A treatise on jazz guitarists on Quora

[GuyBoden]

Years ago on the rec.music.makers.guitar.jazz newsgroup, Tony DeCaprio posted about a conversation he had with Dizzy Gillespie about Charlie Christian, in which Diz gave CC the credit for the foundation of bebop and that Charlie Parker was indeed greatly inspired by and wanted to play like CC. The amount of anger that aroused was something else, with some people practically screaming that Charlie Christian was not bebop, that he was just a swing player, that bebop was invented by Bird and how dare anyone say otherwise, etc. But, you know, Diz said it. And he oughta know.

Yes, I remember that too, the quote is still easy to find.
Who did Charlie Christian copy?
Here:












Listen below and make up your own mind:

[brent.h]

My theory is that bebop is three foundational things:

- Lester Young's asymmetrical phrasing
- Coleman Hawkin's arpeggiating
- Charlie Christian's changes-playing and chromaticism (he had Prez' asymmetry too)

A lot of bebop is speedy, but I don't think it's as important as the above 3 things.

[James W]

Oh, there are exceptions to that. Allan Holdsworth, for example, was to my ears as expressive as any saxophonist at single note soloing and very close to being as expressive as most pianos (although probably only one hand of the piano rather than two). Rosenwinkel, Kreisberg, Bernstein to name just three provide a depth of playing that I would rank as equal to any musician on any other instrument in jazz. And then there's Ben Monder who is in a musical universe of his own (as was Holdsworth).

That said, as I noted in a post above, due to differences in pedagogy, average musicians on instruments like piano and saxophone tend to be better than really good guitarists.

I spent the morning yesterday listening to Casals- few musicians were as expressive on any instrument. What an amazingly brilliant musician.

Obviously I agree about Holdsworth. I would also add John McLaughlin, who definitely holds his own on this album with people like Chick Corea and Kenny Garrett, check out how they all exchange solos towards the end of this magnificent track -

... and you could say the same thing about his sessions with Miles.

But I will say that for a guitarist to hold their own with piano or horns they have to be pretty exceptional - maybe? I think it might be the case that guitarists are catching up.

[Christian Miller]

Oh, there are exceptions to that. Allan Holdsworth, for example, was to my ears as expressive as any saxophonist at single note soloing and very close to being as expressive as most pianos (although probably only one hand of the piano rather than two). Rosenwinkel, Kreisberg, Bernstein to name just three provide a depth of playing that I would rank as equal to any musician on any other instrument in jazz. And then there's Ben Monder who is in a musical universe of his own (as was Holdsworth).

That said, as I noted in a post above, due to differences in pedagogy, average musicians on instruments like piano and saxophone tend to be better than really good guitarists.

I spent the morning yesterday listening to Casals- few musicians were as expressive on any instrument. What an amazingly brilliant musician.

Two words - Jimmy Raney.

Raney was cited as an influence by Allan, btw, specifically this solo, which is very horn like.

Also a great influence on another deeply hornlike jazz guitarist and another favourite of mine - Grant Green. Pete takes off from Grant Green and in the early days of his recording career the influence in more pointed.

I feel Kurt is also within the horn like tradition. I hear a lot of Jimmy in him, although I don’t think he’s ever mentioned him as an influence?


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[Christian Miller]

Re: Charlie christian I kind of think of him as his own thing. Like Monk. He’d have undoubtedly been considered part of the bop movement and his ghostly presence is felt in the early (late 40s) bop recording because many of them featured guitar, including Tiny Grimes and Barney Kessel who played in the Charlie Christian mould albeit in their own distinctive ways.

However second generation bebop kind of went through a bottleneck. Everyone learned Bird specifically, so his approach became the template. Interestingly the older guitar players had more of a shapes approach - I’m thinking of Herb Ellis, Oscar Moore etc. But pretty much all the 50s and 60s players went into the II V lines thing in a big way, which is not generally how Charlie Christian approached things harmonically.

You hear Barney becoming more boppy as he develops.

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[brent.h]

Re: Charlie christian I kind of think of him as his own thing. Like Monk. He’d have undoubtedly been considered part of the bop movement and his ghostly presence is felt in the early (late 40s) bop recording because many of them featured guitar, including Tiny Grimes and Barney Kessel who played in the Charlie Christian mould albeit in their own distinctive ways.

