[Dixielandjazz] Charlie Christian - New 4 disc CD set available

[Stephen Barbone]

If  you like Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman, or Western Swing you will
enjoy this article about Charlie Christian, his genius, and the new 4 CD
set that is available. Mostly with Goodman. There are some beautiful
standards in this set.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

October 20, 2002 - New York Times

Charlie Christian Changed the Way Jazz Guitar Is Played

By BEN RATLIFF

       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.