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Long but interesting.
Just a moment...
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12-11-2025 09:15 AM
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I read the first part and seems he’s starting on bad assumptions. Anyway, these days guitar is probably the most popular jazz instrument. In the early days, there just weren’t enough guitarists who could hang at the level of the top horns and pianists. Parker included guitar in most of his sessions, Miles wanted Jim Hall, Coltrane wanted Wes, so clearly they liked guitar and wanted it included.
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Johnston writes that he's played guitar for 40 years, so he presumably has experienced the technical challenges it presents. What I find more interesting is his remark that Jim Hall's significance is connected to his becoming more "adventurous and experimental" in the latter part of his career.
Another telling remark is that Charlie Christian "showed guitarists that they could, after all, be heard," which I take to mean that amplification allowed Christian to compete with the louder instruments and to take solos the same way that a horn could. It's also interesting that he mentions Goodman featuring Christian in the small-group environment. Which makes me wonder whether Johnston is really talking about soloing and improvising. (How many big-band bass players took solos? Does that diminish the importance of the bass in jazz? How many jazz units didn't have a bass player?)
My tiny, narrow experience sitting in with a jazz group reinforced what I had tacitly been aware of for a long time: that there is not much space in a bebop environment for a guitarist. In small-group music meant for dancing (even before amplification), the guitar has sonic space to operate and tempos that don't demand extreme technical agility. I also noticed that early bop tunes were often danceable if the tempo was brought down to swing speed. Which opened space for a guitarist. (Not me, but one who could navigate, say, dance-tempo rock.)
An anecdote: I sat in on a course designed to encourage music majors to get used to jazz, particularly to soloing off the page. The teacher was a reed player, and he pointed out to the sax guys that their instrument and training made it easy to just play a bunch of fast notes, but that interesting solos were not necessarily high-speed riffs. I'd also watched guitar teachers tackle the how-to-solo problem, and their take was a variation: it's hard to play a bunch of fast notes on the guitar, so start with one or two and do something interesting with them.
It did seem to take a while for even pro-level guitarists to get the technical and harmonic hang of bop, but by the early 1950s enough had managed that the guitar could be heard in small ensembles.
For me, the key to Johnston's essay is in the notion of the new--"cutting edge" appears at least three times. He writes, "To be a pioneer, you have to be hungry, and you have to be dissatisfied, and I think you also have to play the music full-time." Well, maybe. But that insistence on the centrality of The New is something I see all the time, and not just in music. I get it, but it's not the only part of the musical (or aesthetic) experience that has value.
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Asking why there weren't a bunch of great bebop guitar players is like asking why there weren't a bunch of great bebop trombone players: it's real hard to play that music on those instruments.
As a rule, guitarists are about 10 years behind sax and keyboard players. It takes a while to figure out how to translate the bleeding edge of jazz to the guitar.
There are exceptions. Charlie Christian was definitely the vanguard of jazz at the time. I think the trajectory of jazz guitar would have been very different if he hadn't died so young.
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The Quora answer is interesting and really helpful, though as you all are saying there are definitely some gaps. Seems to me that a major part left out of the original answer (but as a couple of you have suggested) is that it often seems like guitar and piano are competing for the same sonic role, especially in a small combo. Doesn't especially surprise me that the guitar often lost that battle, considering the piano's pretty obvious advantages in providing harmonic options. Piano-less combos like The Bridge seem so fresh because they're the exceptions that proved the rule.
What's interesting to me is how much this is changing in contemporary jazz. I was watching an interview with Lage Lund the other day where he talks about being in music school when Rosenwinkel's The Next Step came out. He said that it was the first guitar-led album that all his horn- and piano-playing friends felt like they needed to get in order to stay on the cutting edge of the music. Now you see an increasing number of groups where guitar is providing the harmonic extensions: Lage Lund himself in Melissa Aldana's quartet, Ben Monder and Chris Speed taking the place of the piano in The Bad Plus, Peter Bernstein on Dmitry Baevsky's last album, Max Light playing with Noah Preminger, to name just a few. Feels like, even if this argument is true of jazz's formative years, it's definitely not true today. (Not to say piano and guitar can't happily coexist: I've had Josh Rager's new album with Bernstein on repeat all day!)
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That paragraph struck me as being almost too guitar-centric.
Originally Posted by brent.h
Yes, the guitar is a physical instrument in ways that a saxophone or a trumpet are not. But all the "patterns" and "boxes" (mentioned in the post about Charlie Christian) allow guitarists to facilitate those physical challenges in ways that reed & horn players only wish they could.
Once a skilled guitarist is able to execute, for example, the melody to "Take The A Train" at >200bpm, s/he is also equally able to execute the melodic motifs of "Take The A Train" through any manner of chromatic variation with equal facility. Try that on saxophone. Or trumpet. Or trombone. Or clarinet.
