Getting lost in his guitar helps Martino find himself

Twenty-five years ago, jazz guitarist Pat Martino emerged from surgery to repair a brain aneurysm with near total memory loss. His severe amnesia meant he no longer knew that he'd ever played guitar, let alone how. His father tried jogging his memory by bringing LPs with Martino's name and photo on them to the hospital as proof of his son's ability on the instrument, but that didn't go over as well as expected.

''By him doing that," recalls Martino, 61, by phone from Philadelphia, ''it triggered something within me that pushed the guitar away from me. It pushed music away from me, in fact."

The problem, Martino says, was that in the early days of his recovery he was totally absorbed in the present, with zero interest in the past or the future. Depressed, Martino tried various therapies to lift his mood. Nothing worked. Then he began fooling around on his guitar, not with an eye toward resuming his career but as a way of taking his mind off his worries.

''My favorite toy became the guitar again," says Martino, who performs at the Regattabar Thursday and Friday. ''It was the only thing that I could play with and lose myself in. And that's how I learned the instrument. The same way that I did when I was a little boy. I lost myself in it. The only difference, of course, was that there was no one to say to me as an adult, 'Stop playing and do your homework.' "

As he played with the guitar, enjoying ''simple, basic motions on the instrument" and ''the sound of its tone," Martino found his technique rebuilding itself.

By the late '80s, Martino had resumed playing professionally. (Now he's on what might be considered his third act, having surmounted life-threatening lung problems in the late '90s through a combination of diet and yoga exercises.) His recorded work since then includes a Grammy-nominated live organ-trio disc with fellow Philadelphian Joey DeFrancesco and drummer Billy Hart, and an all-star studio session with Joe Lovano, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Christian McBride, and Lewis Nash. The latter, titled ''Think Tank," helped Martino win the guitar category in the 2004 Down Beat Readers Poll.

Martino's current project, a CD tribute to late guitar great Wes Montgomery, is due out on Blue Note early next year. Martino claims credit for introducing Montgomery and his work to another guitar icon, Les Paul, who used to drop by regularly to watch Martino perform in New York. One night, Montgomery was playing a couple of blocks down Seventh Avenue, and Martino brought Paul in to meet him.

''One of the strangest things happened," Martino recalls. ''Wes came offstage as we were waiting to see him. He walked on over, and I introduced him to Les, and Wes told Les Paul, 'I'm one of your biggest fans.' And Les was so taken by his playing that I just left them there."

Martino met Montgomery and Paul outside Count Basie's nightclub afterward, where George Benson and Grant Green wandered up and joined them, and the impromptu assemblage of guitar greats headed off to breakfast together.

At the Regattabar, Martino and his working quartet of Rick Germanson on piano, Steve Varner on bass, and Scott Robinson on drums will be playing such Montgomery favorites as ''Four on Six," ''Unit 7," ''Groove Yard," and ''Full House," the same basic repertoire as on the CD in progress. Decades-old LPs from Martino's boyhood collection contributed heavily to the song selections -- and this time Martino was delighted to have old records reconnect him with his past.

''I found records that brought me way, way back," he said, ''and I found little ballpoint pen markings on the backs of the albums. Certain songs that were circled told me what really had moved me, and it triggered bursts of images that brought me back to sitting in front of a record player that belonged to my father and putting the arm of the needle on the album, again and again, copying the solo, at the age of 13 or 14 years old. I took those circles off of those albums and chose that as the repertoire for this particular project."

Guitar clinics: Aspiring guitarists who'd like to tap into Martino's mastery of the instrument are in luck. He'll bookend his Regattabar shows with clinics at Berklee College of Music and at Bosse School of Music in Weymouth. The Berklee event is Wednesday at 1 p.m. at the Berklee Performance Center. Martino will also give two clinics on Saturday at Bosse, at noon and 2 p.m. For reservations for the Bosse clinics, call 781-337-8500.