Legendary recording artist, studio pioneer, and virtuoso guitarist Les Paul passed away at the age of 94 on August 13, 2009. Donations can be made to the Les Paul Foundation, 236 West 30th Street, 7th Floor, New York, New York 10001.

A portion of door proceeds will be contributed by Iridium every Monday to honor our friend.

Every Monday we will be featuring world class guitarists from all genres of music to preserve Les' legacy.


Joining the Les Paul trio this night will be the legendary Pat Martino and Eldar.

When the anesthesia wore off, Pat Martino looked up hazily at his parents and his doctors. and tried to piece together any memory of his life.
One of the greatest guitarists in jazz. Martino had suffered a severe brain aneurysm and underwent surgery after being told that his condition could be terminal. After his operations he could remember almost nothing. He barely recognized his parents. and had no memory of his guitar or his career. He remembers feeling as if he had been 'dropped cold, empty, neutral, cleansed...naked.

In the following months. Martino made a remarkable recovery. Through intensive study of his own historic recordings, and with the help of computer technology, Pat managed to reverse his memory loss and return to form on his instrument. His past recordings eventually became 'an old friend, a spiritual experience which remained beautiful and honest.' This recovery fits in perfectly with Pat's illustrious personal history. Since playing his first notes while still in his pre-teenage years, Martino has been recognized as one of the most exciting and virtuosic guitarists in jazz. With a distinctive, fat sound and gut-wrenching performances, he represents the best not just in jazz, but in music. He embodies thoughtful energy and soul.

Born Pat Azzara in Philadelphia in 1944, ha was first exposed to jazz through his father, Carmen 'Mickey' Azzara, who sang in local clubs and briefly studied guitar with Eddie Lang. He took Pat to all the city's hot-spots to hear and meet Wes Montgomery and other musical giants. 'I have always admired my father and have wanted to impress him. As a result, it forced me to get serious with my creative powers.'

He began playing guitar when he was twelve years old. and left school in tenth grade to devote himself to music. During Visits to his music teacher Dennis Sandole, Pat often ran into another gifted student, John Coltrane, who would treat the youngster to hot chocolate as they talked about music.

Besides first-hand encounters with `Trane and Montgomery, whose album Grooveyard had 'an enormous influence' on Martino, he also cites Johnny Smith, a Stan Getz associate, as an early inspiration. 'He seemed to me, as a child. to understand everything about music,' Pat recalls.

Martino became actively involved with the , early rock scene in Philadelphia, alongside stars like Bobby Rydell, Chubby Checker and Bobby Darin. His first road gig was with jazz organist Charles Earland, a high school friend. His reputation soon spread among other jazz players, and he was recruited by bandleader Lloyd Price to play hits such as Stagger Lee on-stage with musicians like Slide Hampton and Red Holloway.

Martino moved to Harlem to immerse himself in the 'soul jazz' played by Earland and others. Previously, he had 'heard all of the white man's jazz. I never heard that other part of the culture,' he remembers. The organ trio concept had a profound influence on Martino's rhythmic and harmonic approach. and he remained in the idiom as a sideman, gigging with Jack McDuff and Don Patterson. An icon before his eighteenth birthday, Pat was signed as a leader for Prestige Records when he was twenty. His seminal albums from this period include classics like Strings!, Desperado, El Hombre and Baiyina (The Clear Evidence), one of jazz's first successful ventures into psychedelia.

In 1976, Martino began experiencing the excruciating headaches which were eventually diagnosed as symptoms of his aneurysms. After his surgery and recovery, he resumed his career when he appeared in1987 in New York, a gig that was released on a CD with an appropriate name, The Return. He then took another hiatus when both of his parents became ill, and he didn't record again until 1994, when he recorded Interchange and then The Maker.

Today, Martino lives in Philadelphia again and continues to grow as a musician. As the New York Times recently noted, 'Mr. Martino, at fifty, is back and he is plotting new musical directions, adding more layers to his myth.' His experiments with guitar synthesizers, begun during his rehabilitation, are taking him in the direction of orchestral arrangements and they promise groundbreaking possibilities. Musicians flock to his door for lessons, and he offers not only the benefits of his musical knowledge, but also the philosophical insights of a man who has faced and overcome enormous obstacles. 'The guitar is of no great importance to me,' he muses. 'The people it brings to me are what matter. They are what I\'m extremely grateful for, because they are alive. The guitar is just an apparatus.

Eldar left his native Kyrgystan for the United States in 1998, a boy of 11 with a slight grasp of English but an astonishing natural talent that immediately captured the attention of the jazz world. In the last seven years, with the support of his family, he has established American roots as he continued his education, absorbed the culture, and emerged as one of the most distinctive jazz pianists of the new generation.

Jazz pianist Eldar masters yet another milestone in his young but already remarkable career, with the release of Eldar Live at the Blue Note, his second CD for Sony Classical. Captured live at New York’s legendary Blue Note in October 2005, the recording features Eldar and his trio with jazz trumpeters Chris Botti and Roy Hargrove as guest artists. Its release comes a little over a year since his self-titled Sony Classical debut CD hit the stores, just as he passed his 18th birthday. It won rave reviews from jazz critics across the country, as have his live performances in the nation’s top jazz venues.