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Sax is more popular than guitar because it sounds better, simple as that. Sounds like human voice where as guitar is thin and lumpy. Sad but true.
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Are we missing the point here? CC was so influential because he played guitar like a guitar and not a piano or trumpet. Maybe?
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Originally Posted by brent.h
So ignorant
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we love it Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Yes, especially for single note playing. Originally Posted by ragman1
On the plus side, a Sax can't comp.
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Was this the motivation for going for more distorted guitar tones and using guitar synthed horns (e.g Pat M.) ? Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Yes, especially for single note playing.
On the plus side, a Sax can't comp.
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Well, you know, the guitar wasn't a lead instrument for a long time. But now it's become one a good player of whatever style will combine single notes and chordal sounds. That's probably its limit. But whether it'll ever really convey the depth of the sax is doubtful. Strangely, the only other instruments that come close are both string instruments, the violin and cello. Depending on the kind of music, of course. Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Yes, especially for single note playing.
On the plus side, a Sax can't comp.
Screaming hysteria-inducing rock guitar is another thing, naturally :-)
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"Jim Hall, ...and Hall deserves to be included mostly on the strength of the music he made in the last 20–25 years of his life, when he became dramatically more adventurous and experimental, and was retrospectively recognised as a subtle genius."
The writer has no idea what he's talking about. Jim basically invented the concept of modern jazz guitar.
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I think instrument dynamics may have played a role. Jazz guitar just doesn't have the dynamic range to follow where most instruments in bebop go, horns, piano, drums. Also all the main instruments were acoustic, not electric, so the guitar is again kinda out of place stylistically since it needs an amp unless bands are playing really softly. And as soon as an instrument becomes electric it does become a bit less expressive. If you listen to most classic jazz guitar albums, the music, the interplay and the dynamics are often just a portion of the equivalent horn or piano album.
Also possible electricity and carrying amps? Easier to setup acoustically as they did in the beginning, and most places had drums and certainly pianos.
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You just don't recognize the subtle genius of using a chorus pedal sometimes. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Looks like AI crap. Originally Posted by medblues
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amen brother Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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here is an AI take on the topic. even gemini likes grant green... Originally Posted by charlieparker
Title: The Quiet Revolutionary: The Evolution and Struggle of the Guitar in the Jazz Hierarchy
In the popular imagination, the silhouette of a jazz musician is almost invariably a saxophonist leaning back in a smoky haze, or a trumpeter pointing their bell toward the ceiling. While the guitar is arguably the most popular instrument in the broader landscape of 20th-century music—dominating Rock, Blues, and Pop—it has historically occupied a more ambiguous, often secondary tier in the jazz hierarchy. This perceived lack of "importance" compared to the saxophone or trumpet is not a reflection of musical capability, but rather the result of acoustic limitations, the harmonic dominance of the piano, and the specific sonic requirements of the Bebop era. However, to say the guitar is unimportant is a misunderstanding; it is better described as a "late bloomer" that had to invent its own technology to compete.
The Physics of Volume: The Acoustic Barrier
The primary reason the guitar was not a lead instrument in early jazz is largely a matter of physics. In the New Orleans and Dixieland eras (1910s–1920s), jazz was a loud, boisterous music often played for dancers in large halls or outdoors. An acoustic guitar simply could not generate enough volume to be heard over a drum kit, a brass section, and a piano.[1] Consequently, the banjo—with its piercing, metallic transient—was the string instrument of choice.
When the guitar did enter the Big Band era of the 1930s, it was strictly relegated to the rhythm section. The archetype of this era was Freddie Green of the Count Basie Orchestra.[2][3] Green is legendary not for solos, but for his selfless "chunk-chunk" rhythm—a percussive, metronomic pulse that locked in with the drums. While essential to the "swing" feel, this role was utilitarian. The guitar was felt rather than heard, leaving the melodic glory to the trumpets of Louis Armstrong or the saxophones of Coleman Hawkins.
The Technological Pivot: Charlie Christian
The hierarchy shifted permanently in 1939 with the arrival of Charlie Christian.[4] By plugging a Gibson ES-150 into an amplifier, Christian did not just make the guitar louder; he fundamentally changed its nature. Suddenly, the guitar had the sustain and presence of a horn. Christian is to the jazz guitar what Charlie Parker is to the saxophone—a singular figure who rewrote the vocabulary of the instrument. He proved that the guitar could play linear, melodic lines that rivaled the complexity of the tenor sax.
However, Christian died tragically young (at 25), just as the Bebop revolution was beginning. Had he lived, the guitar might have sat at the very center of the Bebop movement. Instead, the mantle of innovation passed to the horn players—Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—who defined the frantic, angular sound of modern jazz.
The Harmonic Conflict: Guitar vs. Piano
Another major factor limiting the guitar's ubiquity in jazz is its competition with the piano. In a standard jazz quartet, the piano serves as the primary harmonic engine. It has eighty-eight keys, a massive range, and the ability to voice ten-note chords with ease. The guitar, by comparison, is limited to six strings and occupies a frequency range that often clashes with the piano’s middle register.
