Masters of Jazz Guitar: The Story of the Players and Their Music PDF
Preview Masters of Jazz Guitar: The Story of the Players and Their Music
title: author: publisher: isbn10 | asin: print isbn13: ebook isbn13: language: subject publication date: lcc: ddc: subject: 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
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