Jazz guitar

Jazz guitar is the use of guitar in jazz music.

Related Topics:
Guitar - Jazz - Music

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The guitar has a long and honorable history in jazz. Historically, the guitar played the same role in jazz as in country music, blues and other forms of folk music, as an instrument easy to acquire financially and easy (enough) to play for an individual performer.

Related Topics:
Guitar - Jazz - Country music - Blues - Folk music

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As an instrument in an ensemble, however, the guitar had first to supplant the banjo as the standard "string tenor" rhythm instrument. Even as late as the early 30s such sophisticated orchestras as Duke Ellington's still used a banjo. In the late 30s, however, there were five important developments, or, more accurately, five important individuals:

Related Topics:
Instrument - Banjo - 30s - Duke Ellington

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• Lonnie Johnson, a New Orleans born guitarist, who was the first to play single-string guitar solos. Although best known as a bluesman, Johnson played all forms of music. He had developed his single-string playing while working as a strolling musician in restaurants, accompanying himself as he sang. Although he never achieved great fame, he was a strong influence on the next three guitarists discussed here.
• Eddie Lang, who hid his virtuoso guitar playing behind a good-time persona in his collaborations with jazz violinist Joe Venuti, the Mound City Blue Blowers and appearances with virtually every important white jazz organization in the 1920s, from Red Nichols and Bix Beiderbecke, to Paul Whiteman. He also collaborated with Lonnie Johnson.
• Charlie Christian -- Also out of the southwest, from Texas, Christian showed up in the Benny Goodman Orchestra unexpected by anyone with a full-blown style of electric guitar soloing. In addition to his appearances with Goodman, Christian was a regular after-hours bebop player. The astonished critics of the time called it "single-string" playing because no big-band guitarist before Christian did it (although blues players played single-string obligattos). Now virtually all guitarists do it. Christian's career only lasted a few years and he died young, but his innovation changed the guitar forever.
• Django Reinhardt, one-of-a-kind jazz guitarist, a Belgian Gypsy with the use of only two fingers on his left (fretting) hand due to a fire in a gypsy caravan. Reinhardt recorded rarely with a standard jazz group, and recorded most often with either solo or with the peculiar Quintet of the Hot Club of France with violinist Stéphane Grappelli. Influential for technique, taste, harmonies, and melodies, with many followers and not a single successor.
• Freddie Green -- In the Count Basie Orchestra out of Kansas City, Missouri, Green was a peerless rhythm guitarist, whose reliable pulse propelled the hardest swinging band in jazz. Green's ascendency pretty much ended the banjo era. Green rarely soloed, even in the modern era, but he remains the apotheosis of the rhythm guitar and the master of chorded accompaniment.
 
Jazz guitar: Other notable jazz guitarists ►