A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Charlie Christian (1916-1942): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
It can be said without exaggeration that virtually
every jazz guitarist that emerged during 1940-65 sounded like a relative
of Charlie Christian. The first important electric guitarist, Christian
played his instrument with the fluidity, confidence, and swing of a
saxophonist. Although technically a swing stylist, his musical
vocabulary was studied and emulated by the bop players, and when one
listens to players ranging from Tiny Grimes, Barney Kessel, and Herb Ellis, to Wes Montgomery and George Benson, the dominant influence of Christian is obvious. Charlie Christian's
time in the spotlight was terribly brief. He played piano locally in
Oklahoma, and began to utilize an amplified guitar in 1937, after
becoming a student of Eddie Durham, a jazz guitarist who invented the
amplified guitar. John Hammond, the masterful talent scout and producer, heard about Christian (possibly from Mary Lou Williams), was impressed by what he saw, and arranged for the guitarist to travel to Los Angeles in August 1939 and try out with Benny Goodman. As soon as they started jamming on "Rose Room," Christian's talents were obvious. For the next two years, he would be well-featured with Benny Goodman's Sextet;
there were two solos (including the showcase "Solo Flight") with the
full orchestra; and the guitarist had the opportunity to jam at Minton's
Playhouse with such up-and-coming players as Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and Dizzy Gillespie.
All of the guitarist's recordings (including guest spots and radio
broadcasts) are currently available on CD. Tragically, he contracted
tuberculosis in 1941, and died at the age of 25 on March 2, 1942. It
would be 25 years before jazz guitarists finally moved beyond Charlie Christian.
As the man who popularized the guitar in a jazz setting, his legacy lives on.
Charlie
Christian was born on July 29, 1916 in Bonham, Texas but was raised in
Oklahoma City from the time he was two years old. Charlie's immediate
family were all musically talented - his mother played the piano; his
father sang and played the trumpet and guitar; his brother, Clarence,
played the violin and the mandolin; and his oldest brother, Edward,
played the string bass. His parents made a living writing accompaniments
for silent movies. At the age of twelve, Charlie was playing on a
guitar that he had made from a cigar box in a manual training class.
Charlie was actually first trained on the trumpet which was a huge
contribution to his fluid single-note guitar style. Then, his father and
brothers formed a quartet and Charlie got a real guitar. They performed
in Oklahoma City clubs and Charlie even met Lester Young (tenor
saxophonist) during one of his performances. Charlie was fascinated by
Lester's style which helped in shaping his own stylistic development.At
the age of twenty-one he was playing electric guitar and leading a jump
band. At the age of 23 (1939), Charlie was discovered by a talent
scout, John Hammond, who had stopped in Oklahoma city to attend Benny
Goodman's first Columbia recording sessions. Pianist Mary Lou Williams
had actually recommended Charlie to John Hammond. Goodman was not very
excited, this was due to the fact that Charlie was an unknown musician
playing an electric instrument. The amplified electric guitar was fairly
new at the time (trombonist and arranger Eddie Durham began playing it
as a solo instrument in Jimmie Lunceford's band in 1935). It was
essentially an amplified “f-hole,” and it helped in making the jazz
guitar solo a practical reality for the first time.
Previously relegated to a chordal rhythm style by the
limitations of the acoustic instrument, jazz guitarists could now revel
in the volume, sustain, and tonal flexibility provided by amplification.
Charlie quickly realized the potential of the electric guitar, and
developed a style which made the most of the unique properties of the
instrument. When Charlie arrived in Los Angeles, he was only allowed a
brief audition and he was not even allowed the time to plug in his amp.
Goodman was not impressed so Hammond decided to sneak Charlie onstage
later that night during a concert at the Victor Hugo. This made Goodman
angry and he responded by launching into “Rose Room,” which he assumed
Charlie would be unfamiliar with. Charlie performed an impressive
extended solo on the piece. This impressed Goodman and Charlie was let
into the band.
Charlie was a hit on the electric guitar and
remained in the Benny Goodman Sextet for two years (1939-1941). He wrote
many of the group's head arrangements (some of which Goodman took
credit for) and was an inspiration to all. The sextet made him famous
and provided him with a steady income while Charlie worked on
legitimizing, popularizing, revolutionizing, and standardizing the
electric guitar as a jazz instrument.
After working at nights with
Goodman, Charlie would seek out jam sessions. He discovered a club in
Harlem, Minton's, located on New York's West 118th Street. At Minton's
Charlie played with such greats as Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker,
Thelonius Monk, Joe Guy (trumpet), Nick Fenton (bass), Kenny Kersey
(piano), and Kenny Clarke (drums). Charlie impressed them all by
improvising long lines that emphasized off beats, and by using altered
chords. He even bought a second amp to leave at Minton’s. Jamming
sessions would usually last until about 4 A.M. and Minton’s became the
cradle of the bebop movement. Charlie's inventive single-note playing
helped popularize the electric guitar as a solo instrument and helped
usher in the era of bop.
In the summer of 1941, Christian was
touring the Midwest when he began showing the first signs of
tuberculosis. He left the tour and was admitted to the Seaview
Sanatorium on Staten Island. While he was there, he died on March 2,
1942 at the age of twenty-five.
Charlie Christian’s most familiar
recordings are those with Benny Goodman which were available on vinyl
for years (”Solo Flight”) and which are now available on cd as “Charlie
Christian: Genius of the Electric Guitar.” There are recorded sessions
from when he played with members of the Goodman and Count Basie bands,
Lester Young, and numerous artists at Minton's. Charlie Christian had an
immense influence on the development of BeBop and the transition from
Swing to BeBop.
First, a few myths get cleared up by the very
existence of this box, which goes far beyond the original Columbia
compilations with the same name. For starters, Columbia goes a long way
to setting the record straight that Charlie Christian was not the first
electric guitarist or the first jazz guitarist or the first electric
guitarist in jazz. For another, they concentrate on only one thing here:
documenting Christian's seminal tenure with Benny Goodman's
various bands from 1939-1941. While in essence, that's all there really
is, various dodgy compilations have been made advertising Christian playing with Lester Young or Lionel Hampton. It's true that he did, but only in the context of the Goodman
band. There are 98 tracks spread over four CDs, all of which have been
remastered from original sources -- the sound is nothing short of
breathtaking. The tracks include the well-known master takes, all 70 of
them, as well as 17 never before released alternates and 28 cuts that
have only been issued on European or Japanese compilations. What all of
this compiling proves is one thing certainly: all single-disc
collections cannot begin to do justice to the legend and methyl that
surrounds Christian's
genius. The single-disc ventures are merely shadows, not even
photographs or snaps of the massive wealth of musicality that this
collaboration between these two men, and the various bands and
orchestras they were involved in. Chronologically laid out, the notes
are exhaustive enough to include take numbers for jazz historians to
argue about. For the rest of us, we get to delve deep into the Goodman band's treasure trove with "Flying Home," "Rose Room," "Memories of You," "AC-DC Current" -- with a killer Lionel Hampton vibes solo, as well as Christian's
fat-shaped chords that sound downright funky -- "Gone With What Wind,"
and more masters with those slippery solos and lilting clarinets. Plus,
we get nine alternate takes just on disc one. Disc two brings Lester Young and Buck Clayton to the Goodman sextet, as well as players like Georgie Auld and Cootie Williams. These sides in 1940 are the most cooking, as Christian
has to actually get in and mix it up with the horns. Among the most
noteworthy are "Ad Lib Blues," "Lester's Dream," "Wholly Cats," and
"Royal Garden Blues." The alternates are three takes of "Six Appeal (My
Daddy Rocks Me)" and two of "Good Enough to Keep (Air Mail Special),"
which must have been hell to pick between for the original issues --
they all smoke. Disc three puts the Goodman sextet in a new groove, with Count Basie making the scene briefly with Williams and Auld. The trading of fours between Basie and Christian
on "Breakfast Feud" -- of which there are even steamier alternate takes
-- is one of the highlights of either's career, and the only place on
record where Goodman himself gets lost in the beat. Finally, disc four presents the Goodman Orchestra, Metronome All-Star Review, and his own big band. The sheer talent on these sides is dizzying to even list: Gene Krupa, Harry James, Jack Teagarden, Benny Carter, Pete Mondello, Fletcher Henderson, and on. Christian
shines on all of these sides. Backed by a rhythm guitarist (acoustic),
and a big rhythm section, his solos are wracked with fluttering
arpeggios that seem to meander before sideswiping the listener with
their on-target incision into the melodic framework of the tune and
their absolutely in-the-pocket sense of time. Along with alternate
takes, there are sextet false starts and breakdowns included, as well as
the Goodman Orchestra's
rehearsals. The fourth is easily the most exhausting disc of the set to
listen through, but it also has the most astonishing music. This set is
an archivist's dream, to be sure, but it nonetheless offers the rest of
listeners plenty as well: a complete education in Goodman, as well as Christian and the eras, and to be sure, the most potent music outside the Ellington band from those years. In addition, Peter Broadbent's encyclopedic biographical notes and Loren Schoenberg'
s obsessively (yes, that's a good thing) musical notes make for an
indispensable package both historically and aesthetically.
