My three favorite guitar players are Jimi Hendrix, Joe Pass and Andrés Segovia.
I love Hendrix’s contact with the strings.
It’s very physical.
In his use of bends and vibrato, there is a strong, sensual aurality and a masculine physicality that I’ve never heard expressed, to that degree, in any other guitar player.
His timing is finer than any musician I’ve heard, on any instrument, though Glenn Gould might give him a run for his money on the Goldberg Variations (1955 version).
There there is also a boldness, bordering on brazen riskiness, with his experimentation with color, with his panoply of techniques.
So, for me, the rhythmic and tonal content of Hendrix, is what I like most.
Joe Pass and Andrés Segovia are distant second and third loves, respectively, but I like them for a very different reason…They are solo artists.
Technically, I admire both these men’s ability to carry the bass, simultaneously, with the melody and the chords…
What I love about Joe Pass is his impetuosity, his lust to create melody on the spot. That is very African-American in it’s nature and it appeals to me on a gut level.
Also…Joe has a passion for the blues.
I like Andrés Segovia’s pureness of tone on his his classical guitar. There’s an elegance and restrained formality in his “feel”, as he cascades through his Iberian romantic and stern baroque repertoire and while it can feel a little stilted, here and there, still, there is real purity and profound sense of color that Hendrix has…but Pass does not.