Artist:     Arlen Roth

Album:     Tele Masters

Label:     Aquinnah Records

Release Date:     2.22.2019

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If ever there was a true guitar-geek album, this must be it. For many a Tele may mean television, telephone or the likes, for a guitar geek it can have but one meaning—a Fender Telecaster, an electric guitar that most will have seen in use and inescapably heard somewhere down the years.

Roth is a mean guitar picker who favors a Telecaster, generally shortened to “Tele,” (TELL-ee) by pickers around the world, a universal guitarist-shorthand understood by all. On this remarkable and surprising release, Roth rattles along on his Tele with a range of genuinely great global guitar names also adding their own takes and covers aided by their own Fender Telecasters. The result is a sixteen-track album featuring some of the finest guitarists we all know and love, guys that between them cover a wide range of varied musical interests and influences and which make this album one of those hard-to-ignore offerings.

Roth is joined by Nashville guitar gods, Brad Paisley, Vince Gill and Brent Mason. UK veteran Albert Lee, a guy who can turn his hand to almost any genre, here delivers a totally unexpected instrumental cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s famed, “Mrs. Robinson” to the strange mix. Soulman singer-writer, Steve Cropper (Booker T and the MGs) lends a hand as does bluesman Joe Bonamassa, the wonderful Bill Kirchen (aka “Master of the Telecaster”), and Jerry Donahue.

Wrap the whole package with production by the great Tom Hambridge, who works as drummer too, and we have an album that is both simple in its conception and absorbing in its execution. If nothing else, for guitar pickers this is a likely must-have release if only to catch the varied styles and sounds these guys coax from what is basically the same instrument.

—Iain Patience