Chuck Wayne (February 27, 1923 – July 29, 1997) was an American jazz guitarist. He came to prominence in the 1940s, and was among the earliest jazz guitarists to play in the bebop style. Wayne was a member of Woody Herman‘s First Herd, the first guitarist in the George Shearing quintet, and Tony Bennett‘s music director and accompanist. He developed a systematic method for playing jazz guitar.

Wayne was known for a bebop style influenced by saxophone players of his time, especially Charlie Parkerand Coleman Hawkins. In an era when many guitarists used four-square, mandolin-style picking, with rigid up-down stroke articulation, Wayne developed a technique not widely adopted by others until decades later. He also developed a comprehensive approach to guitar chords and arpeggios – based on generic tetradforms spanning all possible inversions, in varying degrees of open voicing. This highly analytic approach to the fretboard was later documented in a series of theory books, some released posthumously.

Chuck Wayne was born Charles Jagelka in New York City to a Czechoslovakian family. As a boy, he learned banjo, mandolin, and balalaika. In the early 1940s he began playing in jazz bands on 52nd Street.