Coryell showed up in New York around 1965 from Texas via Seattle, and he was immediately different from the guitarists already working the jazz circuit. He had absorbed Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall, sure, but he'd also been listening to Jimi Hendrix and Scotty Moore. That combination wasn't supposed to work in jazz. He helped make it work anyway. His early gigs with Chico Hamilton and then with the Free Spirits — often cited as one of the first jazz-rock bands — gave him a platform to start wiring those two worlds together before most people thought it was even worth trying.

His run in the late 1960s and early 1970s is where you want to start listening. Lady Coryell (1969) and Spaces (1970) capture him right at the sweet spot — technically ferocious, stylistically open, willing to go somewhere strange without losing the groove. Spaces (1970) in particular is worth your time: it features John McLaughlin alongside him, and the two guitarists push each other in ways that feel genuinely competitive and generous at the same time. It's a record that sounds like two people who both have something to prove.

He went through phases that not every fan followed him through. There was an acoustic period, a classical period, a lot of trio work in the 1980s and 1990s that varied wildly in quality depending on the night and the label. He could be inconsistent, and people who loved his fusion work sometimes felt abandoned when he went acoustic, and vice versa. But that restlessness was also the honest expression of someone who was genuinely curious rather than someone managing a brand. He played with Stephane Grappelli, recorded Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, and still found time to dig back into straight-ahead bebop. Not many guitarists would even attempt all of that.

By the 2000s and into the 2010s, Coryell was playing better than ever in a lot of people's ears — sharper, more focused, less inclined to overplay. He'd burned through some of that early frenetic energy and replaced it with something more deliberate. Younger fusion fans who found him late were sometimes surprised by how loose and swinging he could be when the context called for it. He was never just a rock guy who learned jazz scales. He had real jazz fluency, and late in his career it showed clearly.

He died in February 2017 in New York, the morning after a pair of shows. The timing felt almost too symbolic — he was still out there doing it, not coasting, not playing the hits circuit. If you're coming to him fresh, don't try to find a single definitive album and call it done. He's one of those artists where the picture only gets interesting when you follow the whole zigzag of it.