If you go back far enough, it becomes difficult to differentiate between genres. Just under a century ago, it wasn't entirely clear what was jazz, what was blues, what was R&B, and what would soon become rock 'n' roll. And the guitar was near the center of it all.
Listen to the fast-swinging fretwork of Lonnie Johnson and Teddy Bunn playing single-note lines and you'll hear jazz history being made. However, their music is usually remembered as blues and early R&B.
As the jazz ensemble grew, the six strings on the guitar sometimes didn't fit. But even if the guitar wasn't always the central figure in jazz, the best guitarists usually had both the challenge and the advantage of defining it. their own relationship to the genre;
During the bebop revolution, a young Charlie Christian charged into a Harlem jam session with one of music's first electric guitars, whistling like a hot knife. Romani guitarist Django Reinhardt invented jazz, perhaps Europe's first homegrown genre, using only three fingers on his left hand. In the 1950s, hard bop guitarists like Grant Green and Kenny Burrell helped reaffirm the role of blues at the core of jazz. During the jazz-rock fusion era, John McLaughlin and Pete Causey used six strings to seek a kind of spiritual release through electric currents of sound.
Below, we asked 14 musicians and writers to name songs that help beginners fall in love with the sound of jazz guitar. Read more, listen to the playlist to accompany the article, and don't forget to leave your own recommendations in the comments.
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Ben Ratliff, former New York Times pop and jazz critic
Charlie Christian “Swing to Bop”
Charlie Christian's importance to the lineage of early jazz guitar is established, but everything about his posthumously titled “swing to bop” remains uncodified. This is a slice of life from a jam session held at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem in May 1941. This is an amateur recording and an early bootleg. It has been a gray market product since it was first distributed illegally in the 1950s. Christian enjambs and resolves the flow of eighth notes over the rhythm section, changing the rhythmic emphasis and listening at least four bars into the future. He expresses it like a modernist novel. Super long sentences with wicked syntax are followed by extremely simple sentences, followed by provocative repetitions. At the juncture of each chorus, he shadows and feints with drummer Kenny Clark, exploding with moving harmonic implications. The word bop in the title didn't quite exist in 1941. (The song was actually “Topsy,” recorded by his then-employer Benny Goodman.) Practice playing the electric guitar in single-note patterns, like the horns, which neither could do much . Christian was 24 years old and was about to die of tuberculosis. There was no name for what he was doing here, and there was no name for the way the music made you feel.
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Miles Okazaki (guitarist)
Grant Green: “It doesn't have to be that way”
Recorded on a cold January night in New Jersey in 1962, the band lit a fire and fanned the flames for more than 10 minutes. In Grant Green's hands, the guitar sings, screams, and swings gleefully through an epic 18-chorus improvisation. After briefly incorporating Gershwin's melodies, Green moves into a solo, demonstrating that he is a master of achieving a lot with a little of his raw, soulful tone. Similar to Art Blakey's relentless shuffling, you can see things heat up over a few minutes of exclamation points. For me, the magic here is in the dynamics between the guitar and drums. The pushing and pulling motions are fascinating. Try tapping your foot or making other movements. After three and a half minutes, Green unleashes one of his signature repetitive loops, as if to say, “Are you paying attention yet?” Blakey landed gracefully and appeared to be settling in with a slow step before yelling “Go!”, prompting him to move on to the final four rounds. This is the opposite of bombastic music. It's from the heart and the earth, and if you let yourself get into the groove, it can't help but move you.
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