On a recent visit to Seattle’s Museum of Popular Culture (formerly EMP), I found myself transfixed for well over an hour by the Guitar Gallery,
a veritable shrine for guitar players, with “55 vintage, world changing
guitars from the 1770s to the present.” In addition to illustrating a
few hundred years of music history, the exhibit represents the slow
development of the electric guitar, and the many ungainly stages
in-between. What we learn in studying the history is that guitar
innovations have always been player-driven. Guitarists have modified and built their own guitars, and many have
taken models and adapted them so fully to their style that they become
iconic mainstays as other models drop away. Such is the case with the ES-150, Gibson’s first “Electric Spanish” archtop guitar, and its most famous player, Charlie Christian,
who has inspired some of the best-known guitarists in jazz, like Barney
Kessel and Wes Montgomery, and who also may have invented the electric
guitar solo. Gibson goes so far as to bestow on Christian the honorific of "the first guitar hero." Before Christian, guitar soloists in jazz ensembles and orchestras were
rare, since the acoustic instrument couldn’t be heard loudly enough over
horns, woodwinds, double bass, and drums. The first electric guitar, the “Frying Pan,”
arrived in 1931, built for Hawaiian jazz lap steel players. Rapid
development of the electric pickup proceeded throughout the decade, and
Christian bought his ES-150 the year after it went into production in
1936. By 1938, when he had found steady work at a club in Bismarck, North
Dakota, “a local music store displayed the Gibson ES-150 with a sign
reading ‘As featured by Charlie Christian.’” By this point, writes Riff Interactive, Christian was “a regional hero.” In 1939, Christian joined the Benny Goodman orchestra, but the story of
his audition tells us as much about the electric guitar’s importance as
it does about Christian’s playing. It seems that “Goodman was initially
unimpressed” by Christian’s strumming of an “unamplified rhythm guitar
behind ‘Tea for Two.’” (hear him play the song, electrified, below.) But
when jazz impresario John Hammond
snuck him and his electric guitar onstage with Goodman’s Quintet later
at the Victor Hugo Restaurant, “Christian matched Goodman riff for riff
and improvised over 20 choruses. He was hired on the spot.” He could
play some of Django Reinhardt's most difficult songs note-for-note, and
“many of the figures he worked into his solos evolved later into Benny
Goodman tunes.”
“Some argue he wasn’t the first” electric soloist, writes the site Justice through Music,
but “he made the electric guitar lead solo ‘popular,’ and in essence
‘invented’ it,” leading the way for “Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Buddy
Guy, Eddie Van Halen and all the great guitar shredders.” Jazz critic
Kevin Whitehead agrees, telling Terry Gross
that Christian “was the single greatest influence on the signature 20th
century instrument, the electric guitar, even though he died at age 25
and did all his recording in under two years.” Beginning in his hometown of Oklahoma City as a ukulele player,
Christian picked up many of his “slingshot rhythms” on the guitar from
saxophonist Lester Young (hear him play with Young just above).
“Amplified slide guitarists in white western swing bands showed
Christian how electric guitar could project,” Whitehead notes. “He
wasn’t the first electric picker who played on the frets. He dug Chicago
pioneer George Barnes. But Christian had the most imposing sound.” We have a representative sampling of the imposing sound of Christian and
his ES-150 in the recordings here. At the top of the post, hear him
live with Goodman (who introduces him as “our new discovery, Charles
Christian”) in 1939, playing “Flying Home.” Further down listen to “Rose
Room” with Goodman’s Sextet, with whom he made most of his records,
Whitehead tells us, “compet[ing] for space with other good soloists.”
Further down, hear Christian play “Stompin’ at the Savoy” live at
Minton’s in 1941 and “Tea for Two” with Jerry Jerome in 1939. Further up, in “Solo Flight” with Goodman’s orchestra, Christian
demonstrates his “impeccable” timing and “heavy, front-loaded attack” in
a two-and-a-half-minute showcase. Christian’s phenomenal playing
“inspired untold jazz, blues, and rock-guitar players.” In some of his
last recordings, before his death from tuberculosis in 1942, he “laid
the groundwork for the new music that Christian started calling bebop.”
Hear him reshape the sound of jazz with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious
Monk, Don Byas, and Kenny Clarke above in “Groovin’ High.” “You can hear
a lot of guitar’s future coming” in these recordings, Whitehead argues,
“Chuck Berry included.”
Charlie Christian has been gone for nearly 60 years, but there isn’t a
guitarist worthy of the name that’s unaware of who this jazz genius was
and how significant his contribution continues to be. Yet of all the
indelible names in the pantheon of jazz, his is the one granted the
least time to earn its place. For a scant 22 months, Charlie Christian occupied center stage of
the jazz world, and then he was gone, as suddenly as he had appeared.
We know the basic facts of his life: Born in Dallas, Texas, on July 29,
1916, youngest son of a blind musician; raised in Oklahoma City, where
he and his two brothers all became professional players; playing bass
and guitar with various bands, including that of Alphonse Trent;
beginning to experiment with amplification in 1937; heard by various
touring musicians who were impressed, among them Teddy Wilson, Eddie
Durham (a pioneer of amplified guitar who gave Charlie pointers) and
Mary Lou Williams, who told John Hammond, who went to Oklahoma City to
hear for himself and promptly gave Charlie train fare to Los Angeles,
where he auditioned for Benny Goodman and was hired on the spot;
featured member of Goodman’s sextet, then septet, recording
prolifically, jamming at Minton’s, winning polls and then, as his
tuberculosis worsened, forced to leave the band, spending the remainder
of his brief life in a hospital, where he died on March 2, 1942And we know the records, and hear echoes of his inventions, riffs and
melodies all over the place. Yet we know precious little about the man
himself. Ralph Ellison, whose younger brother went to school with
Charlie, has given us some insight into the circumstances of his early
life, and musicians who knew him have given us glimpses of him, such as
tenor saxophonist Jerry Jerome. The words that crop up most frequently
are “sweet” and “shy.” “He had the most wonderful smile, something like Tiger Woods,”
the 86-year-old Jerome says. He helped Hammond place Charlie’s amplifier
on the bandstand in the French Garden Room of the swank Victor Hugo
restaurant in Beverly Hills on the night of Aug. 16, 1939, when the
guitarist played with Goodman for the first time. “Charlie and I were
both single, and both of us were crazy about Lester Young, so we started
to hang out and go jam, as on that night in Milwaukee, a few weeks
after Charlie joined, that happened to be recorded on acetates and, to
my great surprise, came out more than 20 years later. “Charlie would get every new Basie record with Lester, and he
knew all the solos by heart, could play them or sing them.” (According
to Ellison, Charlie first heard Young in Oklahoma City in 1929, and when
the young guitarist Mary Osborne heard Charlie for the first time in
Bismarck, N.D., from outside a club, she thought he was playing a tenor
sax.) “He was an absolute master of riffs, and he responded musically to
things around him. Once, when we were on a train and had been shunted
to a siding, some cars went by and made that grating noise that would
make most people flinch, but Charlie smiled, said “C sharp!” and
proceeded to make up a riff in that key. “He was a great third baseman; we played quite a bit of baseball
when we were on location, with the waiters and busboys, or with other
bands. Charlie had a great move to first base. I think he could have
been a minor league prospect.” It is difficult for most people to imagine what it was like to be
in one of the top big bands at the height of the swing era. Charlie was
plucked from working in a club on Oklahoma City’s Second Street, where
he might have made five dollars on a good night, but three days after
he’d been signed by Goodman, he was presented by the leader to a live
audience at the Hollywood Bowl for a coast-to-coast network broadcast in
prime time as “one of the most terrific musicians to be introduced in
years,” featured with Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Artie
Bernstein and Goodman himself on “Flying Home,” a brand-new tune Charlie
certainly made a major contribution to composing. Then off by train to Wichita, Kan., where
he was greeted by friends thrilled to see him in his new role, then
Atlantic City’s famous Steel Pier, the Canadian National Exhibition in
Toronto, the Michigan State Fair in Detroit and a week at the World’s
Fair in New York City, with time out for a “Swing Session” at Manhattan
Center opposite the bands of Stuff Smith and Teddy Wilson, plus the
weekly Camel Caravan broadcasts. Then, on September 11, his first
commercial record date, with an all-star Hampton group including a reed
section of Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Chu Berry, a
young trumpeter named John Birks Gillespie, the great Clyde Hart on
piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Cozy Cole on drums. Was Charlie fazed?
“Nothing fazed him, musically,” Jerome recalls, pointing out that, aside
from his fantastic soloing, “Charlie was a hell of a rhythm
guitarist-boy, could he make you play.” On that date, he was a key
ingredient in what has been singled out as one of the greatest swing
rhythm sections captured on record, and also contributed a lovely
accompaniment to Hamp’s vocal on “One Sweet Letter From You,” his first
recorded solo, so to speak. On Oct. 2, the first Goodman Sextet date, he introduced his
unique blend of clarinet and electric guitar and vibes. Among the tunes,
“Rose Room,” which they had jammed on for nearly three-quarters of an
hour on that first night at the Victor Hugo, and “Flying Home,” which
would bring fame and fortune to Hamp. A couple of weeks later, Charlie’s
Carnegie Hall debut, with the Sextet at ASCAP’s 25th anniversary
concert. By then, the band was settled in for a two-month season at the
Waldorf Astoria. Charlie got to play with Louis Armstrong on the next
Camel Caravan and in November they were both involved in a promising but
short-lived Broadway venture: Swinging the Dream, a musical based on
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring Louis, Maxine
Sullivan, the Goodman Sextet, Bud Freeman’s Summa Cum Laude band, Zutty
Singleton, Jackie “Moms” Mabley and others-but it closed after just 13
performances. On Christmas Eve, John Hammond’s second “Spirituals to
Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall, where Charlie got to play with his
idol, Lester Young, as well as with the sextet and in a jam with the
Count Basie band and others, where his solo almost stole the show. Then a
record date with the Metronome All Stars (though on the scene for just a
few months, Charlie won both the Down Beat and Metronome polls), then a
Hollywood Bowl concert where Benny joined forces with Leopold Stokowski
and the L.A. Symphony for the first half, with the sextet featured on
the second, and then a record date with Fred Astaire… That’s what it was like to be in the big time, and Charlie
Christian fit right in, playing as relaxed and inspired as he had back
home, and maybe even more so, and inspiring those around him-especially
guitarists. As Tiny Grimes, among the first to fall under Charlie’s
spell, put it: “After I heard Charlie Christian, I had no use for anyone
else.” His was a new sound, a new conception, and one that immediately
struck a responsive chord in all who listened-it is worth noting that
acceptance of Charlie Christian was as good as universal, with musicians
and with the public. There was a chance to see friends and family back home when
Goodman’s persistent back problems became so unbearable that he had to
undergo surgery. He disbanded, but kept on salary a select few: Hampton,
trumpeters Ziggy Elman and lead man Jimmy Maxwell, bassist Artie
Bernstein, arranger Eddie Sauter, vocalist Helen Forrest-and Charlie.