However second generation bebop kind of went through a bottleneck. Everyone learned Bird specifically, so his approach became the template. Interestingly the older guitar players had more of a shapes approach - I’m thinking of Herb Ellis, Oscar Moore etc. But pretty much all the 50s and 60s players went into the II V lines thing in a big way, which is not generally how Charlie Christian approached things harmonically.

You hear Barney becoming more boppy as he develops.

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yah... definitely hear a lot more triplet arpeggios later on, that's for sure.. that's the first thing i learnt about bop

[djg]

i like the observations connecting tunes like blue and boogie or diggin diz to CCs style. also check out CCs influence on early rock n roll and players like chuck berry. but i dont think bird would have sounded much different without CC.

maybe CC might have become the th monk of guitar, had he lived.

i think the hotbeds for bebop were the bigbands of the 40s like earl hines or billy eckstine. later dizzys band. imagine all those horn players like fats or dex feeding off each other. you dont have that with guitarists. later you had the du sable highschool and captain dyett. also most horn players play functional piano so there is a preference there as well.

side note: musicians who played a litttle guitar on the side were maybe more inclined to work with guitarists. elvin jones comes to mind. milt jackson played as well, quite close to wes' style actually. sam jones played cello, and i guess he could also play some guitar. wes played not only 6-string electric bass but double bass as well. no wonder they became friends.

[Christian Miller]

yah... definitely hear a lot more triplet arpeggios later on, that's for sure.. that's the first thing i learnt about bop

Also harmonically the suspension of the V chord as Barry would have called it.

The older players went direct to V, the boppers used II-7 and IV more to ornament the V.

That, and setting up chord II-7 with the VI7b9 are two big harmonic aspects of bebop as opposed to swing that derived from Bird’s improvisational approach.

So in prewar music you hear things like Honeysuckle played on C7 for four bars. It’s one way to get into the style more.

You could say II V is a bebop thing. Obviously you have some II Vs in music before that, but it’s not nearly so common.

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[GuyBoden]

CC sounds a lot like Western Swing Guitar, to my ears. I don't know the earliest Western Swing guitar recordings.

[Christian Miller]

CC sounds a lot like Western Swing Guitar, to my ears. I don't know the earliest Western Swing guitar recordings.

Western swing guitar sounds like CC


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[djg]

he plays upside down like uffe steen. amazing.

[brent.h]

CC sounds a lot like Western Swing Guitar, to my ears. I don't know the earliest Western Swing guitar recordings.

This is very likely correct. I read this many moons ago:

https://jazzhotbigstep.com/79001.html

As much as he was a Prez disciple/fan (picking up the asymmetrical phrasing) and a critical figure in the birth of bebop, an undeniably huge part of his vocab and melodicism is Western Swing and the blues. He grew up his type of stuff. Eventually, CC would leave some of that blues behind (microtonal bends and stuff) because he was trying to distance himself from that old 'minstrelsy' sound.

The thing that set him apart from his swing and Western swing peers were his changes-playing combined with his wild chromaticism and strange leaps in melody. This contributed to angularity of bebop.

Edit: After learning about this, I did try checking out Western Swing. It's pretty nice and familiar cos I was familiar with CC, but I dunno, when the other Western Swing guys did it, it just didn't feel urbane or as slick. Don't know how to describe it, and don't get me wrong these guys are plenty talented. I can listen to CC endlessly, but not pure Western Swing. Tried listening to a Jimmie Rivers album once. Quit halfway. *Shrugs*

[GuyBoden]

Western swing guitar sounds like CC

Maybe, but were others not playing with a similar feel/sound in the 1930's, even the same guitar.

Muryel Campbell (Zeke) listen to his 1930's Solo at 2:17min

[AllanAllen]

Edit: After learning about this, I did try checking out Western Swing. It's pretty nice and familiar cos I was familiar with CC, but I dunno, when the other Western Swing guys did it, it just didn't feel urbane or as slick. Don't know how to describe it, and don't get me wrong these guys are plenty talented. I can listen to CC endlessly, but not pure Western Swing. Tried listening to a Jimmie Rivers album once. Quit halfway. *Shrugs*

You want to check out Bob Wills “Best of the Tiffany Transcriptions” it’s longer takes for radio play, and since they aren’t trying for a hit, they stretch out.

