Charlie Christian

He changed the guitar world. He changed it not so much as being a superb guitar player, but rather the music that he made. Anyone that would study him can see where all the other guitar players who came after him evolved, that they came from his fountainhead. They came from that and went their own way, according to their own tastes, but he was a way-shower. He was as much a way-shower as any philosophical giant that other people have come along and patterned themselves after.

His contributions were so strong in several departments. One is there have been very few people on any instrument that have come since him that have had his sense of time. His ability to play in time in a way that he plays. The spacing of his notes. That’s one of the things.  The other thing is he was years ahead of most of the people he was playing with in terms of the lines he was playing. They involved certain chord changes that were not existent then.

If you listen to any of the blues that he played, you will hear in the line that he has spelled out harmonic changes that none of the others on the record are playing, not even the background. They’re refreshing and they fit. He’s playing more chord changes in his lines, and also interesting ones, different ones than existed at the time. Any record would be an example of that, any record. In addition, his tone was more the concept of what is being used today in jazz, and all along. It is more of a velvet sound. It’s just the antithesis of a rock and roll sound, or a pop rock or punk rock sound. It is more an electric guitar sound rather than an electronic guitar sound. A lot of people don’t understand this either. I have people that come up to me and they think that what I want now, and what Charlie Christian wanted then, is simply to amplify the natural sound of the guitar and just make the natural sound louder. That’s not true. That’s a different sound entirely. The electric guitar as he played it had its own sound.

So we’ve got three different sounds, really, we’re talking about: One is we’ve got a regular acoustic guitar where you put something on it, and it doesn’t change the sound – it only makes it louder. Now that’s one thing. Another is the actual sound of an electric guitar coming through a particular pickup that sounds like an electric guitar, which is different. And then you’ve got things that people are playing today in the rock and pop, etcetera, which is really an electronic sound.  So Charlie Christian’s tone was more horn-like. It’s more like the velvety sound of some of the saxophone players and trombone players. It was more horn. As a matter of fact, many people that heard him play that didn’t know him didn’t even know that they were listening to a guitar. They didn’t know anything about it. They just were simply going to this club where he might be playing, and they’d hear the music from outside, and they didn’t know that there was such a thing as an electric guitar. Almost all of them thought that it was a tenor saxophone. - Barney Kessel

Christian died of TB in 1942 aged 25

He had TB, which we didn’t find out until Benny got to Chicago. He was coughing, and Benny sent him to the Michael Reed Hospital, and that was when they found out that Charlie had already had TB. He was warned by the doctors to be terribly careful not to smoke and to get his rest. But he got to New York and there was never any rest. He played with the band – they worked the New York hotels at the time – and then afterwards he would hang out at Minton’s up in Harlem, on 188th Street and Seventh Avenue. And he was up there all night. At the same time, Dizzy used to hang out up there – Charlie came a year or so later. But anyway, I would say that the real architects of bebop were probably Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, and Dizzy Gillespie.  I saw Charlie about three or four days before he died, out at Seaview Hospital on Staten Island. That’s where Charlie died. Fortunately, his trained nurse out there was a good friend of mine. This was in the spring of 1942, and I was at my family’s house for dinner, I’ll never forget, and the nurse called me and said, “Please” – she didn’t think Charlie would last even a couple of more days. And she asked me to please get in touch with Benny and have Benny send some kind of a wire or send some fruit or something, to show him how much Benny stilled loved him. I don’t know whether Benny ever did or not. I have a feeling maybe he didn’t. But Charlie died within a couple of days. And then his funeral was up at the Mother Zion A.M.E. Church on 137^th Street in New York City. And then we shipped the body to Oklahoma City. I made all the funeral arrangements, I remember.

Charlie Christian Live

Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt had little influence on Christian, but he was obviously familiar with some of his recordings. Guitarist Mary Osborne recalled hearing him play Django's solo on "St Louis Blues" note for note, but then following it with his own ideas.  Charlie's fingers were long but perhaps not as long as Tal Farlow's

Swing to Bop 1941