Masters of Jazz Guitar: The Story of the Players and Their Music

530 Pages·2002·12.15 MB·English

by  Charles Alexander

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Page 1
Masters of Jazz Guitar
Page 2
View from the back of the stage at a George Benson show in Harlem
Masters of Jazz Guitar
The Story of the Players and their Music
A Balafon Book
First British edition 1999
Published in the UK by Balafon Books,
an imprint of Outline Press Ltd,
115j Cleveland Street, London W1P 5PN, England.
Copyright © 1999 Balafon. All rights reserved.
No part of this book covered by the copyrights
hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in articles or
reviews where the source should be made clear.
For information contact the publishers.
ISBN
USA 0-87-930-592-4
UK 1-871547-85-7
Printed in Singapore
Art Director
Nigel Osborne
Editor
Charles Alexander
Editorial Director
Tony Bacon
Production
Pip Richardson
Print and origination by Tien Wah Press
99 00 01 02 03 5 4 3 2 1
Page 3
The Guitar Breaks Through 4
Tony Russell
Masters of Rhythm 10
Richard Cook
Soloists of the Swing Era 16
Brian Priestley
Django Reinhardt 24
Max Harrison
Charlie Christian 32
Dave Gelly
Swing to Bop 38
Stan Britt
The Bebop Masters 44
Stan Britt
The Cool Sound 54
Alun Morgan
Influence and Confluence 60
John Fordham
Wes Montgomery 68
Kenny Mathieson
The Hardboppers 74
John Fordham
Joe Pass 82
John Fordham
Fusion: The First Wave 88
Stuart Nicholson
Pat Metheny 98
Kenny Mathieson
Fusion: The Second Wave 104
Mark Gilbert
Shredding the Frets 112
Mark Gilbert
Brazilian Guitar 118
John Zaradin
The Session Players 126
Kenny Mathieson
The Deconstructionists 132
Stuart Nicholson
The Acoustic Guitar in Jazz 140
Charles Alexander
The New Mainstream 148
Kenny Mathieson
The Legacy of Django 154
Andy MacKenzie
The British Scene 162
Kenny Mathieson
The European Scene 170
Chris Burden
The American Scene 178
Charles Chapman
Recommended Listening 186
Index of People 190
Acknowledgements 192
Page 4
The Guitar Breaks Through
Tony Russell
It took the invention of electrical recording for the guitar to shake off
european gentility and take its place as the voice of a new era and a
new world.
Looking back from here, the guitar seems to have been the defining
instrument of 20th century popular music. Yet at around the time that
the 19th century put up its shutters and the 20th prepared to open for
business, several other instruments vied for space in the music stores'
windows. The guitar had yet to assert its domination over the piano,
the violin or the banjo. The process of establishing that pre-eminence
is entwined with the history of jazz but not with jazz alone.
For some decades the guitar had lived a double life. At one stratum of
society it was a favourite instrument of the middle-class drawing
room. Young men and, more particularly, young women would
acquire some skill upon it as a polite accomplishment, rather as Jane
Austen's ladies, a century or so earlier, sought a respectable
competence on the piano. With the rise of the Gibson and Martin
stringed instrument companies in the later 19th century there was also
a rapid growth in stringed instrument societies (often sponsored by
Gibson or Martin) under such genteel names as the T.A. Miles Guitar
and Ukulele Club of Knoxville, Tennessee, or the Silk City Plectral
Sextet of Paterson, New Jersey. These societies formed guitar, banjo
or mandolin orchestras, often using variants of the featured
instrument, such as harp guitar, bass banjo and mandola.
At the same time, the guitar was a component of the string orchestras
and mariachi bands of Mexico and the Mexican-Texan border and of
the small 'serenading' groups of stringed instrument players in South
Texas and New Orleans. Meanwhile, the surge of immigrants from
Europe introduced fresh subcultures of guitar-playing that grew
quickly in the ethnic enclaves of New York, Philadelphia, Boston or
Chicago.
So the guitar had a place, or places, in society. But it had yet to find a
prominent role in the recording studio. In an age when the sound of an
instrument had to be filtered through the thick blanket of the pre-
electric recording process, it was imperative that it should be loud and
resonant. Whether picked or strummed, the wood-bodied guitar could
hardly compete in this arena with the clangour of the banjo, whose
vivid recordability quickly put it on a secure footing with the early
record companies. Reliable studio practitioners like Fred Van Eps,
Vess L. Ossman and Olly Oakley were especially in demand, and by
the time of the Great War, they and scores of other banjoists in the
United States, Britain and elsewhere had recorded hundreds, possibly
thousands, of rags, marches, cakewalks, ''coon songs" and light
classical pieces.
The recorded guitar repertory, by contrast, was meagre, though the
picture began to change in the early 1910s with the discovery that one
type of
Guitarist Danny Barker with Cab Calloway's Cotton Club Orchestra in 1943. Originally a
New Orleans banjoist, Barker became a leading New York rhythm guitarist. With
Calloway rom 1939 to 1946, he played guitar on recordings such as 'Minnie
the Moocher'.
playing could be successfully transferred to the half-pound shellac discs of
the time: the shimmering legato lines of the Hawaiian guitarist, playing with
the instrument flat on the lap, making the strings sing by swooping up the
fretboard with a steel bar. Hawaiian guitar troupes had begun to visit the