The layoff lasted more than three months; when he got back into action,
Benny took an experimental group into the studio that included Charlie,
Lester Young, Count Basie and his famous rhythm section, and trumpeter
Buck Clayton. This was the prototype for the new Goodman Septet,
featuring Cootie Williams, acquired from the Ellington band, and
tenorman Georgie Auld, resulting in a new blend in which the Christian
guitar again functioned like a horn-and which, notably when Dave Tough
came in on drums, and Basie (as he often would) sat in on piano,
inspired Goodman to some of his greatest playing. Again, too, the
Christian gift for catchy riffs informed the repertory. Now, also,
Charlie more often played in the big band as well, though Benny
continued to carry a rhythm guitarist. Among the highlights of the winter season was the President’s
Birthday Ball in the nation’s capital, where Charlie got to shake hands
with FDR. The band now settled in for a long stay in the New York City
area (there was a new weekly radio show, for Old Gold), and Charlie
began to spend a lot of time after hours at Minton’s, the Harlem
musicians’ hangout where, legend has it, bebop was born, and also at
other Harlem clubs, including Monroe’s Uptown House, and thanks to Jerry
Newman’s portable disc recorder, we have some precious close-ups of
Charlie in an informal setting. (There’s also the studio jam captured by
Columbia engineers, which presently is available only on the French
Masters of Jazz Christian CD series.) Charlie was still with the Goodman crew when the great Sid
Catlett and young Mel Powell came on board, but this potential dream
combination lasted no more than weeks. Charlie’s health, always
precarious, now made it impossible for him to remain on the road. Though
he was hopeful that his condition would improve, that was not in the
cards, and he would not live to see his 26th birthday. But his message lives on; like Lester Young, he sounds as fresh
as ever. As one of his countless disciples, fellow Texan Herb Ellis, put
it: “If Charlie were alive today, we’d still be taking lessons from
him.”
Charlie Christian took electric guitar out of the rhythm section and into the spotlight. Christian’s single-string solo technique proved that guitar could be a
lead instrument and shaped a generation of bebop guitarists.
Biography
Charlie Christian elevated the guitar as a lead instrument on par with the saxophone and trumpet in jazz and popular music. His single-string technique established a solo style that was carried
on by such contemporaries as T-Bone Walker and emulated by later
disciples like B. B. King and Chuck Berry. Born in Bonham, Texas on July 29, 1916 and raised in Oklahoma City,
Christian was influenced by country music and jazz, an odd hybrid of
influences that can be heard in his recorded works, such as “Seven Come
Eleven,” with the Benny Goodman Sextet. Unfortunately, his recording
career lasted less than two years, as he was cut down in his prime by
tuberculosis on March 2, 1942 in New York. Though his life was short, his hornlike, single-note style, which
capitalized on innovations in amplification technology, revolutionized
and redefined the role of the electric guitar in popular music. The
reverberations from Christian’s pioneering efforts have echoed down the
decades, through Western swing, rockabilly and rock and roll to the
present day. Inductee: Charlie Christian (born July 29, 1916, died March 2, 1942)
Born in 1916, Christian died when he was just 25 years old.
Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead calls him "the single greatest influence on a
signature 20th-century instrument."
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. This Friday marks the centennial of the birth
of electric guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the most
influential musicians of the last century. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead
has this appreciation. (SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE CHRISTIAN SONG)
KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Charlie Christian was the
single-greatest influence on the signature 20th century instrument, the
electric guitar, even though he died at age 25 and did all his recording
in under two years. He made most of his records in Benny Goodman's
sextet, where he competed for space with other good soloists. In that
band, he took beautifully crafted 30-second improvisations, serving up
fresh variations on every take of a tune. (SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE CHRISTIAN SONG)
WHITEHEAD: Charlie Christian had started on ukulele as a little
kid in Oklahoma City and crossed paths early with Lester Young. That
saxophonist profoundly influenced the guitarist's slingshot rhythms -
the way he'd lag behind the beat and then spring ahead. Amplified slide
guitarists in white western swing bands showed Christian how electric
guitar could project. He wasn't the first electric picker who played on
the frets. He dug Chicago pioneer George Barnes. But Christian had the
most imposing sound. (SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE CHRISTIAN SONG)
WHITEHEAD: Charlie Christian's timing was impeccable. His heavy,
front-loaded attack underlined his aggressive beat and inspired untold
jazz, blues, and rock-guitar players. Benny Goodman loved him but begged
him to turn his amplifier down. Christian once explained, I like to
hear myself. Like other great lead players, He was an adept rhythm
guitarist - strumming like mad, riffing with precision or cutting
against the grain. (SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE CHRISTIAN SONG)
WHITEHEAD: Christian recorded with a few leaders besides Goodman,
like vibist Lionel Hampton and blues singer Ida Cox. But he was
curiously underexploited on those dates, mostly playing acoustic guitar
in the background - his acoustic had bite, too. He even played a little
guitar boogie woogie behind clarinetist Edmond Hall. (SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE CHRISTIAN SONG)
WHITEHEAD: The best Charlie Christian on record comes from jam
sessions in Harlem in 1941. There, he and other young modernists, like
Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke, laid the groundwork for the new music
that Christian started calling bebop. His amped-up rhythms and offbeat
accents fit right in. Sitting in Uptown is where Christian really got to
stretch out. You can hear a lot of guitar's future coming, Chuck Berry
included. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STOMPIN AT THE SAVOY")
WHITEHEAD: Charlie Christian on Stompin' at the Savoy, May 1941.
The following month he was hospitalized, suffering from tuberculosis. He
died in hospital the following spring before he could hear the new
music of bebop come to fruition and long before electric guitar
conquered popular music and the full impact of his playing could be
felt. Charlie Christian has left his mark on many thousands of musicians
who never knew his name. That's about as influential as you can get. (SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE CHRISTIAN SONG)
GROSS: Kevin Whitehead writes for Point of Departure and
TONEAudio and is the author of "Why Jazz?" Friday marks the centennial
of Charlie Christian's birth. After we take a short break, John Powers
will review a dystopian novel he says captures the dark side of
contemporary life. This is FRESH AIR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc.,
an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription
process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and
may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may
vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Christian laid the foundation for the guitar as a modern-jazz
instrument, creating single-note lines and solos that swung with
imagination and vitality.
In 1939 a young musician named Charlie Christian seemingly came
from out of nowhere to become a pioneer of the electric guitar in jazz
and help pave the way for the rise of bebop, though he himself would not
live to see it. On this edition of Night Lights we’ll hear his
swinging, scintillating solos with Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk,
Lester Young, and other significant artists of his time. In 1939, the age when swing was king, the guitar was not the
thing. The acoustic instrument was in danger of becoming lost in the
world of large-ensemble jazz. The advent of Charlie Christian and his
electric guitar changed all that, creating a path to follow for Wes
Montgomery, Grant Green, Tal Farlow, George Benson, Barney Kessel, and
many others. While Christian was not the first guitar soloist in jazz,
with just a handful of musicians preceding him–Eddie Lang, Lonnie
Johnson, and Django Reinhardt–and not the first to play electric guitar,
either—in less than two years this thin, quiet, bespectacled young man
made a series of recordings that put him in the echelon of jazz greats
such as Lester Young and Charlie Parker, influencing guitarists to this
day, and not just in jazz, either; in 1990 Christian was inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an acknowledgement of his far-reaching
impact.
“Long, Flowing Bursts Of Lyrical Melody”
Charlie Christian was born in Bonham, Texas on July 29, 1916 and grew
up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He and his brothers were taught to play
music by their father, who became blind and relied on his sons to guide
him to places where he could play for money on the street. Ralph
Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man is considered to be a
landmark of 20th century literature, knew Christian growing up and wrote
an eloquent remembrance in 1958, evoking the guitarist’s origins:
He flowered from a background with roots not only in a
tradition of music, but in a deep division in the Negro community as
well. He spent much of his life in a slum in which all the forms of
disintegration attending the urbanization of rural Negroes ran riot.
Although he himself was from a respectable family, the wooden tenement
in which he grew up was full of poverty, crime, and sickness. It was
also alive and exciting, and I enjoyed visiting there, for the people
both lived and sang the blues. Nonetheless, it was doubtlessly here that
he developed the tuberculosis from which he died.
Christian’s father died when Charlie was 12, and he spent much of the
1930s playing with territory bands. He began to play an electrified
guitar in the late 1930s, and his amplified approach won him a
passionate following among area musicians. “The typical Christian solo,”
jazz critic Martin Williams wrote, “is organized in contrasts of brief,
tight, riff figures and long, flowing bursts of lyrical melody; and in
his best improvisations these elements not only contrast effectively but
also, paradoxically, lead to another.” Christian’s big break came when jazz impresario John Hammond, hipped
to the guitarist’s talent by pianist Mary Lou Williams, persuaded Benny
Goodman, the so-called “King of Swing,” to give Christian a chance at
playing with his small group and big band. Christian was reluctant to
leave Oklahoma City, and Goodman was reportedly lukewarm about bringing
Christian aboard until a Hammond-arranged appearance on the bandstand
led to a legendary, possibly apocryphal 45-minute rendition of “Rose
Room.” There’s no doubt that Goodman was impressed, and soon Christian
was both performing and recording with Goodman, often in the context of
the small group, and often on tunes that incorporated riffs that
Christian had brought with him from Oklahoma City. We’ll hear one such
tune now, the first studio recording that Charlie Christian made with
Benny Goodman:
Christian’s swinging, innovative and amplified sound immediately
galvanized both listeners and other musicians, and in January 1940,
after being on the national scene for just several months, he won
DownBeat Magazine’s reader poll for best guitarist. He participated in
the second “From Spirituals To Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall, and was a
frequent presence at jam sessions. The bulk of his recorded legacy
comes from his small-group appearances with Benny Goodman, a dynamic
where his lopes and bursts of melody had the best opportunity to shine.
Christian’s playing, writes jazz scholar Loren Schoenberg, “was all
about the line and about how rhythm could extend the line and give it
all sorts of new and unexpected shapes.”
Almost all of Christian’s notable solos with Goodman came in small-group
settings, but he was featured from time to time on the full-orchestra
recordings that he made with the clarinetist. We’ll hear one of the
recordings that’s come to be associated strongly with Christian, called
“Solo Flight,” after this Fletcher Henderson arrangement of “Honeysuckle
Rose”:
Christian found some of his musical inspiration in Lester Young, another
innovator whose sound left a significant stamp on many who followed.
