I thought I’d share this lovely little clip of the late great jazz guitarist Joe Pass. It’s from a show that classical guitarist John Williams presented along with three other exponents of the guitar from different genres. At this point they had been talking about the similarities between Jazz and Baroque music, especially with regards to the improvisation, so Williams invited Pass to improvise on a Chaconne by Johan Sebastian Bach. The result is absolutely fascinating, not least because of the musical jokes in the form of blue notes that Pass includes during his spontaneous elaboration. The first elicits a big smile from John Williams because the tritone Pass plays was regarded as the diabolus in musica in Bach’s time, but for a jazz musician blue notes like this are par for the course.
P.S. it’s amazing how little Joe Pass’s right hand seems to move…
More very sad news arrived yesterday with the death at the age of 87 of the brilliant guitarist and lute player Julian Bream. His influence on the classical guitar, through both playing and teaching, was enormous and he leaves a rich legacy of recordings covering a vast repertoire. I remember seeing and hearing him play and talk about music many times on TV when I was younger, and have quite a few recordings.
It’s difficult to pick an appropriate piece to pay homage to him, but I settled on this wonderful work Homenaje by Manuel de Falla. The full title of this, de Falla’s only piece for guitar, is Homenaje pour Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy and it was a tribute to Debussy. It also provided Benjamin Britten, when he heard Bream play it, with the inspiration to write a much longer piece for Bream, called Nocturnal, which uses a theme from Elizabethan composer John Dowland. Given these connections I thought it would be a nice tribute.
Anyway this is an older Bream playing Homenaje very beautifully and it’s beautifully filmed too!
I was transferring some old CDs onto my iPod the other day, and in the process of doing that I realized that in all the six years I’ve been running this blog I haven’t posted a single item about the great guitarist Charlie Christian, who did more than any other individual to promote the use of the electrical guitar and thus had an enormous influence on the development of 20th century music. The only reason I can think of why his is not a household name is that he died so young, in 1942, of tuberculosis, at the age of just 25.
Born in 1916, Charlie Christian came to prominence with Benny Goodman‘s orchestra during the 1930s. That in itself merits a remark. Benny Goodman was one of the first white bandleaders in the Swing Era to have black musicians in his band at a time when both musicians and audiences were generally racially segregated in the United States of America. Goodman deserves great credit for picking the best musicians he could find, regardless of the colour of their skin; Lionel Hampton is another prominent example. Bringing the young Charlie Christian into his band also testifies not only to his refusal to pander to racism, but also his willingness to experiment with new musical ideas, not least taking the guitarist out of the rhythm section and placing him as front-line soloist.
Here’s an excellent example of Charlie Christian playing with Benny Goodman’s Orchestra in 1939. I remember that my Dad wasn’t all that keen on Benny Goodman’s clarinet playing, which he regarded as “too clinical”. In fact many jazz writers also tend to refer to Benny Goodman’s playing as “unemotional”. I can’t agree. I admit that the band is a bit “slick”, but the clarinet on this track is absolutely sensational to me, and I find it a joy to listen to over and over again. There’s also fine Cootie Williams on trumpet on this version of Fats Waller’s composition Honeysuckle Rose:
Commercial records from the 1930s were strictly limited by the available technology to 3 minutes’ duration, so Charlie Christian’s solo on that track is necessarily brief. You can hear much more of him on the historically important amateur recordings made during the early 1940s of late-night jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City. This is an excerpt from a piece called Swing to Bop recorded in 1941, which shows how far Charlie Christian had advanced in just a couple of years. His improvised solo is way ahead of its time in the way it develops through an effortless string of musical ideas into an exploration of the harmonic possibilities of the chord sequence that I find absolutely sensational to listen to.
Not many people knew it at the time, because tracks like this weren’t made commercially available, but a musical revolution was brewing. Charlie Christian changed the course of jazz history, helping to usher in the bebop era, but his influence on rock-and-roll guitar is also incalculable.
Incidentally, I think Swing to Bop is actually the Count Basie tune Topsy in disguise, or at least the chords thereof. Listen to Topsyhere and see if you agree..
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In the Dark 