands — from a lifetime of choices about how to touch the instrument, how to let air into the tone, how to mean every note. Kenny Burrell's sound is his fingerprint. No one can copy it because no one has lived his life.

This is what guitarist Junewon Choi returns to when he talks about what "modern" really means in jazz. True freshness in music — the feeling that something is genuinely alive — doesn't usually come from new chords or new scales. It comes from the irreplaceable specificity of a particular person's musical body: how they physically interact with the instrument, and what life experiences shaped that physical relationship.

Wes Montgomery is the ultimate example. He didn't choose the thumb. The thumb chose him — chosen by his wife's sleeping hours, by the walls of his apartment, by the economics of a newly married life with a guitar and amplifier he could barely afford. The constraint became the art. The limitation became the legend.

What Happens When You Stop Fighting Your Direction

Junewon speaks honestly about his own path. He describes himself as a traditionalist — someone still working deeply within the Wes Montgomery lineage, still finding things he hasn't fully explored. He sees players around him pursuing modern voicings and a more angular sound and says, simply, "That's a sound I don't have." He says it without envy. He says it with clarity.

That clarity is rare and worth pausing on. In a musical world that constantly presents new approaches, new methods, new "best practices," the ability to look at a different path and say "that's not mine" — without judgment and without regret — is a form of artistic maturity that takes years to develop.

At Berklee, while other guitarists chopped rhythms with alternate picking and thin-bodied electric guitars, he sat with his archtop and played consistent down strokes. It might have looked unsophisticated. It didn't sound that way. A Grammy-winning percussionist in the room crossed the floor to shake his hand and said: "You sound good. Keep doing what you're doing."

The path that looked wrong was the right one. Because it was his.

A Weekend Practice

This weekend, before you pick up the guitar, ask yourself: what sound are you genuinely chasing? Not what sound impresses other players, not what the trending YouTube tutorial is teaching, not what the "modern" approach dictates. What do you hear when you close your eyes and imagine your best playing?

That answer is where the work begins. Everything else is just getting better at finding the path back to it.

Visit VoiceLidJazzGuitar.com for lessons that help you find and develop your own voice in jazz.