“The jazz people were laughing when they saw me at the audition with my Telecaster”: Steve Morse says the music school jazz snobs were not impressed by his choice of guitar

Music school can be an intimidating place. Just ask former Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse. Enrolling at the University of Miami School of Music was to be the making of him, but not after the occasional humiliation.

In a recent interview with Louder, Morse recanted a story that would be familiar to many a college freshman; he just did not fit in. And unlike regular college, where you could drop geography and take up, y’know, material engineering or astro-physics, Morse couldn’t just swap the guitar for tuba. It doesn’t work like that. Morse had to find his niche with the guitar.

“When I got there I didn’t fit in with the classical people,” he says. “I wasn’t advanced enough.”

Worst still. There were some on campus who really did not care for Morse’s choice of electric guitar – and they were not slow in letting him know.

“The jazz people were laughing when they saw me at the audition with my Telecaster,” says Morse. “That wasn’t the right presentation. You were supposed to have an acoustic hollow body guitar with a pickup on it, like Wes Montgomery.”

This, of course, would be news to a lot of jazz guitar players today. Yes, the big ol’ jazz box was the archetypical tool of the trade, of Montgomery, Charlie Christian, Joe Pass et al.

And yet, look at today’s finest jazz players, the likes of Bill Frisell and Julian Lage, who have made the Telecaster their weapon of choice. The late Ted Greene was another virtuoso who could make the Tele work for jazz.

None of this was any use to Morse. He flunked the audition. But it was there he found himself among like-minded players.

“They rolled their eyes and said, ‘Put him in the rock ensemble,’ which was really a Latin jazz group,” says Morse. “There were only six of us in that programme; guitarists like me that failed the jazz audition. So Miami started off really bad, but being around all those other guitarists, suddenly I could relate to them.”

It was then Morse started writing and collaborating and combining different styles, the fusion of jazz and rock, using polychords, moving away from Led Zeppelin, and the rest is pretty much history.

Morse doesn’t specify whether it was his legendary FrankenTele that he used for the audition. This, a hybrid build featuring the neck from a 1967 Fender Stratocaster and the body of a Tele and a suite of bespoke wiring and hardware mods, would have been a little avant-garde for the jazz crowd.

But Morse did tell Guitarist in 2024 that his time on campus at Miami did yield his greatest gear find, when he acquired a hand-built classical guitar on the cheap.

“The most incredible find I’ve ever had was buying a handmade classical guitar in Miami in 1971. The builder needed money,” said Morse. “I was a broke student, and with the warning that the finishing was not complete, I bought it.

“I also never finished it because I was too busy playing it every single day to learn my studies at the University of Miami. It has a cloudy hand-rubbed finish and one crack, I think, but it’s a big part of my early history.”

Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to publications including Guitar World, MusicRadar and Total Guitar. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.