Yea he definitely is not a Jazz cat and is more an educated bluesman that can do a lot of things, and that was during Miles fusion & Pop period.
This is an example of what a lot of Jazz guitar players strive for tone wise, and there's no way you can get that with 10" cones.
(Kenny starts @2:10)
Burrell is a master, always sounds great. And certainly, that tone is a 12" speaker. Though I'm not a jazzer, I've been around enough and seen enough live jazz to understand how to capture the tone.
I'm not a genre-specific musician. I like everything. If it's good, I'll listen to it. If it's boring and predictable - like folks who just play scales over changes, which you hear far too often - I'm out.
I should mention that in the '90s I took bass lessons for a year from one of the jazz professors at Wayne State, who also, interestingly, was a first-call session player for sessions at Motown after James Jamerson passed away.
Not that bass and electric guitar are the same thing, and not that I'm any good at it, but I do have a smattering of understanding the genre. Just enough to get myself in trouble (though I was hired to write and produce music for Detroit's Montreux Jazz festival ads - their mistake, of course, but they were happy anyway).
In the late 1960s as a teenager, I could get into Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, a famous jazz club where I had the joy of seeing a lot of the great players, including Wes Montgomery. It was about a mile from where I lived in the city back then.
I do remember seeing black panel Fender combos for the guitar that would have had 12" speakers. The piano, bass and drums weren't miked, nor was the guitar amp. It's not a big place.
They'd let young people in as long as you got dressed properly in a jacket and tie and didn't try to order alcohol.
Speaking of very good jazz players, In the late '80s- early '90s I got to hang around a bit with Earl Klugh, who was my neighbor. Earl had a home studio similar to mine. So we shared that interest. He was into classical acoustic guitars at the time, super-nice guy and always sounded amazing. I went to his shows, where he often played with Alexander Zonjic on flute.
But obviously he didn't play electric guitar (that I was aware of).
I got to see Barney Kessel play at a Guitar Summit in Ann Arbor in 1997, and his tone was very similar to the classic tone I remembered. Very much like Burrell did in that video he played solo.
For all the greatness of the other players, the star of that show (that included classical players) was not a jazzer, it was Michael Hedges, who was so amazing that at the end of the show the other players came out on stage and gave him a standing ovation along with the audience.
I mention him because he was a genre-buster, a unique and inventive musician who didn't care what anyone else did or sounded like. He was gonna be him. Astounding player, one of a kind. He died only a few months later in a car accident.
I feel the same way about Robben Ford, a guy who can just show up and play with just about anyone, doing it in his own style. He wasn't bound by convention, though I will also say that I've heard him play a little trad jazz on his old Baker guitar at a clinic, and he could do it very well, even if it wasn't his means of self-expression. He loves blues based stuff, and more power to him.
Bottom line for me is, sound the way you want to sound. If it's a particular genre-based thing, great. If you're the only one who sounds like you, also great. Whatever gets your music across is wonderful.
My final thought here is that I'm a terrible guitar player and shouldn't be allowed to make comments on any guitar forum, yet here I am.
