Few guitarists have spent as much of their careers refusing to stand still as Lee Ritenour. Across nearly six decades, the Los Angeles-born guitarist has moved effortlessly between jazz, fusion, pop, Brazilian music, funk and rock, building a body of work defined less by a single sound than by an enduring curiosity about where the guitar can go next.
Now, at 74, Ritenour is taking that restless spirit to one of jazz’s most storied rooms with Live At Ronnie Scott’s, a new double album arriving October 23, 2026, on The Player’s Club.
Recorded at London’s legendary Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, the album captures a musician whose career has always been shaped by the energy of live performance. For Ritenour, the choice of venue feels almost inevitable.
“Every type of music has been played at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club since 1959,” he says. “That's exactly what I love to do too. So Live At Ronnie Scott's is a match made in heaven.”
The album’s 12 tracks draw from different corners of Ritenour’s extensive repertoire, moving between Brazilian-influenced material, jazz fusion, sophisticated groove and some of the guitarist’s best-known compositions. It is a program that reflects the musical range he has cultivated throughout his career — and the freedom he has always given himself to move from one style to another.
That freedom has been one of the defining characteristics of Ritenour’s career.
He began playing guitar as a child in Los Angeles and was already working professionally as a studio musician while still in his teens. At 16, he landed his first recording session with The Mamas & the Papas, setting him on a path that would eventually make him one of the busiest and most versatile session guitarists in the world.
By the 1970s, Ritenour was working with an extraordinary cross-section of artists. His session credits would eventually encompass names including Frank Sinatra, Pink Floyd, B.B. King, Tony Bennett and Quincy Jones, while his jazz work brought him into contact with musicians such as Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie and Stanley Turrentine. Estimates have placed his studio appearances at thousands of recordings.
Yet Ritenour was never content to remain simply a first-call session player.
In 1976, he launched his solo career with First Course, beginning a discography that would eventually encompass more than 40 albums. His early records helped establish him as one of the leading guitar voices in the emerging jazz-fusion movement, while releases such as Rit demonstrated his ability to incorporate the melodic sensibility and production values of contemporary pop without sacrificing his jazz vocabulary.
His fascination with Brazilian music became another crucial strand of his musical identity. Ritenour toured with Sergio Mendes in the early 1970s and worked with artists including Flora Purim, Gato Barbieri and Paulinho Da Costa. That Brazilian influence would remain a constant throughout his career, and it is reflected repeatedly in the material featured on Live At Ronnie Scott’s.
His 1978 album The Captain’s Journey and later releases such as Rio further developed his fusion of jazz, Brazilian rhythms and sophisticated contemporary songwriting. His collaboration with pianist and composer Dave Grusin became particularly important, producing the Grammy-winning Harlequin in 1985.
Ritenour’s Grammy history is extensive, with one win and 16 nominations across jazz, pop and classical categories.
The guitarist’s collaborative instincts also led to one of contemporary jazz’s most successful supergroups. In the early 1990s, Ritenour joined pianist Bob James, bassist Nathan East and drummer Harvey Mason to form Fourplay. The group’s self-titled 1991 debut became a major commercial success, and Ritenour remained for its first three albums before leaving the group in 1997, with Larry Carlton subsequently taking his place.
His own discography continued to evolve throughout the decades. Wes Bound paid tribute to Wes Montgomery, while Larry & Lee reunited him with fellow guitarist Larry Carlton. 6 String Theory brought together an astonishing collection of guitarists and musicians, including B.B. King, George Benson, Keb’ Mo’ and Pat Martino, while Rhythm Sessions featured guests including Dave Grusin, Stanley Clarke, George Duke and Chick Corea.
In 2020, Ritenour took perhaps his most stripped-down musical turn with Dreamcatcher, his first album devoted entirely to solo guitar. It was another reminder that, despite having spent much of his career in ensembles, his fascination with the instrument itself had never diminished.
His longstanding musical partnership with Grusin has continued into the present day. In 2024, the pair released Brasil, returning to the Brazilian music that had played such an important role in their earlier work and recording with an ensemble of Brazilian musicians in São Paulo. The album extended a creative conversation that had begun decades earlier.
That history makes Live At Ronnie Scott’s feel less like a retrospective than another stop on a journey that has never really had a final destination.
The repertoire tells the story.
“Cravo e Canela” immediately establishes the Brazilian influence that has run through so much of Ritenour’s work. “L.A. By Bike” and “For the Palms” move the set into more contemporary territory before the first disc reaches two of his signature pieces, “Captain Fingers” and “A Little Bumpin’.” “Meu Samba Torto” brings the Brazilian thread back into focus to close the first half.
The second disc continues the stylistic journey with “Lay It Down,” followed by the familiar “Is It You?” — Ritenour’s 1981 collaboration with vocalist Eric Tagg that became a pop hit and enduring smooth-jazz favorite.
“Waltz for Carmen” offers a more lyrical turn before the set returns to Brazilian-inspired material with “Stone Flower.” “Pearl” follows, and the performance closes with “Rio Funk,” one of the guitarist’s enduring groove-oriented compositions.
The sequencing makes sense for an artist whose career has always existed between categories. Ritenour does not approach jazz, fusion, Brazilian music or pop as separate identities. They are simply different parts of the same musical vocabulary.
That may be why his playing has remained so recognizable across such a wide range of settings.
His guitar tone can be lyrical and delicate one moment, rhythmically aggressive the next, but there is always an underlying emphasis on melody and groove. Even at his most technically sophisticated, Ritenour has rarely seemed interested in virtuosity for its own sake.
The music has to move.
That principle is particularly important in a live setting, where the guitarist has to respond to the room, the musicians around him and the audience. Ronnie Scott’s is therefore an especially appropriate location for this recording. Since opening in 1959, the club has become one of London’s defining jazz institutions, welcoming generations of international musicians and developing its own reputation as a place where jazz can stretch beyond conventional boundaries.
For Ritenour, that spirit mirrors the way he has approached his own career.
He has never been particularly interested in choosing between jazz and other forms of music. Instead, he has spent decades demonstrating how porous those boundaries can be. His discography moves naturally from fusion to pop, from Brazilian music to funk, from sophisticated instrumental music to collaborations with major vocalists and composers.
The result is a career that is difficult to summarize with a single label.
Jazz guitarist works. Fusion pioneer works. Session ace works. Brazilian music devotee works. Pop collaborator works. Grammy-winning musician works.
But none of those descriptions tells the whole story.
What connects them is the willingness to follow the music wherever it leads.
Live At Ronnie Scott’s arrives as a two-LP gatefold set and CD on The Player’s Club, offering a live portrait of Ritenour at a stage in his career when he has accumulated almost every accolade available but remains just as interested in the next performance.
The complete tracklist is:
Disc One — Side One
- Cravo e Canela
- L.A. By Bike
- For the Palms
Disc One — Side Two
- Captain Fingers
- A Little Bumpin’
- Meu Samba Torto
Disc Two — Side One
- Lay It Down
- Is It You?
- Waltz for Carmen
Disc Two — Side Two
- Stone Flower
- Pearl
- Rio Funk
Live At Ronnie Scott’s will be released October 23, 2026, on The Player’s Club, in 2LP and CD editions.
After nearly 60 years of recording, touring, collaborating and constantly reinventing himself, Lee Ritenour could easily be forgiven for looking back.
Instead, he continues to look forward.
And on a London stage built around the idea that jazz should remain open to possibility, that restless spirit sounds right at home.
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