Christian was a teenager when he first heard Young, and there are
accounts of him memorizing Young’s solos and singing them to himself.
Young, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says, “profoundly influenced the
guitarist’s slingshot rhythms – the way he’d lag behind the beat and
then spring ahead.” Christian performed and recorded with Young on just a
couple of occasions, including a 1940 studio date that brought the
guitarist and Benny Goodman together with members of Count Basie’s
orchestra. Curiously, this session was not released at the time,
possibly because of internal jazz-world machinations involving Basie and
Goodman; the music itself is stellar. On the first selection Goodman
sits out while the others play a dreamy blues; then, at the beginning of
“Wholly Cats,” listen for Goodman exhorting “C’mon, Charlie” right
before Christian’s solo.
Record buyers got a rare chance to hear Christian on acoustic guitar
after he participated in a February 1941 quartet date for the
then-fairly new Blue Note label led by clarinetist Edmond Hall, with
Israel Crosby on bass and Meade Lux Lewis playing celeste. Of this
recording Martin Williams wrote,
“Profoundly Blue” opens with three superb Christian
choruses, with Crosby in a true countermelody behind him, and with a few
gently rendered comments from Lewis as well. It is a performance of
such exceptional musical and emotional quality as to produce a sense of
sustained wonder, both the first time one hears it and the hundredth.
Only a couple of months after that session, Christian was captured on a
disc-cutting recording machine at Minton’s, a club in Harlem that has
passed into jazz legend as a place where young musicians such as
Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie gathered to jam. It is often cited
as the place where bebop was born. And while the story of bebop’s
origins is considerably more complex, the creative opportunities and
artistically challenging environment that Minton’s offered played an
important role in the evolution of a new sound for jazz. Charlie
Christian, who would spend much of the last year of his life battling
tuberculosis, would not live to see or hear the full flowering of bebop
in the mid-to-late 1940s, but the recordings made at Minton’s give us a
chance to hear how far ahead of his time he already was. As jazz critic
Kevin Whitehead observes, “His amped-up rhythms and offbeat accents fit
right in” with the sound of the future. We’ll hear him here on a version
of the tune “Topsy,” later retitled “Swing To Bop,” on Night Lights:
Charlie Christian and “Swing To Bop,” actually a variation on the
tune “Topsy,” recorded at Minton’s in Harlem in May of 1941, with
Thelonious Monk thought to be the pianist, although some scholars
disagree and suggest that it’s Kenneth Kersey. The May 1941 Minton’s jam sessions are close to the last times that
Charlie Christian’s guitar playing was ever recorded; shortly
afterwards, with his health worsening as a result of tuberculosis, and
possibly aggravated by the hectic, late-night lifestyle of the jazz
world, he was admitted to Seaview Hospital on Staten Island. Over the
next few months he was frequently visited by friends, and by one account
he and another hospitalized musician organized jam sessions to
entertain patients who were too sick to leave their beds. Reports in the
music press of his condition gave a mixed view as to whether he was
recovering or getting worse, but on March 2, 1942, Charlie Christian
passed away at the age of 25. “Charlie Christian Dies In New York,” a
headline announced in the March 15, 1942 issue of DownBeat Magazine. The
article also indicated that trumpeter Cootie Williams had been planning
on adding Christian to his new band. Another great innovator on his
instrument, bassist Jimmy Blanton, would die of tuberculosis just a few
months later at the age of 23. America and the world had plunged into
war, the big-band era had less time left than its leaders could have
imagined, and in just 15 years the electric guitar would become the
primary instrument of popular music. Charlie Christian wouldn’t be
around to hear it, but the music that he played in the short span of
less than 24 months, between the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1941,
continues to reverberate down through the ages to today:
“Charlie Christian, like all other guitar players. There was no way out. That cat tore everybody’s head up …” Wes Montgomery explaining what started his interest in guitars. Three years. In three short years, this amiable, smiling quiet man
quite literally changed jazz guitar and the way it was played for
decades to come. Despite having a short lived career, what Charlie
Christian accomplished in just three years in the spot-light remains a
jaw dropping example of prime jazz guitar. Now for most of us
rock fans, jazz is a four-letter word. It conjures up images of our
parents sipping Cosmopolitans’ at the club after a round of golf while a
quiet, unassuming band plays ‘mellow’ tunes at a volume that allows for
conversations about investment tips and portfolio management. Or
perhaps, if you’re of a certain age, smoke filled clubs with beret
wearing ‘beats’, all dressed in black while some erstwhile maniac
screams performance poetry in front of an angular man playing low on a
saxophone and another tapping out a primitive rhythm on a bongo. But
jazz is an incredibly complex form of music (some contend that it is far
more complicated to play than many classical pieces) with a deep and
varied history. But despite where you sit at the table of this
particular discussion, the one thing is for certain; jazz is American;
purely and uniquely American. Charlie Christian sprung from the
heart of America in a place where one would not have thought of as
having jazz roots, Oklahoma. Although born in Bonham, Texas (outside of
Dallas, Texas), his family relocated to Oklahoma City when he was five
years old. Charlie was the youngest of three children born to musician
parents (Clarence Senior played trumpet while their mother, Willie Mae,
played piano. To earn extra money they also composed and played musical
accompaniments to silent movies playing in local theatres) and shared a
musical talent with his older brothers Edward and Clarence. Clarence
Senior, although blinded by a high fever as a young man, used to take
his sons with him to busk on street corners. Clarence the younger played
mandolin and violin and Edward worked the upright bass. Charlie played a
rudimentary guitar most often times homemade out of cigar boxes and
broom handles. Clarence Senior passed away when Charlie was only 12
years old and Charlie inherited his fathers’ guitar. Charlie’s
skills became evident early on and as he became enamored with the music
of his day he began to absorb the influences around him at an
astonishing rate. Although he learned the rudiments from his father as
his interest grew he began taking guitar lessons from James Simpson, a
trumpet player in his big brothers band as we'll as from Ralph ‘Big Foot
Chuck’ Hamilton, a local guitar talent. There are stories that one of
Charlie’s friends while he was a young man was future blues guitar
legend T-Bone Walker who also studied guitar with Hamilton around the
same time. Writer and family friend Ralph Ellison (The
Invisible Man, Shadow and Act) noted that the range of Charlie’s
influences were deep, wide-ranging and varied. One of those influences
that seem to have turned up in Charlie’s work was saxophonist Lester
Young. Christian became infatuated with Young’s notorious long ranging
solo lines and worked them stylistically into his own work as a
guitarist. At this time the guitar had been relegated to
primarily a background rhythm instrument on the bandstand. Even though
there were several tremendous rhythm and lead players at the time
(including the legendary Django Reinhardt who is universally
acknowledged as one of the very few true masters of the guitar), the
instrument simply wasn’t loud enough to compete in a big band setting
and be a stand out instrument. Add to that the fact that compositions
simply weren’t being written for an instrument that could not really be
heard in a horn heavy band. Christians first professional gig
was when he in 1930 when he was 14 years old as he sat in with the Don
Redman Orchestra at Honey Murphy’s Club in Oklahoma City. He played his
solos on ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, ‘Tea For Two’ and Rose Room’ by holding
his acoustic guitar up to the microphone. Word of this astounding
performance spread so quickly that it actually reached his mother before
Charlie made it home from the gig. In the early thirties some
enterprising guitarists were experimenting with amplifying their
guitars, some mechanically (dobros, resonators) and others electrically.
One such inventive type was a jazz guitarist named Eddie Durham. In
1937 Durham and Christian met and Durham taught Charlie what he knew
about amplified guitars. Charlie took to it immediately. Christian, still based out of the mid-west, began to hook up with
various local touring bands alternating between playing guitar and bass.
After touring through Minnesota, Nebraska and Wyoming, Charlie found
himself back in Oklahoma in 1939. Local pianist and composer Mary Lou
Williams heard Charlie play (stunned as she watched and heard Charlie
play Django’s solo on ‘St. Louis Blues’ note for note) and was
completely blown away by his inventive horn-like approach to his single
string solos. She immediately contacted promoter and talent hunter John
Hammond Sr. Hammond, with his incredibly keen ear for talent (think
Dylan, Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and Stevie Ray Vaughn), stopped in
Oklahoma on his way to Los Angeles for a recording date with Benny
Goodman to hear Christian play. Hammond, much like Williams and everyone
else who had the chance to hear Charlie play, found him ‘unbelievable’
and convinced a notoriously recalcitrant and cranky Goodman to give
Charlie an audition. There are many stories about the initial
audition and what followed but according to Christian himself in a 1940
interview in Metronome Magazine, “I guess neither one of us liked what
played,” he said of he August 1939 audition. There are stories that
Christian showed up for the audition dressed ‘garishly’ (I have not been
able to find out what he was wearing but suffice it to say, it didn’t
sit well with Goodman who thought Charlie to be a ‘hick’ and a ‘rube’). Christian said that despite not doing well on the initial audition,
Goodman invited him to the show that evening at the Victor Hugo
Restaurant in Los Angeles. Hammond decided to sneak Christian onto the
bandstand unbeknownst to Goodman. The bandleader was not pleased at the
surprise and decided to call for ‘Rose Room’, a song he felt that
Charlie would not know. But Charlie had been playing the song for years
and when the band struck up, Charlie jumped right in at the chorus. The
band ran through twenty choruses and Christian played differing versions
each time and each one seemed even better than the one before. The song
went on for over forty minutes! By the end of the song, Christian was
in the band. By 1940 Charlie Christian was riding the top of
the polls as the king of jazz and swing guitar players as well as being
named to the Metronome All-Stars. Goodman, a famously mercurial
bandleader cut the majority of the band in a reorganization move but he
made sure to keep Charlie. Goodman’s next move was the formation of a
new sextet featuring Charlie, Count Basie and trumpeter Cootie Williams.