They even do some jazz tunes.

[JazzPadd]

This is so interesting, and I hadn't realized it was about Charlie Christian from the title.

Coincidentally about a month ago I found an old USB drive that I haven't seen in years. It has a number of folders labelled Charlie Christian arranged into various volumes and each has about a dozen tunes in it, all small group recordings. They are MP3 and have signs of digital decay, glitches and such here and there. No idea where I got it, it must've been quite a while ago, but now I'm boppin' along the road to and from work listening to it.



I also dug out a book I got back in the 1980s, with about 20 transcriptions of his solos from various sources, and several pages of background, information, etc., including a brief bio, an explanation of playing off of chord shapes and playing through changes.



As this thread attests, there is a wealth of information online nowadays about CC, but that old book had some of things now being dissected and it was enough to get me into learning some of his lines when I first started on jazz guitar back in the 1980s. I recall a few chord shape based lines creeping into my playing back then, one in particular that I can still play after all these years is more or less an outline of a minor 6th chord shape. From the 1990s, I took a decades long hiatus from guitar and explored world music, but returned to jazz guitar about 10 years ago, which is probably when I got the MP3 files.

This discussion highlighted some very interesting ideas, of the "what if" kind. I always thought that it was the horn players who invented what came to be known as bebop, but to think that they may have been trying to emulate Charlie Christian is fascinating. I am not interested in the details of that debate, thank you, but the very notion made me think about something I realized about playing guitar when I took it up again in my mid-fifties.

The guitar is in a way a minimalist instrument, 3 octaves and only a few fingers to use. CC got it all started on an instrument with 14 frets, using a pick. It's truly incredible what others have done since then, lush chordal arrangements playing fingerstyle that remind me of a piano, and playing lines at breakneck speed reminiscent of horn players. But I realized right off that, as a casual lover of jazz who wanted to play a bit of this amazing music with others in a live setting, that my aged out-of-practice hands could never play in those maximalist ways as an amateur casual player, at least not in the short time I have.

So I latched onto more minimalist players like Jim Hall and Bill Frisell, who make the most of those guitaristic limitations, embracing rather than trying to transcend them, seeing the guitar for what it is, rather than a kind of defective piano or horn, allowing its limitations to breed their creativity. And now this discussion has brought all that back into focus for me.

I guess each of us have something that piques our interest in playing music, that ignites a kind of innate spark within us, and I have to say that listening to those old CC recordings still tweaks my heart strings more than most of what I've been listening to. To me, that's jazz. I'll continue to absorb myself in those CC sounds echoing from the past, and hope that I can at least on occasion eke out something that vaguely resembles his artistry.

One last thought. The above CC book references some of the recordings from which the transcriptions were made, and some of them are titled jam sessions. I'm not a historian, but I like to think that jazz as improvisational music was forged at least in part in those after hours informal jam sessions, where work-a-day musicians could stretch out far beyond the confines of the tunes they played for pay to entertain an audience in more formal settings. One can almost hear the liberated exuberance in CCs playing on those cuts. I don't know, but I like to think that playing in a casual, informal, spontaneous jam session remains an important feature of learning to play this wondrous music we all love.

[brent.h]

Maybe, but were others not playing with a similar feel/sound in the 1930's, even the same guitar.
Muryel Campbell (Zeke) listen to his 1930's Solo

You want to check out Bob Wills “Best of the Tiffany Transcriptions” it’s longer takes for radio play, and since they aren’t trying for a hit, they stretch out.

There it is. I wrote about this elsewhere before that many Western Swing guitarists have this incredible dance bounce to their playing. CC is no different. (I think it's the length of their notes that contribute to this bounce.)

But yeah, listening to these WS guys and then listening to CC... I can hear so clearly that the thing they don't have is that Prez asymmetry. Maybe that's the reason I can't listening to WS continuously? Guess I'm learning about what my ears like.

As this thread attests, there is a wealth of information online nowadays about CC..

