Not a Jazz superfan, but I do love guitarists who can play. Joe Pass was a titan. Absolute master of the instument

[The Polack MSgt]

?si=SDww8kwE10JX4enm

[Mme. Defarge]

1. Are you sure you don't like Jazz?

[ProfessorGAC]

2. An All-Time Great

He altered, in a big way, the vocabulary of guitar.
I grew up playing jazz piano, so I've always loved that genre, but I've never been a big jazz guitar guy because so many guys use that "blippy" tone that fails to sound like a guitar to me.
Joe is, alas, in that category. The difference between him & a guy like Tal Farlow is night and day, even though Joe is the superior musician. But, Tal's sound was so much more appealing.

[keep_left]

3. I'm assuming that by "blippy" tone...

...you're referring to the de rigueur "jazz tone" of a neck humbucking pickup like a Gibson PAF, with the treble turned way down on the amp. While I love that tone (I got bitten hard by the jazz bug as a renegade conservatory student), it is almost a cliché when it comes to jazz guitar tone. Anytime I do session work and someone wants a "jazz sound", I just reach for my Tele Thinline with the George Benson pickup, plug it into a Fender Twin, and turn the treble way down near zero.

If you're looking for a little variety in your jazz guitar sound, you might want to check out "Gypsy jazz" aka "jazz manouche", which is played mostly on acoustic instruments. The most well-known artists of the genre were the late Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli (Quintette du Hot Club de France) from the '30s to the early '50s. But jazz manouche still a very active field today; it is also the ancestor to genres like Western Swing, and I think you can argue that the country-blues-rock of the Eagles et al. is a distant cousin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_jazz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintette_du_Hot_Club_de_France

[ProfessorGAC]

4. Yes

The Polytone sound. They're out of business now, but there are so many out there, we'll be hearing that sound for a while. CI always felt that sound really did an injustice to guitar.
Django's guitar always sounded like a guitar to me. You can hear the "ping" of the string on attack. So, I've always been good with him. Cool stuff, good sounding. I wonder how he & Grapelli would have sounded with modern recording methods.
That tone kept me from enjoying jazz guitar as much as I otherwise would have. There have been some sax cats whose tone I found off-putting, but not many.
And, most my jazz listening was piano focused, which was fine by me.

[keep_left]

5. Polytone...a solid-state amp, right?

If so, yuck. The only SS amps I ever really liked were the Roland JC-120 and a Gallien-Kreuger preamp from the '90s. Even then, I only liked them for certain sounds. (The JC-120 is famous for being about 75% of the "80s guitar sound": that super-clean, brickwall-compressed tone with tons of stereo chorus on it).

[ProfessorGAC]

6. I've Played Through A JC

I saw Beat in early November & Adrian Belew was still using one.
Yes, Polytone amps were solid state.
In my earliest guitar days, I had a SS Ampeg. But, I had a chance to buy a Twin Reverb pretty cheap (guy was buying a Marshall half-stack). So, I sold the Ampeg & bought it. I've been tubes ever since. I have a Boogie & a Marshall now, plus a Deluxe Reverb we used at rehearsals. That thing hasn't even been turned on for 18 years.
Jamie West-Oram & Andy Summers used JC-120s a lot, too. So did Greg Hawkes on the occasional guitar tune for him.
You're right; they were all over late 70s & 80s music.

[keep_left]

7. I have a lot of tube gear, being a studio rat...

...and much of it is modified. But I did really like the JC-120 for clean stuff, because it was so hard and clean, even more so than a Fender Twin. I changed out the speakers with Celestion "Modern Lead" 12M-70s, which were the standard Marshall speaker at the time, IIRC. They really improved that amp, which had terrible factory speakers made by Roland. I sold that one, unfortunately, and replaced it with an ADA MP-1 tube preamp, which has a pretty good solid-state channel similar to a JC-120. At the time, a lot of players were getting tired of lugging around racks of Marshalls and Rolands (including me), and the ADA was sort of a no-brainer. I still use it for a lot of the '80s super-clean processed sounds.