Listeners looking to assemble a jazz-guitar starter kit may want to visit local musician Bill Coon’s website, which includes a guide to this ultra-tasteful player’s top 13 jazz-guitar albums of all time. There’s not a dud among them—and further evidence of Coon’s helpful nature comes when it’s revealed that this Straight scribe owns all but one of his baker’s dozen. Within minutes, audio files of Ed Bickert and Don Thompson’s At the Garden Party are winging their way over the Internet to complete the set. But don’t worry: no musicians are being cheated in the process.

“I don’t think Ed’s making any money from that record anyway,” says Coon of the 2004 release.

Not only does this Montreal transplant know his jazz-guitar history, he’s part of it, having studied with one of the instrument’s quiet revolutionaries, Jim Hall. So with the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival starting this week, it seems natural to open our chat by asking what his top three jazz-fest guitar concerts might be.

“The first one that comes to mind is Kurt Rosenwinkel [at Performance Works on Wednesday (June 26)], and unfortunately I’m away that day,” says Coon, in a telephone interview from his Vancouver home. “I’m really upset about that! I would say he’s my favourite of the new breed of guitar players.”

He also recommends checking out Peter Bernstein with organist Larry Goldings and drummer Bill Stewart at Cory Weeds’ Cellar Jazz Club on Friday and Saturday (June 21 and 22); Vancouver legend Oliver Gannon’s quartet date at the Cellar on Wednesday (June 26); and another local, Jared Burrows, playing with drummer Dave Robbins’s Electric Band at Pat’s Pub on Saturday (June 22).

“I couldn’t keep it to three!” Coon says.

Enthusiasm and generosity play a part in the guitarist’s makeup, on and off the bandstand, and so does modesty. He’d never mention that he has four jazz-fest shows of his own, so we will: this year, smart festival fans can catch him with his own trio, with singer Kate Hammett-Vaughan and bassist Adam Thomas, with trombonist Hugh Fraser’s Electric Sextet, and with his trombone-playing wife Jill Townsend’s hard-charging big band.

Coon does allow that he could have booked another four shows without exhausting the number of groups that he’s a part of. When we talk, he’s readying to play a Pat’s Pub show with bassist André Lachance, trumpeter Kevin Elaschuk, and drummer Dylan van der Schyff. He’s just coming off a successful El Barrio tribute to the bluesiest of the great jazz guitarists, Grant Green, for which he teamed up with the comparatively avant-garde Tony Wilson. With Benefits, by the Cory Weeds/Bill Coon Quartet, recently made number five on the Canadian jazz charts. And then there’s the band that’s perhaps closest to his heart, the Bill Coon Double Quartet, which will likely be his next recording project. The group’s undeniably ordinary name belies its imaginative nature; it brings a jazz ensemble together with a string quartet in a way that’s rare, here or anywhere else.

“There’s the classical world and the jazz world, and I’m the marriage counsellor,” Coon says, laughing. “That sound of strings and especially trumpet or flügelhorn, it just kills me. I think that sound is just so beautiful. And it’s really interesting because this brings out a certain side of [brass virtuoso] Brad Turner—a real lyrical side that sometimes people don’t hear. We all know what a great player he is, and it’s really fun to write music that brings out a certain side of his playing.”

If it seems that Coon’s playing with everybody of any consequence on the Vancouver scene, from unrepentant swing cats to relative radicals, that’s because it’s pretty much true. Not surprisingly, the guitarist has a strong sense of jazz as the most collaborative of the performing arts.

“That’s the way I look at playing music,” he says. “I don’t think I ever go into any musical situation, even if I’m the leader, thinking that I’m the most important thing there. I see myself as part of a group and part of a team—and that, I guess, has really worked out for me.”