It was another stunning success as the sextet again topped the polls
and again Charlie was named to the Metronome All-Stars. Charlie had
become a bona fide star. But Charlie felt that he had energy to
burn that equaled his love for being on the bandstand. Famed jazz
bassist John ‘Milt’ Hinton had opened a club called, naturally,
Hinton’s, at the Hotel Cecil on 118th Street in Harlem. Charlie would
often times finish a full set or a day in the studio with Goodman’s
Sextet and then head up-town to play at Minton’s. Minton’s had become a
favored haunt of both local and visiting jazz men and Charlie quickly
became a fixture at the joint during the after hours jams that would
often times extend until 4 AM. It was at Minton’s that Charlie got to
play with some of the most impressive names in jazz- Dizzy Gillespie,
Kenny Clarke, Thelonius Monk and the young Charlie Parker. It was during
these late night jams where the formation for bebop began. It
got to the point where Christian was such a regular at Minton’s that the
manager Teddy Hill (also a world class jazz musician in his own right)
bought Christian an amp to leave at the club so he wouldn’t have to lug
his own up-town every night. But it was the hectic pace coupled
with his various addictions (marijuana, tobacco and alcohol) that seemed
to bring about the quick end to the lightning rod career of Charlie
Christian. In 1940, Charlie was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was
advised by his doctor to slow down his pace. But Christian ignored the
advice of his doctors and actually accelerated his pace both on and off
the bandstand. Christian was immensely popular and found himself
surrounded with admiring women and ‘friends’ and the party continued
long into the wee hours of the morning, every morning. By July
1941 he had been committed to the Seaview Sanitarium on Staten Island in
New York. Succumbing to the culmination of tuberculosis and exhaustion,
Charlie Christian developed pneumonia and died on March 2, 1942 at the
age of 25. But there are very few jazz and guitar fans who do
not acknowledge the absolute influence that Charlie Christian had on
jazz and, in essence, guitar music in general well beyond his life time.
In three very short years, the young man from Oklahoma set the jazz
world on fire, developed a unique technique for his solos and will be
remembered as a pioneering electric guitarist. Joe Pass said of
Christian “I first heard Charlie Christian in about 1942 - on record - I
never did hear him live. His sound was just great. How, with a little
amplifier without any gimmicks or anything, he gets that sound! Today we
have all this equipment; all special kinds of pickups and amplifiers
... and still can't get that sound! I think it has to do with the person
that's playing …” And if jazz is veritable musical feast, he was a true master chef. There is no doubt about it. Charlie Christian could cook.
“Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar” Columbia Legacy
****
Charlie Christian’s name is not likely to cause much of a stir among
young rock guitarists. But it should, since the pioneering, Texas-born
artist produced a body of work -- amazingly, in just two years -- that
is the foundation for the entire history of the electric guitar, in jazz
and beyond. The succeeding stages in the instrument’s development --
from Les Paul and Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, John
McLaughlin, Joe Pass, etc. -- seem almost inconceivable without
Christian’s establishment of the guitar’s enormous sonic potential
beyond its qualities as an acoustic instrument. A great deal --
but by no means all -- of Christian’s most impressive performances took
place during his association with Benny Goodman’s big bands and small
groups, from 1939 to 1941. The first comprehensive collection of his
Columbia recordings from that period with the Goodman sextet and
orchestra (with the addition of a Metronome All-Star effort) has been
gathered into a four-CD boxed set. The first date included is a
New York City studio session from Oct. 2, 1939. The interest in
Christian was high in the jazz world from the very moment he joined
Goodman. And, within a few short months after his first official
recording was issued, he won the Down Beat magazine poll as best
guitarist. What seems most astonishing about these early
recordings is the fully formed character of Christian’s playing. The
electric guitar had surfaced in jazz shortly before his arrival via
Eddie Durham and George Barnes. And steel guitar was present in country
music through players such as Floyd Smith and the crossover efforts of
Leon McAuliffe with the swing-styled Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. But Christian seems to have been the first to recognize the real
potential of what could be done with sustained string notes. Taking his
cue from jazz horn players -- in particular, tenor saxophonist Lester
Young -- he developed a free-flowing, briskly swinging style that, with
amplification, allowed his long, lean melody lines to integrate freely
into the horn-dominated jazz of the Swing Era. Most of the tracks
are dedicated to the familiar repertoire of the sextets, first with
vibist Lionel Hampton and Christian alongside Goodman in the front line,
later with Hampton replaced by tenor saxophonist Georgie Auld. And, in
one especially fascinating group of tunes from 1940, the sextet is
expanded and consists of Goodman, Christian, Young, trumpeter Buck
Clayton, pianist Count Basie, rhythm guitarist Freddie Green, bassist
Walter Page and drummer Jo Jones. The few brief moments in which
exchanges take place between Young and Christian have a time-warp
quality -- a momentary forecast of the sounds and styles that would flow
over the next decades from these two seminal figures. Equally
compelling are the two versions of Christian’s “hit” (it reached the pop
charts), “Solo Flight,” an envelope-stretching original featuring his
soaring guitar lines as the solo voice with the full Goodman orchestra.
And, finally, there is a loosely structured jam session from a studio
date in 1941. Here, in a freely spontaneous setting, Christian’s many
innovative qualities are on full display: his long, loping lines; his
crisp accompaniment chording, delivered on the offbeat in strikingly
contemporary fashion; his repetition of the same note on different
strings; his dramatic, often dissonant strumming. In effect, a virtual
catalog of guitar techniques that would be absorbed by many others. In
early 1941 Christian became one of the regulars who attended the jam
sessions at Minton’s in Harlem. Among the other participants in what
essentially served as the incubator for the birth of bebop were
Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Don Byas, Joe Guy, etc. Recordings made
by engineer Jerry Newman (not included in the Columbia Legacy box)
suggest that Christian was moving into a further stage of development --
one that surely would have placed him alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Bud
Powell and Charlie Parker as icons of the new jazz. But it wasn’t to be. In
July 1941, stricken with tuberculosis, he was placed in a Staten Island
hospital. The following January, while still hospitalized, he was named
best guitarist in the Down Beat poll for the third consecutive year.
Christian died on March 3, 1942. He was 25 years old.
Charles Henry Christian (July 29, 1916 – March 2, 1942) was an American swing and jazz guitarist.
Christian was an important early performer on the electric guitar and a key figure in the development of bebop and cool jazz. He gained national exposure as a member of the Benny Goodman
Sextet and Orchestra from August 1939 to June 1941. His single-string
technique, combined with amplification, helped bring the guitar out of
the rhythm section and into the forefront as a solo instrument. John Hammond[1] and George T. Simon[2] called Christian the best improvisational talent of the swing era. In the liner notes to the album Solo Flight: The Genius of Charlie Christian (Columbia, 1972), Gene Lees
wrote that "Many critics and musicians consider that Christian was one
of the founding fathers of bebop, or if not that, at least a precursor
to it."[3] Christian's influence reached beyond jazz and swing. In 1990, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the category Early Influence.
In 2006 Oklahoma City renamed a street in its Bricktown
entertainment district "Charlie Christian Avenue" (Christian was raised
in Oklahoma City and was one of many musicians who jammed along the
city's "Deep Deuce" section on N.E. Second Street).
Early life
Christian was born in Bonham, Texas. His family moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma,
when he was a small child. His parents were musicians. He had two
brothers, Edward, born in 1906, and Clarence, born in 1911. All three
sons were taught music by their father, Clarence Henry Christian.
Clarence Henry was struck blind by fever, and in order to support the
family he and the boys worked as buskers,
on what the Christians called "busts." He would have them lead him into
the better neighborhoods, where they would perform for cash or goods.
When Charles was old enough to go along, he first entertained by
dancing.[4] Later he learned to play the guitar, inheriting his father's instruments upon his death when Charles was 12.[5] He attended Douglass School in Oklahoma City, where he was further encouraged in music by an instructor, Zelia N. Breaux. Charles wanted to play tenor saxophone in the school band, but she insisted he try trumpet instead.[5] As he believed playing the trumpet would disfigure his lip, he quit to pursue his interest in baseball, at which he excelled.[6] In a 1978 interview with Charlie Christian biographer Craig
McKinney, Clarence Christian said that in the 1920s and '30s Edward
Christian led a band in Oklahoma City as a pianist and had a shaky
relationship with the trumpeter James Simpson. Around 1931, he took the
guitarist "Bigfoot" Ralph Hamilton and began secretly schooling the
younger Charles in jazz. They taught him to solo on three songs, "Rose Room", "Tea for Two", and "Sweet Georgia Brown". When the time was right they took him out to one of the many after-hours jam sessions along "Deep Deuce", Northeast Second Street, in Oklahoma City.[citation needed]
"Let Charles play one," they told Edward. "Ah, nobody wants to
hear them old blues," Edward replied. After some encouragement, he
allowed Charles to play. "What do you want to play?" he asked. All three
songs were big in the early 1930s, and Edward was surprised that
Charles knew them. After two encores, Charles had played all three, and
Deep Deuce was in an uproar. He coolly dismissed himself from the jam
session, and his mother had heard about it before he got home.[7]
Charles fathered a daughter, Billie Jean Christian (December 23,
1932 – July 19, 2004) by Margretta Lorraine Downey of Oklahoma City.[7]
Charles soon was performing locally and on the road throughout the Midwest, as far away as North Dakota and Minnesota.
By 1936 he was playing electric guitar and had become a regional
attraction. He jammed with many of the big-name performers traveling
through Oklahoma City, including Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. Mary Lou Williams, the pianist for Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy, told the record producer John Hammond about Christian.[8]
National fame
Benny Goodman playing the clarinet
In 1939, Christian auditioned for John Hammond, who recommended him to the bandleader Benny Goodman. Goodman was the fourth white bandleader to feature black musicians in his live band: the first was Jimmy Durante, for whom the clarinetist Achille Baquet played and recorded in Durante's Original New Orleans Jazz Band (1918–1920); the second was the violinist Arthur Hand, who led The California Ramblers, which, from 1922 to 1925, included the trumpeter Bill Moore, who was billed as the Hot Hawaiian; the third was Ben Bernie, whose band from 1925 to 1928 also featured Moore. Goodman became the fourth by bringing in Teddy Wilson on piano in 1935 and Lionel Hampton on vibraphone in 1936. Goodman hired Christian to play with the newly formed Goodman Sextet in September 1939.[9]
It has been claimed that Goodman was initially uninterested in
hiring Christian because the electric guitar was a relatively new
instrument. Goodman had been exposed to the instrument with Floyd Smith
and Leonard Ware, among others, none of whom had the ability of Christian. There is a report that Goodman unsuccessfully tried to buy out Floyd Smith's contract from Andy Kirk. However, Goodman was so impressed by Christian's playing that he hired him instead.[7]
Christian, circa 1919 FrankDriggs Collection
at the Oklahoma Historical Society]
There are several versions of the first meeting of Christian and
Goodman on August 16, 1939. The encounter that afternoon at the
recording studio had not gone well. Christian recalled in a 1940 article
in Metronome
magazine, "I guess neither one of us liked what I played," but Hammond
decided to try again—without consulting Goodman. (Christian says Goodman
invited him to the show that evening.)[10]
He installed Christian on the bandstand for that night's set at the Victor Hugo restaurant in Los Angeles.