Yeah, it's incredible. I picked up this music mostly by listening on YouTube and watching tutorials. Learning is very accessible now.

The guitar is in a way a minimalist instrument...

...seeing the guitar for what it is, rather than a kind of defective piano or horn, allowing its limitations to breed their creativity.

I also noticed that when guitarists find their style, they tend to sound so unique (which is the exact opposite of what Johnston writes about in his Quora post; he says finds the differences between pianists starker than differences between guitarists). I stopped having piano/sax envy too.

I have to say that listening to those old CC recordings still tweaks my heart strings more than most of what I've been listening to.

Same. I know this feeling.

[GuyBoden]

I also dug out a book I got back in the 1980s, with about 20 transcriptions of his solos from various sources, and several pages of background, information, etc., including a brief bio, an explanation of playing off of chord shapes and playing through changes.

A friend (a much better player than me) had the same book, probably in the 1990's, he had learned some of Charlie Christian's solo techniques and introduced me to Charlie Christian's music with the "Swing to Bop" cd.

All good stuff.

[JGinNJ]

One man's opinion, and I think his perspective overlooks a lot, maybe because he's an academic from the UK and wasn't on the scene.

I grew up just outside NYC, and in the 80's on, I was able to hear several of the guitar greats- Jim Hall/Red Mitchell at the Vanguard. Joe Pass solo. Tal Farlow (who was only mentioned in passing) in small groups in Trenton. Harry Leahy, who taught so many great players. Peter Bernstein was just starting out in the loft scene. The author dismisses Tristano, but there was a scene there, too, with guitarists like Peter Priscoe. Josh Breakstone played with Warne Marsh. Bucky Pizzarelli (not mentioned at all) was, indeed, a studio guy, but he played jazz gigs all the time. Then there was guitar night at Gulliver's.

I could go on, but my point is, there was a big jazz guitar scene here in NY/NJ that had nothing to do with fusion, rock, or George Benson & smooth jazz. If anything, guitar jazz existed as it's own entity, when in jazz overall the guitar is more of a supporting, rhythm section instrument (which is what made CC such a big deal).

[RLetson]

Because I'm just a tad obsessive--and have been guitar-obsessed for 60-some years--my guitar-music record collection is pretty comprehensive, and over the last 30 years I've particularly pursued the role of the guitar in swing and jazz. There are now quite a few anthologies that cover the period from the 1920s through the 1950s*, and what I hear in them is not so much a change in technical prowess as changes in the performing contexts. Forgive the teacherish tone of what follows--I come by it honestly and can't shake it even in retirement.

When the guitar replaced the banjo in the dance-band rhythm section, its role was supportive and the peak exemplar was eventually Freddie Green--famously noticed if he dropped out. But in the small-group environment even an unamplified guitar could make itself heard, and players such as Alan Reuss, George Van Eps, and Al Casey certainly had something to say. And Django, of course. Then there were the duo recordings of Lang-Venuti (and Lang-Johnson and Lang-Kress) and Kress-McDonough. It was the combination of amplification and small groups that gave the guitar an expanded role, and bebop was what was happening when the electric guitar finally got fully up and running. First Eddie Durham and George Barnes, then CC, then Oscar Moore and Les Paul in trio formats that straddle the birth-of-bop period. But it's hard to speak the language of bebop when you can't make yourself heard. Nevertheless, CD 4 of the Hittin' on All Six set has examples of guitarists--Barney Kessel, Arvin Garrison, Mary Osborne, Chuck Wayne--navigating bop pretty well in the mid-to-late 1940s, and all but two examples are of small units.

* My collection includes Hittin' on All Six, Fifty Years of Jazz Guitar, Pioneers of Jazz Guitar (Yazoo), Swing to Bop Guitar (Hep Records), and others. Similar surveys cover western swing, gypsy jazz, and the small-group format of jump blues that was evolving right next to bebop was pretty guitar-friendly as well, partly thanks to amplification.

[Cunamara]

But I will say that for a guitarist to hold their own with piano or horns they have to be pretty exceptional - maybe? I think it might be the case that guitarists are catching up.

