Larry Carlton
American guitarist (born 1948)
Larry Eugene Carlton (born March 2, 1948) is an American guitarist who built his career as a studio musician in the 1970s and 1980s for acts including Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. One of the most sought-after guitarists of his era, Carlton has participated in thousands of recording sessions, recorded on hundreds of albums in many genres including more than 100 gold records, in addition to music for television and movies. He was a member of the jazz fusion group the Crusaders and the smooth jazz band Fourplay maintaining a long solo career.
Music career
Session work
Carlton was born in Torrance, California in the South Bay Area of L.A., and, at the age of six, began guitar lessons. In the early 1960s, while he was still in high school, he debuted his talent playing surf guitar with Eddie and the Showmen, who became the house band at the Retail Clerks Union Hall in Buena Park, California. His interest in jazz came from hearing guitarist Joe Pass on the radio, after which he started to listen to jazz guitarists Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery, as well as blues guitarist B.B. King. He went to junior college and Long Beach State College while playing professionally at clubs in Los Angeles.
During the 1970s, he found steady work as a studio musician on electric and acoustic guitar in a variety of genres: pop, jazz pop, rock, rhythm and blues, soul, and country. Carlton appeared in hundreds of recording sessions with Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Bobby Bland, Sammy Davis Jr., Paulinho Da Costa, Charly García, the Fifth Dimension, Herb Alpert, Christopher Cross, Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, and the Partridge Family. Carlton performed on Mike Post's 1981 "Theme from Hill Street Blues", which won Grammys for 'Best Instrumental Composition' and for 'Best Pop Instrumental Performance'.
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This entry incorporates text from “Larry Carlton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.