“The vigor, stylistic range and dazzling speed displayed on his debut album Eldar (Sony Classical) have already earned this emigrant from Kyrgyzstan the usual comparisons,” The New York Times wrote, when the recording was released early last year. “Eldar combines Art Tatum’s superhuman velocity with echoes of Oscar Peterson’s grandeur … an all-things-to-all-people prodigy whose formidable technique is wedded to a mature grasp of musical structure.”

Reviewing a live performance last June, Billboard wrote, “Eldar has the fastest hands in jazz … melds Russian soul (in the ballads) with American razzle-dazzle (the up-tempo tunes) in standards, not-so-standards and originals … His nine-tune set brought the house down … He seems to easily channel Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson in his approach, but to his credit he gets lost in the music in his own way.”
'Eldar brought gasps of astonishment from a mesmerized audience,' writes Don Heckman of the Los Angeles Times. 'He whipped through a set of finger-blurring passages delivered with precision, tonal variation and a brisk sense of swing...a fine ear for harmonic textures enhanced by an effective sense of dynamics.'

Following the release of his first CD in 2005, Eldar appeared in some of the top jazz clubs in the country, including Yoshi’s in Oakland; Jazz Alley in Seattle; Dizzy’s and the Blue Note in New York; Scullers in Boston; Zanzibar in Philadelphia; and Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. He also performed at the Kennedy Center and the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Eldar Live at the Blue Note introduces four original tunes by Eldar – including the title track – and includes his fresh interpretations of Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?”, Bobby Timmons’ “Dat Dere,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train” and the Latin classic “Besame Mucho.” Chris Botti joins Eldar on the Don Raye/Gene De Paul classic “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” and Roy Hargrove collaborates on Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser.” Completing Eldar’s trio are bassist Marco Panascia and, on drums, Todd Strait.

Eldar returns to the Blue Note for performances July 5-9, during the busy summer of 2006 that also includes his debut at the Hollywood Bowl Playboy Jazz Festival (June 18) and performances in Japan (June 19-28). Following the Blue Note dates, Eldar performs at the Interlochen Festival (August 3); San Jose Jazz Festival (August 19); and Monterey Jazz Festival (September 25). In March, he completed a European tour that took him to Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Berlin, Hamburg and Munich.

Having achieved all of this by the age of 19, Eldar has also become a thoroughly Americanized native of Kyrgyzstan, where he was born in 1987 to Emil and Tatiana Djangirov. An engineer who has always been a passionate jazz fan, Emil began to notice that his five-year-old son – who began playing the piano when he was three – could repeat what was played on recordings, note for note. Eldar progressed quickly when he began serious private study with his father and his mother, a musicologist who taught music history at the college in the city of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital. Though his studies were technical and included traditional classical keyboard training, Eldar gravitated to jazz. When he was given transcriptions of piano solos of Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans, the boy polished them off with ease.
Eldar was nine when he played at a jazz festival in the Russian city of Novosibirsk in the summer of 1996. In the audience was New York jazz enthusiast and patron Charles McWhorter, who determined to bring him to the U.S. McWhorter obtained a scholarship for Eldar to attend summer camp at the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, where, by the age of 12, the boy had joined the High School Jazz Big Band. Not only did Eldar spend the summer sessions of 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 at Interlochen, he and his parents moved to the U.S. in 1998, beginning their new life together in Kansas City because of its venerable tradition for jazz.

Despite the family’s difficulties in resettling, Eldar continued to develop and impress everyone who heard him. Charles McWhorter sent his friend Marian McPartland a tape of the boy’s playing, and an impressed McPartland invited Eldar to join her on her NPR series Piano Jazz. Dr. Billy Taylor encountered him at a Charlie Parker symposium in Kansas City and booked him for an appearance on CBS’s Sunday Morning. It was also in Kansas City that Eldar played for the Jazz Musician Foundation, where he was heard by Michael Greene, then the head of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences. Greene immediately decided to have Eldar play on the 2000 Grammy Awards telecast. At the same time, Eldar participated in the jazz piano competition of the 2001 Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival and won the top prize. The following year, he won first place in the Peter Nero Piano Competition.

Eldar has participated in several American jazz festivals, including those in Jefferson City, Topeka and Kansas City, MO; Roswell, NM and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival; Palm Springs, CA; the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, ID; and the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City. After his appearance on Piano Jazz, Eldar was invited by Marian McPartland to play in her annual Jazz Concert Series at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. He has also twice performed at the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. When he was only 15, Eldar played Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Independence Symphony Orchestra, and he has also performed as a guest artist with Nebraska Jazz Orchestra.

Since coming to the United States, Eldar has studied jazz harmony and improvisation with jazz educator Kim Park and John Elliott, as well as studying big band with Vernon Howard and arranging with Dave Remington. The Djangirov family eventually moved to San Diego, and Eldar continued his academic studies on scholarship at the prestigious Francis Parker School there. He currently attends the University of Southern California.