If you grew up on 1970s pop and rock radio and never heard of Larry Carlton, that's kind of the point. He was the guy labels called when they needed a guitar part that actually worked — tasteful, melodic, technically flawless, done in one or two takes. He played on records by Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, and dozens of others, and if you've ever air-guitared the solo on "Kid Charlemagne," you've been air-guitaring Larry Carlton.

His main instrument, a Gibson ES-335, earned him the nickname "Mr. 335," and once you learn to hear his tone you start picking him out everywhere — that warm, slightly overdriven hollow-body sound sitting right in the pocket between jazz chops and rock attitude. He came up playing with Joe Sample and The Crusaders in the mid-70s, which is really where his sensibility got formed: blues-inflected, groove-first, never showing off for the sake of it.

What makes him worth your time beyond the session credits is that he could actually lead a band too. His solo records from the late 70s, including Larry Carlton (1978), show a guy who understood pop hooks and jazz harmony equally well and didn't see any contradiction between them. It's smooth, sure, but it's smooth because he earned the right to make it look easy, not because he was avoiding difficulty.

There's a dark footnote to his story — he was shot in the throat outside his home studio in 1988, nearly lost his career and his life, and came back from it. He didn't lean on that story for sympathy; he just kept playing, kept touring, kept making records that sound like a man who loves his instrument more than his own myth. That's the whole Larry Carlton thing, really: less interested in being a legend than in making the next note sound right.