“He said, ‘You think I’m old. Don’t you ever hold back onstage again”: Tommy Emmanuel on the time Les Paul baited him into bringing his A-game to a jam

Tommy Emmanuel and Les Paul: On the left, Emmanuel beats on the top of his beat-up acoustic with some brushes. On the right, Les Paul laughs onstage at the Iridium, with his eponymous guitar cradled on his lap.

Les Paul made no secret of the fact that he loved to jam. He would welcome all kinds of players up onstage with him. Slash, B.B. King, Eddie Van Halen, Brian Setzer, David Gilmour... The list goes on. They have all shared the stage with the man.

Besides putting his name to one of the most-famous electric guitars of all time, he was a heckuva player. He also had a heckuva sense of humor, as Australian acoustic guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel learned when he was first invited to sit in with the Les Paul band during his residency at the Iridium, in New York. You would find Les Paul in there every Monday night. He played there weekly from 1995 until his dead in 2009.