Jazz on the Tube

James Stanley Hall (born December 4, 1930, Buffalo, New York) is an American Jazz guitarist.

Educated at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Hall moved to Los Angeles where he began to attract national, and then international, attention in the late 1950s. There he studied classic guitar with Vincente Gómez.

He played with Chico Hamilton Quintet, (1955–1956), Jimmy Giuffre Trio (1956–1959), Ella Fitzgerald (1960–1961), Ben Webster, Hampton Hawes, Bob Brookmeyer, John Lewis, Zoot Sims, Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz and Bill Evans. By 1960 Jim had arrived in New York to work with Sonny Rollins and Art Farmer, among others. His live and recorded collaborations there with Bill Evans, Paul Desmond and Ron Carter have become legendary.

Formal recognition as a composer came in 1997, when Hall won the New York Jazz Critics Circle Award for Best Jazz Composer/Arranger. His pieces for string, brass, and vocal ensembles can be heard on his Textures and By Arrangement recordings. His original composition, Quartet Plus Four, a piece for jazz quartet augmented by the Zapolski string quartet, was debuted in Denmark during the concert and ceremony where he was awarded the coveted Jazzpar Prize, and later released on CD.

His most recent large-scale composition was a concerto for guitar and orchestra, commissioned by Towson University in Maryland for The First World Guitar Congress, which was debuted in June 2004 with the Baltimore Symphony. He was awarded an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship award in January 2004. In November, 2008 the double-disc album Hemispheres was released through the ArtistShare label featuring fellow guitarist and former student Bill Frisell with Scott Colley (bass) and Joey Baron (drums).