(Credits: Far Out / Tidal / Alamy)
Thu 2 October 2025 18:30, UK
When we talk about our favourite guitarists of all time, it’s very rare that they all occupy the same space or possess the same traits as a player, otherwise you’re essentially nominating a group of people who are copying each other.
There’s no denying that George Harrison and Jerry Garcia are both great players, but they’re so far removed from one another that it becomes more about their uniqueness than having a particular attribute.
While Harrison is perhaps not the most technically-minded player, and was only the lead guitarist in the Beatles by default rather than because he could play a rip-roaring guitar solo on command, his style was perfect for the style of songs that the band were writing. There’s an understated quality to his work that has always shone, rather than an overt showiness that puts himself front and centre of any given track, and while there’s no denying that lead breaks such as ‘Something’ are up there with the best moments in the band’s output, it’s far from being all about flair.
Garcia, on the other hand, is all about being free as a player and playing whatever feels right to accompany what the other musicians in the band are playing. Given how the Grateful Dead were known for their extensive jams, Garcia was required to be a great improviser, and therefore whatever Garcia delivered in live performances was a spur of the moment decision, and everything would often rest on whether he was able to pull rabbits out of proverbial hats and stun audiences with off-the-cuff moments of excellence.
However, despite their differences, both of these two lauded guitarists have one thing in common, and that’s the fact that they can agree on one of their personal picks for the greatest guitarist to have ever lived, with both parties having determined that the Belgian jazz maestro Django Reinhardt was a singular talent and an inspiration to them.
A virtuosic talent, Reinhardt had a flair for playing complex rhythms while layering in beautiful melodies. Having been exposed to his work since he was a nipper, Harrison slowly started folding elements of that style into his own. In a chat with BBC Radio Merseyside, former Wings guitarist Laurence Juber said Harrison had told him that Reinhardt had been a major influence since his early teens. “When he was 13, he had some jazz guitar lessons from someone on the boats who was familiar with Django Reinhardt,” he explained. “Those diminished chords that George uses came from Django, so he was a very sophisticated guitar player.”
On the other hand, Garcia also noted how much of an inspiration Reinhardt had been throughout his career, and that he also modelled some of his own techniques on what the Belgian did on his famous recordings from the 1930s. “Django Reinhardt is like the model guitarist for me,” Garcia claimed in a 1977 interview. “There is so much passion in his playing, both in terms of invention and expressiveness, and you can feel his attitude, his emotion, in his playing.”
While both Harrison and Garcia took aspects of Reinhardt’s style and introduced them into their own work, it’s quite remarkable that neither of them ended up being direct copies of him, or even ended up sounding like one another. Given that they were able to take elements and make them their own in different ways, this is exactly what makes all three of them special – their unique approach to doing the same thing.
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