British jazz guitarist Martin Taylor plays Jazz Alley, March 16-17

Martin Taylor is one of the most well-respected solo jazz guitarists in the world. But the British musician didn't originally set out to perform alone.

As a young man, in the late 1970s, Taylor joined the quartet of the great jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli. But in the mid-'80s, when Grappelli was sidelined by a heart attack, Taylor's career was put on hold, too. Disillusioned and desperate to pay bills, he stopped playing for a year and resorted to selling his guitars for income.

"I just didn't see where I fit in to the whole musical world," said Taylor, 53, who will play two solo shows at Jazz Alley Tuesday and Wednesday night. "Everything was quite a struggle. I got so disillusioned with it, I started turning down work, and then work didn't come along."

In 1986, he was about to sell his last guitar, a gift from Ike Isaacs, another British jazz guitarist, when he stopped upon a sobering moment. He realized he had nothing to fall back on (a blessing he said) because he had left school at age 15 to play jazz, like his father, the bassist Buck Taylor. He had a family to support and no other particular skills.

So he called every promoter he knew and asked if he could play a solo show. One finally agreed, then others. His performances sold well. Hiring one musician cost less than hiring an entire band. Before long, Taylor was a bankable act.

Now he finds it easier to get promoters to hire him solo than with his group, Spirit of Django.

Taylor is known as a guitarist's guitarist. Pat Metheny is a fan; so were Chet Atkins and George Harrison. "I was always fascinated with the guitar as a complete instrument," he said, finding that guitarists who had the technical ability to play alone, like classical guitarists, did not have the jazz background, and that most jazz guitarists did not have the technical ability, himself included. He realized he had to become a better guitarist to play what he wanted to play, he said.

With few other guitarists to emulate, he paid attention to piano players like Art Tatum and Bud Powell. He wanted to play the guitar equivalent of stride piano in which a pianist uses the left hand to play bass lines and walking intervals.

Taylor does similar things, picking a syncopated bass line for instance. But while a piano player can easily play seven or more notes at a time, a guitarist cannot.

"It wouldn't sound good on a guitar," Taylor said. "Piano players can play 10 notes at a time. I can achieve the same effect with three. It's breaking everything down to playing as little as possible."

Sounding like two players at once is more of a trick of "smoke and mirrors," Taylor said. He constantly changes volume and texture to give depth to his sound, picking rather than strumming the low and high ends of a song, something he said he learned from classical guitarists.

"Once I started to play solo," he said, "it seemed to attract interest from people who listened to other kinds of music. The jazz tag started to disappear."

Hugo Kugiya: hkugiya@yahoo.com