For decades, this created a redundancy.[5][6] If a band had a pianist, a guitarist often muddied the sound.[7][8] This is why many seminal jazz recordings (like those of the Miles Davis Quintet or John Coltrane’s Quartet) feature no guitar. The piano was simply more efficient at defining the complex extended harmonies of the Bebop and Hard Bop eras. Guitarists like Jim Hall had to develop a highly interactive, sparse style of "comping" (accompaniment) to coexist with pianists, often choosing to lay out entirely rather than compete for sonic space.
The "Horn-Like" Ideal and the Giants of the Instrument
Despite these hurdles, the guitar produced titans who carved out a unique space. The greatest jazz guitarists often succeeded by either emulating horns or embracing the guitar’s polyphonic nature.
- Django Reinhardt: Operating in Europe without the constraints of American commercial big bands, and usually without a drummer, Django proved that the acoustic guitar could lead. His "Gypsy Jazz" was guitar-centric, virtuosic, and proved that technique could overcome volume issues in the right context.
- Wes Montgomery: If Christian invented the electric jazz guitar, Montgomery perfected it.[3] In the 1950s and 60s, he introduced a warmer, thumb-picked tone that contrasted sharply with the piercing sound of brass. His use of octaves (playing two notes an octave apart simultaneously) allowed the guitar to cut through a band with a thick, powerful texture that mimicked the weight of a horn section.
- Joe Pass: Pass took the opposite approach, utilizing the guitar's similarity to the piano. He was a master of "chord melody," playing bass lines, chords, and melody simultaneously. He proved the guitar could be a self-sufficient solo instrument, rivaling the solo piano in complexity.
Comparison with Horn Giants
When comparing these figures to the "Kings" of jazz—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, or Charlie Parker—a distinction emerges. The horn players were often the architects of new jazz sub-genres (Modal Jazz, Free Jazz, Bebop). Guitarists were rarely the ones leading these stylistic shifts; they were usually adapting to them.
- Miles Davis (Trumpet): A visionary who changed the direction of music four or five times.
- John Coltrane (Saxophone): Pushed harmonic theory to its absolute breaking point.
- Grant Green (Guitar): An incredible player who translated the Bebop language of Parker onto the fretboard, focusing on horn-like phrasing and groove rather than harmonic invention.
The horn is a monophonic instrument inextricably linked to the human breath. This gives it a vocal quality—slurs, vibrato, and dynamic swells—that hits the listener on an emotional, primal level. The guitar, being a plucked instrument, has a natural decay. Once a note is picked, it begins to die. Guitarists have spent a century using amps, compressors, and technique to fight this physics, trying to achieve the "singing" sustain that a saxophonist gets for free.
The Fusion Renaissance
The narrative that the guitar is "less important" collapses in the late 1960s. As Rock music became the dominant cultural force, jazz looked to electricity for survival. Miles Davis, the great trumpet innovator, famously ditched the piano for electric guitars in his Bitches Brew era.
Suddenly, guitarists like John McLaughlin, John Scofield, and Pat Metheny became the most important figures in the genre. They possessed the volume and timbre to bridge the gap between Jazz and Rock. In the Fusion era, the guitar finally defeated the volume problem. It became the aggressive, driving force of the band, capable of screaming louder than a saxophone and distorting more aggressively than a trumpet.
Conclusion
The guitar is not less important than the horn in jazz; it is simply less traditional. Its journey was delayed by the laws of physics—it needed electricity to find its voice. While the saxophone and trumpet will always represent the "voice" of classic acoustic jazz, the guitar represents its adaptability. From the rhythmic chug of Freddie Green to the bebop lines of Wes Montgomery and the sonic landscapes of Pat Metheny, the guitar moved from the back of the stage to the front, proving that it is the only instrument capable of being a drum, a piano, and a horn all at once.
Sourceshelp
- producelikeapro.com
- quora.com
- sheetmusicdirect.com
- jazzguitar.be
- jazzguitar.be
- fromthewoodshed.com
- reddit.com
- themusicstudio.ca
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The unfortunate truth has been that most average pianists or horn players are much better musicians than most really good guitarists. Our pedagogy, other than perhaps classical guitar, is nowhere near as well developed as piano, sax, trumpet, etc. That isn't perhaps as true as it used to be as universities and conservatories have developed their programs.
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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). Originally Posted by ragman1
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.
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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. Originally Posted by brent.h
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Yes, I remember that too, the quote is still easy to find. Originally Posted by Cunamara
Who did Charlie Christian copy?
Here:
Listen below and make up your own mind:
Last edited by GuyBoden; 12-12-2025 at 04:07 PM.
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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 - Originally Posted by Cunamara
... 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.
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Two words - Jimmy Raney. Originally Posted by Cunamara
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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