Geoff Duncan

I've been a little behind on news: I just learned that guitarist Alton "Al" Hendrickson died July 19 in North Bend, Oregon. He was 87.

Al Hendrickson has the distinction of being one of those guitarists most people never heard of, but have been hearing all their lives. He probably wasn't the first, but he was certainly one of the most prominent of the Hollywood/Los Angeles session guitar players from the 1940s through the 1970s, reportedly logging more than 15,000 recording dates and appearances on more than 5,000 movie scores, including everything from Some Like It Hot and West Side Story to The Wild Bunch and High Plains Drifter—along with well-known work on TV shows like Mission: Impossible and M*A*S*H. Like Bob Bain, Tommy Tedesco, Howard Roberts, Barney Kessel, Alan Reuss, and Tiny Timbrell, and other session guitarists, Hendrickson literally played guitar on the soundtrack for a generation or two of Americans, just at the time the electric guitar was becoming an icon and an integral voice in modern culture.

Through either foresight or happenstance, Hendrickson wound up in Los Angeles before World War II. He joined the Coast Guard when the U.S. joined the war in 1941, and wound up playing with Rudy Vallee in its band. Although a very busy session player, Hendrickson got out of town too, playing with Artie Shaw and the Granmery Five, and later with Benny Goodman. As his reputation grew, he toured and recorded with everyone from Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Mel Torme, Rosemary Clooney, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Nat "King" Cole, and Frank Sinatra; bandleaders Andre Previn, Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman, Johnny Mandel, Ray Charles, Louis Bellson, Ray Noble, and (probably to Hendrickson's chagrin) Neal Hefti and Frankie Capp sought him out. He also played in orchestras headed by Nelson Riddle, Quincy Jones, and Lalo Shiffrin. He was also one of the five "board members" of Guitars Inc.—the others were Bobby Gibbons, Tommy Tedesco, Bill Pittman, and Howard Roberts—a guitar ensemble which recorded instrumental albums, but most folks have a better chance of remembering their five-guitar theme for the Henry Fonda TV series The Deputy. And that's omitting gigs with popular performers like The Monkees and Elvis himself.

Like a lot of session players, Hendrickson could switch hit: he famously played both guitar and mandolin on Harry Nilsson's The Point, and played bass guitar on the music used in Disneyland's "Haunted Mansion"—maybe you can still hear him there. And—oddly for a session guitarist—Hendrickson sang: that's him on the lead for Benny Goodman's 1947 top-10 hit "On A Slow Boat To China."

My first encounter with Al Hendrickson came my junior year in high school. For some reason I was playing some bass guitar in a band (bass player quit? got expelled from school? I can't remember) and I randomly checked out Mel Bay's Encyclopedia of Bass Chords, Arpeggios and Scales from the local university library. Guess who wrote it? Al Hendrickson and Art Orzeck. The book offered a systematic approach to I-IV-V7 progressions and branched off into chromatic and whole tone scales. I didn't follow the book from beginning to end—heck, I can't watch a TV show from beginning to end most of the time—but it was the first time I put the pieces together on how to approach chord change from a scalar perspective. And, of course, I immediately began putting those ideas to work on guitar and keyboards because, well, they sure aren't exclusive to bass.

My senior year, those ideas led me back to the university library and to Mel Bay's Deluxe Guitar Arpeggio Studies—written by (you guessed it) Al Hendrickson and Art Orzeck. For some reason I remember it being quite a bit more intimidating, but I can't think why it would have been—same ideas, laid out plain as day, explicitly iterated. As you play through, you have no choice but to understand the bigger ideas behind the notes.

I can't say I got a strong sense of Al Hendrickson "the man" from those books: they're notation and exercises, with a lot of musical notation and very little text. But years later I borrowed a copy of Al Hendrickson Jazz Guitar Solos and his simple, elegant solo number "Hear The Rain" is probably the first chord-melody piece I ever attempted. I think it gave me a slight sense of him…and it's still in my repertoire.