Displeased at the surprise, Goodman called “Rose Room”, a tune he
assumed Christian would be unfamiliar with. Unknown to Goodman,
Christian had been reared on the tune, and he came in with his first
chorus of about twenty, all of them different, all unlike anything
Goodman had heard before. That version of "Rose Room" lasted forty
minutes. By its end, Christian was in the band. In the course of a few
days, Christian went from making $2.50 a night to $150 a week.[3] Christian was placed in Goodman's new sextet, which included Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Artie Bernstein and Nick Fatool. By February 1940 Christian dominated the jazz and swing guitar polls and was elected to the Metronome All Stars.
In the spring of 1940 Goodman let most of his entourage go in a
reorganization. He retained Christian, and in the fall of that year
Goodman led a sextet with Christian, Count Basie, longtime Duke Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams, former Artie Shaw tenor saxophonist Georgie Auld and later drummer Dave Tough. This all-star band dominated the jazz polls in 1941, including another election to the Metronome All Stars for Christian. Johnny Guarnieri, who replaced Henderson in the first sextet, filled the piano chair in Basie's absence.[citation needed]
The Gibson ES-150, the guitar model most associated with Christian
Christian's solos are frequently described as "horn-like", and in that sense he was more influenced by horn players such as Lester Young and Herschel Evans[12] than by early acoustic guitarists like Eddie Lang and the jazz- and bluesman Lonnie Johnson, although they both had contributed to the expansion of the guitar's role from the rhythm section to a solo instrument. Christian stated he wanted his guitar to sound like a tenor saxophone.[13] The French gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt had little influence on him, but Christian was obviously familiar with some of his recordings.[14] The guitarist Mary Osborne recalled hearing him play Django's solo on "St. Louis Blues" note for note, but then following it with his own ideas.[14]
Christian was an important contributor to the music that became known as bop, or bebop.
Some of the participants in those early after-hours affairs at Minton's
Playhouse, where bebop was born, credit Christian with the name bebop, citing his humming of phrases as the onomatopoetic origin of the term.[18]
Private recordings made in September 1939 in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
by Jerry Newhouse, a Goodman aficionado, capture the newly hired
Christian while on the road with Goodman and feature Goodman's tenor sax
player Jerry Jerome and then-local bassist Oscar Pettiford. Taking multiple solos, Christian shows much the same improvisational skills later captured on the Minton's and Monroe's recordings in 1941, suggesting that he had already matured as a musician.[3] The Minneapolis recordings include "Stardust", "Tea for Two", and "I've Got Rhythm", the latter a favorite of bop composers and jammers.[citation needed] Further examples of Christian's bebop playing can be heard in a series of recordings made at Minton's Playhouse, an after-hours club located in the Hotel Cecil, at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem, by Jerry Newman, a student at Columbia University, on a portable disk recorder in 1941, in which Christian was accompanied by Joe Guy on trumpet, Kenny Kersey on piano and Kenny Clarke on drums.[19]
Christian's use of tension and release, a technique employed by Lester Young, Count Basie[20] and later bop musicians, is also present on "Stompin' at the Savoy", included among the Newman recordings. The collection also includes recordings made in 1941 at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, another late-night jazz haunt in Harlem, with Oran "Hot Lips" Page. Other recordings include the tenor sax player Don Byas. The Minton's recordings were long rumored to feature "Dizzy" Gillespie and Thelonious Monk,
but that has since been proved untrue, although both were regulars at
the jam sessions, with Monk a regular in the Minton's house band.[19]
Charlie Christian Avenue, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Kenny Clarke claimed that "Epistrophy" and "Rhythm-a-Ning"
were compositions by Christian, which Christian played with Clarke and
Thelonious Monk at Minton's jam sessions. The "Rhythm-a-Ning" line is
heard on "Down on Teddy's Hill" and behind the introduction on "Guy's Got to Go" from the Newman recordings. It is also a line from Mary Lou Williams's "Walkin' and Swingin'".[citation needed]
Clarke said Christian first showed him the chords to "Epistrophy" on a ukulele.[21] These recordings have been packaged under a number of different titles, including After Hours and The Immortal Charlie Christian.
While the recording quality of many of these sessions is poor, they
show Christian stretching out much longer than he could on the Benny
Goodman sides. On the Minton's and Monroe's recordings, Christian can be
heard taking multiple choruses on a single tune, playing long stretches
of melodic ideas with ease.[22]
Christian was just as adept with understatement as well. His work
on the Goodman sextet sides "Soft Winds", "Till Tom Special", and "A
Smo-o-o-oth One" show his use of few well-placed melodic notes. His work
on the Sextet's recordings of the ballads "Stardust", "Memories of You", "Poor Butterfly", "I Surrender Dear" and "On the Alamo" and his work on "Profoundly Blue" with the Edmond Hall Celeste Quartet (1941) show hints of what was later called cool jazz.[20][23] Although credited for very few, Christian composed many of the original tunes recorded by the Benny Goodman Sextet.[24]
Health and death
In the late 1930s Christian contracted tuberculosis,[25]
and in early 1940 he was hospitalized for a short period in which the
Goodman group was on hiatus because of Goodman's back trouble. Goodman
was hospitalized in the summer of 1940 after a brief stay at Santa Catalina Island, California, where the band stayed when they were on the West Coast.[21]
Proposed grave site for Christian at Gates Hill Cemetery, Bonham, Texas
Christian returned home to Oklahoma City
in late July 1940 and returned to New York City in September 1940. In
early 1941, Christian resumed his hectic lifestyle, heading to Harlem
for late-night jam sessions after finishing gigs with the Goodman
Sextet and Orchestra in New York City. In June 1941 he was admitted to
Seaview, a sanitarium on Staten Island in New York City. He was reported to be making progress, and Down Beat magazine reported in February 1942 that he and Cootie Williams were starting a band.[26]
After a visit to the hospital that same month by the tap dancer
and drummer Marion Joseph "Taps" Miller, Christian declined in health.
He died March 2, 1942, at the age of 25. He was buried in an unmarked
grave in Bonham, Texas.
A Texas State Historical Commission Marker and headstone were placed in
Gates Hill Cemetery in 1994. The location of the historical marker and
headstone was disputed, and in March 2013, Fannin County, Texas, recognized that the marker was in the wrong spot and that Christian is buried under the concrete slab.[27]
Gibson ES-150 guitar (sunburst finish, with dot inlays on the fingerboard), and EH-150 amplifier, 1937 or 1939 - April 1940[29]
Gibson ES-250 guitar (custom built by Gibson with a natural finish, a Super 400 tailpiece, and bowtie inlays on the fingerboard), April 1940 - February 1941. This instrument was re-discovered in 2002.[30]
Gibson ES-250 guitar (custom built by Gibson with a natural finish, an L-7 style neck, and custom inlays on the fingerboard), February 1941 - March 1942
The bar-style pickup used on the ES-150 and ES-250 became known as the “Charlie Christian pickup”.
Discography
Christian
never recorded as a leader. Compilations have been released of his
sessions as a sideman in which he is a featured soloist, of practice and
warm-up recordings for these sessions, and some lower-quality
recordings of Christian's own groups performing in nightclubs, by
amateur technicians.[3]
Savage, William W., Jr. (1983). Singing Cowboys and All That Jazz: A Short History of Popular Music in Oklahoma. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, pp. 48–51. ISBN0-8061-1648-X.
Spring, Howard (1980). The Improvisational Style of Charlie Christian. York University.
Benny Goodman: The Complete 1982 Interview About Charlie Christian
Charlie
Christian expanded the boundaries of jazz and left us an unsurpassed
collection of early electric guitar recordings. A brilliant soloist,
Charlie departed Oklahoma City in August 1939 to try out for Benny
Goodman’s band. Playing the electric guitar, then a fairly new
instrument, Christian quickly proved that he had the tone, imagination,
and finesse to create long, flowing melodic lines that were equal to
those of Goodman’s horn players, who were among the best in the country.
Within weeks, the 23-year-old guitarist had
recorded “Flying Home,” “Stardust,” “Rose Room,” “Seven Come Eleven,”
and other classics with the Benny Goodman Sextet. He performed at that
year’s Spirituals to Swing Concert at Carnegie Hall as part of the Benny
Goodman Sextet and alongside Lester Young and Buck Clayton in the
Kansas City Six. Christian’s impact was immediate: By year’s end, he had won the first
of three consecutive Best Guitarist awards from Downbeat magazine.
Players across the country sought out his recordings and broadcasts with
the Sextet and longed for a guitar like his Gibson ES-150. As Barney
Kessel, one of Christian’s earliest and most successful disciples,
wrote, “The music Charlie made changed the world. There have been very
few people on any instrument since Charlie that have had his sense of
time, his spacing of notes. He was years ahead of most of his
contemporaries in terms of the lines he was playing, which involved
certain chord changes that were non-existent until then. Charlie’s tone
was the concept for what is being used today in jazz.” During
1940 and early ’41, Christian continued to record influential songs
such as “Till Tom Special,” “Gone With ‘What’ Wind,” “Wholly Cats,” “Air
Mail Special,” “Breakfast Feud,” and his specialty number with the full
Benny Goodman Orchestra, the magnificent “Solo Flight.” Another
masterwork was his improvised “Blues in B,” with its five-chorus solo.
