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I sometimes think the trick to playing like yourself, even if you had a particular model musician, is to simply take the particulars of what you learned from that musician, what it was about him which gripped you, and use them as a starting line rather than the goal. I'm just a blues player, but with any blues guitarist or other guitarist who came round again to the blues, like Wes, I would pretty much do that, as best I could. Guys like B.B. King, Albert King, Mike Bloomfield, Wes, I'd think of what made them special to me when they played the blues, learn up what I could of that, and then keep them as starting lines rather than the finishing line. (Not to mention players on other instruments who could do the blues right - Miles Davis is a perfect example; that guy said more laying four stretched notes over a blues verse than most people said playing four hundred notes over eight bars, and any guitar player who thinks that can't give him something, better call a cab.)

I'm no Wes Montgomery, but I'm myself. Simple but from as deep as I can wring it. I'm basically of the school which says, if you can say it in five and make it mean something, you're way ahead of the guy who can say it in twenty-five without saying a bloody thing. On the rare occasions when I get to get out and play the blues, some of the response I get tells me I chose wisely.

I really hate noodlers' (people who just sort of try to play every note possible without thought.) If you listen to the great jazz musicians, their solos are well thought out. A lot of these free jazz students don't think before they play. If solos are talking, then most free jazz is tourettes' syndrome.