Charlie Christian – The Genius Of The Electric Guitar (3-CD box)

Electric guitar starts here. No, Charlie Christian wasn’t, as legend sometimes suggests, the first to amplify the instrument, just as Shakespeare wasn’t to the first to pen a play and Elvis Presley wasn’t the first to ignite a rock ‘n’ roll synthesis of country and blues.

Yet Christian’s influence on those who would follow was so pervasive and profound that the style considered so radical when he introduced it quickly became the standard to which the electric guitar aspired. Almost single-handedly (or at least double-handedly), he yanked the guitar from the rhythm section and put it into the soloist’s spotlight. Which is why readers of No Depression (whoever they are) should be interested in the most significant jazz reissue of 2002, because you can’t hear electric guitar from Chuck Berry to T-Bone Walker to Eldon Shamblin without hearing echoes of Christian’s “genius.”

Texas bluesman Walker was Christian’s contemporary — they would occasionally play together as a duo, switching between guitar and bass — while Shamblin established his Christian-inspired virtuosity in Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys, whose sense of swing (and electric steel guitar) had earlier helped shape Christian’s emerging artistry. When the Texas-born Christian was coming of age in Oklahoma City in the 1930s, musical categories weren’t nearly as rigid as they would become. Whether a band played country or swing or some bluesy hybrid wasn’t nearly as important as whether the music kept the dance floor filled.

Listening to these five hours of music that Christian recorded during his tragically brief life (much of it unreleased until after his death in 1942, almost a third of it unreleased Stateside until now), you hear how Benny Goodman and Bob Wills were kindred spirits in swing, rather than musicians from different categories. Though clarinetist Goodman’s band was heavier with horns where the fiddle-driven Playboys were more of a string band, the signature style of guitar that Christian developed provided the common denominator.

Christian’s contribution to jazz during his brief tenure with Goodman is simple to define, impossible to overestimate. In bringing the guitar to the fore, he introduced a level of virtuosity influenced more by the leading saxophonists of the day (Lester Young in particular) than by other guitarists. Equally significant, he established an aesthetic in which playing the right note with the right tone was a lot more important than how many notes you could play or how fast you could play them.

Like other musical supernovas who flared too briefly and died too young — Christian was 25 when tuberculosis claimed him, ending his year-and-a-half reign as the foremost virtuoso of jazz guitar — his myth looms almost as large as his musical influence. The fable has a rags-to-musical-riches resonance: The son of a blind musician, Charlie was born into such poverty that he was said to have constructed his early instruments from cigar boxes. Barely past his teens, he was elevated from obscurity by John Hammond, who’d been tipped by pianist Mary Lou Williams that this kid playing the dives of Oklahoma City was the best guitarist she’d ever heard.

Hammond introduced Christian to Benny Goodman, who initially looked askance at both the electric guitar Christian carried and his sartorial style. According to apocrypha, Christian arrived for his meeting with the dapper “King of Swing” wearing a ten-gallon hat, purple shoes, green suit and yellow shoes, though the box set’s liner notes by biographer Peter Broadbent suggest Christian was never that gaudy (while conceding his apparel was “somewhat countrified”).

What’s beyond dispute is that his fully formed artistry was evident from his first meeting with Goodman. As a bandstand guest for an impromptu 1939 audition, Christian took the standard “Rose Room” and ran with it, pushing Goodman’s small group to greater heights as improvisations on the tune extended over more than 45 minutes. He got the job and immediately established himself as a spotlight soloist within the ensemble, more than holding his own in musical conversation with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, pianist Fletcher Henderson, and the esteemed bandleader.

In fact, “Flying Home”, the kickoff track to this collection, while credited to Goodman and Hampton, was actually a tune Christian brought to the band and had been playing in Oklahoma City, as a showcase for the subtle fluidity of his guitar solos. Throughout the 98 tracks of this three-disc set, Christian leaves his imprint on a wide variety of material, from the playful “Pretty Baby” interlude he brings to the classic “Stardust” to the stately bluesiness of “I’m Confessin'” to the buoyant bounce of “Gone With What Wind” to the virtuosic sophistication of “Solo Flight”.

Since the commercial recordings of the day didn’t push much past three minutes, one of the hallmarks of Christian’s studio style is its economy. His solos weren’t epics of free-flowing improvisation; they were more like haiku, carefully crafted compositions within compositions.

The rehearsal sequence and jam session that close the set allow him more latitude to stretch out, providing revelatory insight into the development and range of Christian’s musical ideas, of the progression that not only epitomized swing but anticipated the rhythmic revolutions of bebop.

Yet you don’t need a crash course in jazz history to appreciate Christian. Like many rock fans who came of musical age in the 1960s, I’d never heard of the guitarist until Columbia’s vinyl issue of the two-disc Solo Flight: The Genius Of Charlie Christian, the first jazz I’d ever appreciated with sheer delight rather than a sense of duty. Now that the CD era has added four hours of alternate takes and outtakes to that essential document, I won’t argue that all the repetition is essential; but when someone who made music this great was alive for such a short time, you savor every note.