After hours, Charlie often headed to Harlem to jam at Minton’s
Playhouse, where Thelonius Monk and Kenny Clarke served as the house
band and Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and
Coleman Hawkins were regulars. It was here, witnesses insist, that the
foundations of bebop were created. In May 1941, a young jazz enthusiast
recorded Christian at Minton’s playing “Swing to Bop,” “Stompin’ at the
Savoy,” and other compositions. Two months later, the hard-partying
guitarist, who’d been diagnosed in 1940 with tuberculosis, was admitted
to Seaview Sanitarium on Staten Island, where he passed away on March 2,
1942. As a special tribute, I wrote the March 1982 Guitar Player magazine
cover story on Charlie Christian. Barney Kessel, a columnist for the
magazine, wrote a sidebar about Charlie’s style. The article didn’t seem
complete, though, without input from those who actually knew Christian.
On a whim, I called an operator in Manhattan on November 20, 1981, and
asked if she had any listings for Benjamin Goodman. She told me she had
five “B. Goodman” listings, and I asked for those. On my second attempt,
an elderly gentleman answered the phone.
*** I’m looking for Mr. Goodman, the bandleader. This is Mr. Goodman, yes. I’m writing an article on the 40th anniversary of Charlie Christian’s death . . . Has it been that long, has it? It will be 40 years in March. Really? Could I ask you a few questions about him? Why not? Go ahead. When you first heard of Charlie Christian, did you think an electric guitar could fit into your music? [Long pause.] Well, I always played with guitar players before that –
is that what you mean? With Dick McDonough and Carl Kress, so I don’t
think that part of it was terribly unusual, except he was such an
unusual player! And of course, it was electric, yes. What distinguished Charlie’s style? Well, he was unique! A brilliant musician. Inventive. Well, there’s
nothing you could say about him more than that, you know. He was way
ahead of his time, and a joy to listen to. What were your first impressions when you met him? Well, he wasn’t the most imposing figure in the world – is that what
you mean? He was retired and reserved and thin. Of course, he might have
been – well, I don’t know. Well, anyway, he was rather shy. He enjoyed a
good laugh. But by gosh, when he sat down and played the guitar, he was
something! Did you ever have a chance to talk to Mary Lou Williams
about him? No, I didn’t. Oh, you didn’t. She knew him a long time ago, didn’t she? Do you remember her knowing him? Yes, she’s the one who told John Hammond to go see him. Oh, I see. I see. There’s a story that you were playing at a club, and John Hammond put Charlie on the bandstand without your knowledge. I don’t remember that [laughs]. In any event, it’s a nice story. I think that was in Beverly Hills, wasn’t it? Right. Do you know the name of the club? No. I think it was Beverly Hills. Hammond reported that you did a jam on “Rose Room” that went on for about 40 minutes. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember how long it went. Were you pretty sure you wanted Charlie in the band after that first time you played with him? Oh, yeah. No doubt about that. Did he fit in with the other guys right away? You mean the rhythm section? Yes, of course. Everybody was delighted with him. Was he easy to work with? Oh, yes. Would you say he was a schooled musician? Well, I really don’t know about that, but it didn’t make any
difference at all, did it? You mean did he read music? I don’t really
remember that at all. Did his playing change much while he was in your band? I don’t think so. It didn’t have to, did it? [Laughs.] And after all,
he was only with me a short time. He got ill pretty soon after that. I
forget – what date was it he joined me? I think he joined you in late ’39, and he died in ’42. Yeah, so it wasn’t very long, you know. He played with me at the
Paramount Theater and made quite a few records with me. I don’t think
there was really much time for anything to change. Of course, he made
all of the other records that were recorded up at Minton’s, didn’t he?
He was an amazing player to listen to. Did he have immediate impact on other guitar players? Well, I think you’d have to ask guitar players about that! [Laughs.] What about the guys who came into your band after Charlie left? Did they adopt his style? [Long pause.] Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody ever sounded like him, really. How popular was Charlie in his lifetime? Well, he was very popular. With the public, you mean? Yes. He didn’t
have enough time to really establish himself, so to speak, but he was an
immediate success on concerts and records.
MAGIC CHRISTIAN: At the dawn of the electric guitar, the young and talented Charlie Christian broke into the national spotlight to popularize a new sound that shook the world.
by Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna Guitar Player This is an edited and condensed excerpt from Play It Loud
by Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna. Copyright 2016 by Brad Tolinski and
Alan di Perna. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House,
LLC. All rights reserved. Click here to order. One could argue that, as the world’s first electric guitar hero,
Charlie Christian forged the tragic archetype for the many six-string
revolutionaries that followed him, among them Jimi Hendrix, Randy
Rhoads, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Kurt Cobain. All were musicians who
radically changed the face of music but died too soon. Charles
Henry Christian was born on July 29, 1916, in Bonham, Texas, to a family
of musicians—including his parents and his two older brothers. His
father, Clarence, was particularly gifted. It was said Clarence could
play almost any instrument he set his hands on, but he favored strings
and his first love was the guitar. He encouraged his sons to play music,
teaching his older boys to play violin and mandolin. It was assumed
when Charlie was born that he’d complete the family band. Soon
after Charlie came into the world, Clarence contracted an illness that
made him gradually go blind. After dealing with the initial shock and
depression of his condition, Clarence rallied, turning to music for
therapy and a way to feed his family. There weren’t many formal jobs for
musicians, black or otherwise, to be had in Bonham, so Clarence grabbed
his sons, headed to the streets, and played in public places or
door-to-door for change. Unable to make ends meet, and with starvation a
very real threat, the Christians left Texas in 1918 for Oklahoma City,
where they found support in their extended family. When Clarence passed away in 1926 at the age of 36, he left his
guitars to Charlie, who started seriously devoting himself to music. By
the time he was 13, Christian was studying theory with local jazz
musicians and developing his signature sound: a sophisticated and
idiosyncratic approach to soloing that, with its single-note melodies,
owed more to local saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans than to
popular country blues guitarists of the time such as Lonnie Johnson or
Blind Lemon Jefferson. In many ways, the guitar was an unusual
instrument for serious musicians to gravitate to. Still largely an
acoustic instrument, it wasn’t loud enough to compete with horns. As a
rhythm instrument it usually was overshadowed by the piano. But as
Charlie discovered, it was perfect for street entertaining. It was
portable, you could play the chords to all the popular songs of the day
on it, and you could dance while performing. Despite realizing
the seeming limitations of the guitar, Christian was determined to
become a master like his father and elevate the instrument in the
process. The guitar was in the early stages of becoming a lead
instrument in popular music, and though there were no guidelines and few
six-string role models available, one thing Oklahoma City had no
shortage of was musical inspiration and innovation. In the
Thirties, despite the Depression and the unprecedented Dust Bowl drought
that sent thousands scurrying to other regions, Oklahoma City’s music
scene was thriving. The town played host to the Oklahoma City Blue
Devils, an extraordinary Southwestern jazz band featuring future jazz
giants such as Count Basie, drummer Jo Jones, and Charlie’s hero, Lester
Young. Equally important were Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, one of
the very first country bands to synthesize big-city swing jazz with folk
instruments like fiddles and steel guitars. PHOTO: Guitar Player Archive | Christian playing at a recording session with the Metronome All-Stars, New York, 1940
Off the streets, inventions like the radio and phonograph filled the
air with exciting new jazz, blues, and country sounds, and Charlie
soaked it all in. By the time he was 18, in 1934, his talent was
undeniable. He was performing in clubs and proper paying gigs, and the
elder jazz community recognized his talent. Over the next four years he
was allowed to sit in and learn from the best at clubs such as the Hole,
the Goody-Goody Cafe, the Ritz, and on local radio stations like WXFR
and KGFG. The young man enjoyed his life as a professional
musician, but what he most relished was being inducted into jazz’s
not-so-secret society: the exotic and intense world of the late-night
jam session. Any musician visiting the area—black or white—knew that the
only place to be after the clubs closed was Second Street, where
musical showdowns erupted like knife fights almost every night in
ballrooms, public halls, and even hotel rooms. The bandstand was all
well and good, but it was these nightly challenges of skill, technique,
and intellectual rigor that turned Charlie Christian into the phenomenon
he would become. In a cutting contest, he usually had the sharpest
knife, and he had no problem sticking it to any musician with any
instrument. It was one of these jams in 1939 that would cement
Christian’s local hero status and set his trajectory toward world fame
and fortune. Floyd Smith, who had a national reputation as a first-rate
guitarist due to his hit “Floyd’s Guitar Blues,” was playing a
one-nighter at the Oklahoma Ballroom when he was lured into a jam with
Christian. Thinking he was facing off with a hick from the sticks, he
burned through all of his best licks in his first couple of choruses,
hoping to crush the young upstart at the outset. Pianist Mary Lou Williams, an eyewitness to the event and the woman
who later championed Christian to John Hammond, remembered: “For a while
it was a close call, then Charlie decided to blow. He used his head on
cutting sessions, taking it easy while other musicians played everything
they knew, then cutting loose to blast them off the map. Never in my
life had I heard such inspired and exciting music as Christian beat out
of his guitar. Poor Floyd gave it up and walked off the stand. Charlie
played for us till daybreak.” While improvising guitarists were
still pretty rare in the Thirties, Christian wasn’t the only six-string
gunslinger to come from Oklahoma City. The town—almost
miraculously—would serve up two other giants who would eventually
pioneer and revolutionize the use of the electric guitar in two
completely different musical genres. Just as Charlie Christian would
electrify jazz, his childhood friend “T-Bone” Walker would find fame by
fusing blues and swing into his own highly polished sound (which would
go on to influence B.B. King and rockers like Chuck Berry and the Allman
Brothers). Eldon Shamblin, who starred in Bob Wills’s swing band, would
help introduce amplification to country music. Together, these three
men would put the electric guitar on the map. But before they could take
over the musical world, they needed an instrument that was a match for
their talents. Gibson’s ES-150 is regularly referred to as the
world’s first commercially successful Spanish-style electric guitar (the
