Charlie Christian Electric Guitar Pioneer

In 1939, Christian auditioned for John Hammond, who recommended him to bandleader Benny Goodman.

Goodman invited him to a show that evening at the Victor Hugo restaurant in Los Angeles. The bandleader called “Rose Room”, a tune he assumed Christian did not know. However, Christian knew the tune and took an unprecedented twenty choruses of improvisation; Goodman hired him as a member of the band as a result. In the course of a few days, Christian went from making $2.50 a night (he’d been playing electric guitar in mid-West bands since 1936) to $150 a week.

Christian joined the newly formed Goodman Sextet in September 1939, which included Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Artie Bernstein and Nick Fatool and which you’ll hear in live broadcasts on this week’s Phantom Dancer.

By February 1940 Christian dominated the jazz and swing guitar polls and was elected to the Metronome All Stars. In the spring of 1940, Goodman laid off most of his band, but he kept Christian.

COOL

His work on the Goodman sextet sides “Soft Winds”, “Till Tom Special”, and “A Smo-o-o-oth One” show his use of few well-placed melodic notes. His work on the Sextet’s recordings of the ballads “Stardust”, “Memories of You”, “Poor Butterfly”, “I Surrender Dear” and “On the Alamo” and his work on “Profoundly Blue” with the Edmond Hall Celeste Quartet (1941) show hints of what was later called cool jazz. Although credited for very few, Christian composed many of the original tunes recorded by the Benny Goodman Sextet.

BOP

Christian was an important contributor to the music that became known as bop, or bebop. Some of the participants in early after-hours affairs at Minton’s Playhouse, an after-hours club located in the Hotel Cecil at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem where bebop was born, credit Christian with the name bebop, citing his humming of phrases as the onomatopoetic origin of the term.

Kenny Clarke claimed that “Epistrophy” and “Rhythm-a-Ning” were compositions by Christian, which Christian played with Clarke and Thelonious Monk at Minton’s jam sessions. The “Rhythm-a-Ning” line is heard on “Down on Teddy’s Hill” and behind the introduction on “Guy’s Got to Go” from the Newman recordings. It is also a line from Mary Lou Williams’s “Walkin’ and Swingin'”.Clarke further commented that Christian first showed him the chords to “Epistrophy” on a ukulele.

In the late 1930s Christian contracted tuberculosis which killed him in February 1942 .

STYLE

In the brief period Christian played with Goodman he influenced not only guitarists but other musicians as well. The influence he had on “Dizzy” Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Don Byas can be heard on their early bop recordings “Blue ‘n’ Boogie” and “Salt Peanuts”. Other musicians, such as the trumpeter Miles Davis, cited Christian as an early influence.