Collection: Eric Gale

Eric Gale played with a spare, singing tone that let a handful of notes carry more weight than most players manage with a flurry of them. A Brooklyn-born session veteran, he became one of the most recorded guitarists of the 1970s, working with the CTI circle around Bob James, Stanley Turrentine and Grover Washington Jr., and as a member of the New York band Stuff alongside drummer Steve Gadd. His own records, among them Forecast (Kudu, 1973) and the two Columbia albums Multiplication and Ginseng Woman (both 1977), lean into the jazz-funk and soul-jazz grooves of that New York studio scene. He also lent his guitar to pop and rock sessions, including Paul Simon’s One-Trick Pony (1980), and to Washington’s Come Morning (1981). He died in 1994 at 55.