ES stood for Electric Spanish; 150 reflected an instrument/amplifier
bundle priced at around $150). This archtop would become the archetype
for pretty much all jazz electrics to come. Prior to the ES-150,
Gibson had tried getting electric guitars onto the market as early as
1933. These initial attempts, however, were somewhat primitive, using
pickups that relied on capturing vibrations off the top of the guitar
rather than the strings. The introduction of George Beauchamp’s
revolutionary electro-magnetic pickup for the Rickenbacker Electro gave
guitar makers their most essential piece of inspiration. In the spring
of 1935, Gibson commissioned an amateur radio operator named Walter
Fuller to develop an electromagnetic pickup that would better
Beauchamp’s. Remarkably, within a matter of weeks, Fuller had managed to
create what is now commonly known as the “bar pickup” because of its
long, flat shape and bar magnet construction. Destined to be
known as the “Charlie Christian pickup,” this distinctive
hexagonal-shaped pickup was a definite improvement over Beauchamp’s
cumbersome pickup, which had a bulky “horseshoe” magnet that arched over
the strings and interfered with the picking hand. Instead, Fuller’s
pickup sat comfortably and discreetly beneath the strings. The outer
portion of the pickup consisted of a coil of copper wire wrapped around a
rectangular plastic spool known as a bobbin, both of which fit around a
slim, chrome-plated steel blade. Attached to this were two slender bar
magnets. Fuller designed the pickup so that the two magnets were located
beneath the top of the guitar, tucked inside the instrument’s hollow
body, like the bulk of an iceberg concealed under the surface. This
design placed the magnets out of sight and, more important, out of the
way of the player’s picking hand…
Charlie Christian, byname of Charles Christian, (born July 29, 1916, Bonham, Texas, U.S.—died March 2, 1942, New York, New York), American jazzguitarist,
who was one of the first to produce improvised masterpieces using
electrically amplified equipment. His recording career, tragically brief
though it was, helped raise the guitar from an accompanying to a dominant solo instrument. Reared in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Christian studied music with his father, a blind guitarist and trumpet
player. During the 1930s, Christian studied with guitarist Eddie
Durham, who had pioneered the electric guitar while a member of the Jimmie Lunceford
Orchestra and who inspired Christian to start using an amplified
instrument in 1937. He soon won a reputation as a guitarist of rare
talent and was heard by legendary jazz producer and talent scout John Hammond in 1939. Thinking that Christian would be an ideal addition to Benny Goodman’s
small jazz groups, Hammond arranged in that year for a meeting between
Christian and Goodman. Goodman, however, was reluctant to hire a young,
unknown musician playing an obscure electric instrument
and paid scant attention to Christian’s audition, not even allowing the
guitarist time to plug in his amplifier. The same night, Hammond
surreptitiously maneuvered Christian onstage during a Goodman
performance; angered, Goodman launched into “Rose Room,” a demanding
number he thought the young guitar player would either not know or have
trouble following. Christian was instead a sensation, breezing through a
difficult and lengthy solo. This overwhelming tour de force compelled
Goodman to hire Christian on the spot as a permanent member of his small
group. Before
Christian, the guitar had been considered primarily a rhythm instrument;
the sound of an acoustic guitar in a big-band setting was something
“felt” rather than heard. Although not the first electric guitarist,
Christian was the first to realize the instrument’s potential for
single-line solos, characterized by use of sustain and “bent” notes. The
strong influence of tenor saxophonist Lester Young
is also evident in Christian’s playing. Outstanding recordings made by
Christian with Goodman sextets and septets include “Air Mail Special,”
“Seven Come Eleven,” “AC-DC Current,” and “Shivers,” all of which were
cowritten by Christian. Christian was also one of the first musicians whose style heralded the bebop movement of the late 1940s. He often jammed at Minton’s Playhouse, a New York nightclub, with musicians such as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Clarke.
Recordings made of these informal sessions reveal a level of technique
and harmonic sophistication in Christian’s playing that would be
unsurpassed by guitarists for decades to come. Christian, who suffered from ill health throughout his life, was hospitalized with tuberculosis
in 1941 and died the following March. The roughly 100 individual
recordings that feature Christian are a testament to his genius and
lasting influence. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/arts/music-he-changed-the-way-jazz-guitar-is-played.html
See the article in its original context from October 20, 2002, Section 2, Page 30
CHARLIE
CHRISTIAN occupies several artistic planes. On one, he sits aside other
guitarists in jazz. On another, he shares room with a huge number of
jazz musicians who were never guitarists -- Count Basie, Thelonious
Monk, Lester Young, Charlie Parker and so forth -- but who derived a
great deal of their aesthetic from the melodic cut and rhythmic swing of
Christian's improvisations. And on a third, he belongs with the
filmmaker Jean Vigo, the poet John Keats and the rock musician Jimi
Hendrix -- artists of inestimable influence who died young.
Christian
died of tuberculosis at 25 in March 1942. Before his death, he made the
electric guitar transcend its role as an accompanying instrument. But
he wasn't the first guitarist to go electric or the first jazz guitarist
to record that way or even the first to record a solo that way. (The
western-swing guitarists Bob Dunn and Leon McAuliffe were both recording
improvisations in the mid-1930's, when Christian was still working in
his hometown, Oklahoma City.)
His
accomplishment can be fully appreciated on ''The Genius of the Electric
Guitar,'' a new four-disc set of all the Columbia recordings on which
Christian appears. It was to make the jazz guitar sound like what we now
know as a jazz guitar -- a front-line machine with its own full-fledged
identity, capable of delicate melody and blazing swing.
Christian
had a seriousness about music stamped into him by his first music
teacher, Zelia Breaux of Douglass High School in Oklahoma City -- a
woman written about in heroic terms by Ralph Ellison, who also studied
under her. In a segregated public school system in the 1930's, she
offered more than simple music appreciation to her students; they
received four years of training in harmony. As Ellison wrote in his 1958
essay ''The Charlie Christian Story,'' there were also a concert band
and orchestra, but Christian -- an exceptionally gifted teenager who was
making his own crude guitars in shop class -- shunned them, and the
''respectable'' blacks of Oklahoma City looked down on jazz and his
interest in it. Jazz may have been all around him, but adopting a jazz
life came with a cost.
His hero was the
tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who played all over the Southwest with
the Blue Devils band in the early 1930's. Christian sought some of
Young's bizarre command over tension and release, his penchant for
laying behind the rhythm and his cool tone that somehow translated into
good swinging.
''Genius,'' which
mostly covers Christian's time spent as a member of Benny Goodman's
bands, makes clear that he arrived as a fully formed artist. Unlike most
jazz musicians, for whom there is a warming-up period followed by a
supernova explosion, Christian apparently had his style under control
before he ever recorded. His was not the annunciatory warrior cry that
you get from so many of the greatest jazz improvisers -- Armstrong,
Parker, Coltrane. Christian's style was clean as a whistle, linear, with
many of his greatest solos essentially worked out ahead of time, to
which he could add endless variations. In the well-remastered material
on ''Genius,'' his tone is even and bright; he's not self-consciously
quiet, yet you must bring your focus to him.
Christian
rarely played chords through his solos. Among his single-note leads
were great intervallic leaps and passing tones; in the hustle and the
wide journeying of the notes, he was moving toward bebop ahead of time.
(Shortly before his death, Christian took part in the experimental
after-hours sessions at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where musicians
like Kenny Clarke and Dizzy Gillespie were creating bebop.)
There
are marvelous cropped lines, halts before finishing phrases, unexpected
accents. Thelonious Monk surely paid attention to the dramatic
jaggedness of those solos, taking that style with him throughout his
life. Yet in the context of the Goodman sessions, one's initial response
to hearing Christian is not shock; what one first hears is the
accessible logic of his playing. (A more aggressive side to his playing
is evident in the recordings made of his live jam sessions in Harlem in
1941, which have been sporadically issued on collector's labels.)
But
on the Goodman sessions, Christian's playing suggests a baroque sense
of flash tempered by order; he was much cooler here than either Monk or
the decidedly hot western-swing guitarists who rigorously emulated him
as soon as his playing hit shellac.
Many
of these sessions are quite modest: some pretty standards (''Memories
of You,'' ''Stardust,'' ''I Surrender, Dear'') and a number of short
riff tunes. Structurally, there's no particular manifesto going on. But
Christian didn't record a bad track. This music is nectar.
Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar
Columbia/Legacy.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section 2, Page 30 of the National edition with the headline: MUSIC; He Changed the Way Jazz Guitar Is Played. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
THE
MUSIC OF CHARLIE CHRISTIAN: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH CHARLIE CHRISTIAN:
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Charlie Christian 
Charles Henry Christian (July 29, 1916 – March 2, 1942) was an American swing and jazz guitarist. 
In 1939, Christian auditioned for John Hammond, who recommended him to the bandleader Benny Goodman. Goodman was the fourth white bandleader to feature black musicians in his live band: the first was Jimmy Durante, for whom the clarinetist Achille Baquet played and recorded in Durante's Original New Orleans Jazz Band (1918–1920); the second was the violinist Arthur Hand, who led The California Ramblers, which, from 1922 to 1925, included the trumpeter Bill Moore, who was billed as the Hot Hawaiian; the third was Ben Bernie, whose band from 1925 to 1928 also featured Moore. Goodman became the fourth by bringing in Teddy Wilson on piano in 1935 and Lionel Hampton on vibraphone in 1936. Goodman hired Christian to play with the newly formed Goodman Sextet in September 1939.[9]
There are several versions of the first meeting of Christian and
Goodman on August 16, 1939. The encounter that afternoon at the
recording studio had not gone well. Christian recalled in a 1940 article
in Metronome
magazine, "I guess neither one of us liked what I played," but Hammond
decided to try again—without consulting Goodman. (Christian says Goodman
invited him to the show that evening.)[10]
Kenny Clarke claimed that "Epistrophy" and "Rhythm-a-Ning"
were compositions by Christian, which Christian played with Clarke and
Thelonious Monk at Minton's jam sessions. The "Rhythm-a-Ning" line is
heard on "Down on Teddy's Hill" and behind the introduction on "Guy's Got to Go" from the Newman recordings. It is also a line from Mary Lou Williams's "Walkin' and Swingin'".[citation needed]
Some books now claim that Charlie was instrumental in pioneering bebop. 