I think that's still true. I think a lot of that is due to how pianists, orchestral string and horn players, etc., start with a standardized comprehensive pedagogy from the first day they pick up an instrument. They begin learning to read music practically from the first note. Virtually every great jazz instrumentalist on piano, saxophone, trumpet, etc., started out learning the classical methods- not only the music itself but also the physical approach to their instrument to be able to play at ease and efficiently.

Guitarists, on the other hand, tend to learn the basics maybe with guitar lessons but mostly on their own, maybe looking at books and misunderstanding what's in there because most of us can't read sheet music worth a damn. Guitar teachers tend not to have pedagogical training themselves, so they can't train their students in it. Many of us have terrible physical interaction with the instrument with ineffective posture, poor breathing, etc. At 66, I am just beginning to reckon with this due to the undeniable back and neck pain that developed over 45 years of bad habit.

Joe Pass, I have been noticing on videos, had a good physical interaction with the guitar. His early guitar education involved some standardized pedagogy (classical books like the Carcassi method, etc.). The freedom he had in his hands and arms when playing came from having a good relaxed stance with the guitar. And Joe may have been the most complete of us ever on the instrument from a technical perspective of playing jazz.

Jazz guitar pedagogy has developed a lot thanks to places like GIT and Berklee, among others. But we will never be able to exactly play like piano or horns; and horn players and pianists will never be able to exactly play like us. The instruments are just different. Jazz guitarists, throughout my studies of jazz, have suffered from this inferiority complex that we can't play chords like pianists and we can't play lines like saxophonists and therefore we are second tier jazz musicians. But when I talk to pianists about it, they are always interested by how a guitarist stacks notes in a chord compared to themselves and find that refreshing to hear. I've read online discussions by saxophonists looking to take guitar riffs and transpose them to the horn. Different doesn't have to mean inferior, but we have to learn how to be equals.

[Litterick]

This is tosh:

The sax players and trumpeters and pianists committed themselves to full-time jazz. The guitarists settled for studio work, and there was so much studio work available that they seldom felt the need to do anything else.

Many of the guitarists who played in studios also played gigs and made records. Many of the jazz musicians who played instruments other than the guitar also played in studios.

[AllanAllen]

This is tosh:

The sax players and trumpeters and pianists committed themselves to full-time jazz. The guitarists settled for studio work, and there was so much studio work available that they seldom felt the need to do anything else.

Many of the guitarists who played in studios also played gigs and made records. Many of the jazz musicians who played instruments other than the guitar also played in studios.

From what Jimmy Bruno has said, studio work wasn’t a walk in the park. It was playing written arrangements, sheet music, and if you mess up a piece twice you were fired and replaced.

[PMB]

This is tosh:

The sax players and trumpeters and pianists committed themselves to full-time jazz. The guitarists settled for studio work, and there was so much studio work available that they seldom felt the need to do anything else.

Many of the guitarists who played in studios also played gigs and made records. Many of the jazz musicians who played instruments other than the guitar also played in studios.

His timeline's out but I'd say that it's true for the '60s, particularly later in the decade. The number of straight ahead players recording consistently was pretty small. Miles asked Jim Hall to play on one of his albums around that period and Hall declined as he felt out of gigging and recording shape due to his involvement in so many TV sessions.

[Litterick]

His timeline's out but I'd say that it's true for the '60s, particularly later in the decade. The number of straight ahead players recording consistently was pretty small. Miles asked Jim Hall to play on one of his albums around that period and Hall declined as he felt out of gigging and recording shape due to his involvement in so many TV sessions.

Straight-ahead jazz was out of fashion. The record companies commissioned few albums.

[brent.h]

But when I talk to pianists about it, they are always interested by how a guitarist stacks notes in a chord compared to themselves and find that refreshing to hear.

That's nice to hear! Could it be that a lot of our chords are drop 2?

I vaguely remember reading on r/jazz or r/jazzguitar one player saying that it might help to think of the guitar as a more a percussive instrument instead of a smaller version of a piano or sax. It kinda makes sense to me. This is a poor example but we can play and repeat one exact same note in 16ths more easily than a piano/sax. Slightly unrelated, but when I watch banjo players take solos in trad groups, to my ears they sound pretty exciting when they do energetic strum-y chord solos with ghost notes or muted strings.