PAUL
VERNON CHESTER
Manouche Maestro
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Manouche Maestro |
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The Vibrating Strings
The sound wave in motion, one of the most primitive means of measuring pitch.
The vocal cord made manifest. The guitar is the pre-eminent instrument of the
twentieth century, with a tail winding deep into the fossil record of musical
millennia past, and a headstock looking curiously into the next hundred-year
span. It's a physical instrument,
touch-sensitive, and responds equally well to gently caressing soft minor
diminished in the moonlight, It's
portable. You can carry it anywhere (slung over one's shoulder in an old
pillowcase is the accepted mode of transport in my neighbourhood), and with the
addition of even the smallest electronic gain booster, preferably soaked in
tubes, it can be heard for miles around. You
can play any kind of music on it. It lends itself equally well to the polyphonic
classics as it does to basic chord-and-a-half rock, jazzbo comping, and once
electrified, it has a tonal palette unrivalled in expressiveness, As the guitar
flowed west from Europe-with a nudge from Africa and Asia-over the course of
centuries to find lodging in the El Dorado that is America, the home of Messrs.
Rickenbacker, Martin, Gibson, and the sainted Leo Fender (and
Les Paul, the
fulcrum upon which all these hollow- and solid-body visionaries balanced their
evolutionary pickup ideas), it became nigh ubiquitous. Now, with the final chord feed-backing on the century-one that began with a people's instrument sold in the
Sears, Roebuck catalogue for five dollars and ended with the infinite
possibilities of digital encoding-it's time to tune up.
When someone asks me what kind of guitar to buy, I say the one that makes you
want to pick it up. That you'll leave lying across the bed, on a chair, within
easy reach. The one you'll keep playing. Plumage is important. The haze of a
colour, the adornment, the artisanship all play their part in a guitar's
costuming, its character, its role. A decade or two down the line, the guitar
that you bought new in a music store hanging on a rack with a dozen others (all
of which were quite beguiling, thank you) will have opened up its resonance,
stretched its wood in appreciation of the music that has been made, and
accommodated all willing hands, or just yours alone. An instrument requires
respect, give and take. You should get to know each other. The guitar is a
family member, and the following assemblage is a rare reunion and because
families help each other out, one will gift a lick to a relation struggling in
some new clime, and a new music might get born. You never know.
The guitar is a strummer's instrument: a strolling harp, the perfect tool for
a wandering minstrel. In the heyday if the Renaissance lute, guitars began to
mutate. By 1300, there existed a guitarra moresca, which resembled a lute, and a
guitarra latina, a primitive antecedent more closely emphasizing the cinched
waist and boned corset of the guitar torso. They'd met in Spain. You can see how
intermarriage would produce such an offspring.
For a while, the guitar was the prodigal, tumbling down the slippery
slopes of class until it found root in the non-courtly orders. The curvature of
its upper and lower bouts gave it a disconcerting sensuality that removed it
from polite society. Life in back alleys and taverns simplified the instrument
to its bare essentials, refined its basic uses. In the early 1600s, the
chitarra
was widespread enough to warrant Italian instruction books. Working its way back
to the drawing room and concert stage during the 1800s, leaving the duende- the
spirit-elf-of flamenco in its wake, the guitar stayed underfoot (better for
dancing) in the roadhouses and the hills, until the folk boom of the 1960s. With
the guitar-slingers of rock and roll, it became a social signifier, not only an
instrument but an accepted lifestyle accessory and symbol of personal
liberation. Once only a player in the orchestra, now it stepped out to lead the
band.
That's the short view. The long unfolds in the overlapping concentric orbits of
each instrument's role as a go-between in the tacit trio that is player and
music and listener. We have turned up
the volume on the electric century. If there is a narrative to accompany this
procession of stringed instruments, it is the guitar's journey to its
amplification, its desire t be heard, and the music created in its wake.
It perches on the borderline separating
sound generated from within and the ventriloquism projected through an
out-of-body source, manipulating its character.
The enhancement of acoustics began early in the 1920s and resulted in such
wonders as the microphone, radio, and talkies. It would change the way singers
sing and actors act. Les Paul remembers sitting in his Waukesha, Wisconsin,
living room wondering how these relatively new technologies might be combined,
jamming a phonograph record needle into the wood of his guitar and sending it
through the wire-coiled magnet of a telephone mouthpiece into a radio speaker in
hopes of generating an electron stream that might be embellished in amplitude
and tone. Literally sculpting air. Early Luthier's understood the vibration of
the woods they filed and carved into shape. Each guitar was like an ecology,
each piece harmonic. With a minimum of moving parts, the instrument was a
tinker's dream, and even the simplest innovation could radically transform its
sound and attack. When Christian Frederick Martin brought his art and craft from
the Viennese workshop of Johann Staufer to America in 1833, he braced the
soundboard of his instruments in the shape of an X. Thus strengthened, the
guitar would eventually be able to accommodate the grander overtone tensioning
of steel strings, instead of the gut or silver wire over silk that ran through
the courses of European instruments. The ringing appealed to the industrial
clamour of the new twentieth century. Orville Gibson also liked the clang of steel. He thought the guitar came up
short compared with the sophistication of the violin. Working in a music store
in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he combined what he felt were the violin's best design
qualities into his mandolins, zithers, and harp guitars, arching the top of the
instruments and eventually selling his patents to a consortium of investors in
the early 1900s who took his designs to the mass guitar market.
The rush to electricity expanded the playing field, broadening the guitar's
horizons, making it nigh indispensable. No longer confined to a subliminal
supporting role within a band's momentum, it could be the undeniable focal
point. But when the time came for the formal introduction of electricity, the
source was unlikely: a small chain of archipelagos as distant from the United
States as America is wide, Hawaii.
The acoustic lap steel is played with a bar in the neck hand, resting flat, and
in the 1920s became a popular recording instrument via the island stylings. Its
wiry tone and melodic phrasing, with many slurs and vibratos, lent well to the
acoustic horns that would capture sound before 1925, the year
Bell Laboratories
introduced their electrical recording process. The image of hulu maidens and
beachfront sunsets didn't hurt. I am reminded of this gazing at the National Triolian in my corner, waiting for me to tickle its strings, which stretch over
a conical diaphragm resonator, a virtual speaker in a completely metal guitar,
painted bronze, with a palm tree stencilled on the back. Those were adventurous
times.
Ironically, the acoustic lap steel-tied as it was to an island vogue-faded, as
electrical recording became the norm. But Adolph Rickenbacker had a
manufacturing outlet that pressed National's steel bodies, and so came in
contact with George Beauchamp, who had partnered John Dopyera at
National and
helped pioneer the resonator guitar. Beauchamp was still working on how to make
the guitar louder when a disagreement with Dopyera moved him into partnership
with Rickenbacker. Both saw a niche where they could apply George's ideas of
doing away with the soundhole altogether. Out of the Frying Pan (his most famous
creation, driven by pair of horseshoe-shaped magnets) and into the fire. Once
amplifiers were onstage, it was a simple matter to adopt them to guitars, and
the guitars themselves began to transform.
The populist styling of the '50s replicated the Detroit tail fin and sense of
roar that was America in mid-century. Leo Fender, in a southern California that
was a custom car hotspot and future surfing Mecca, invented the Broadcaster in
1948, improving on it with the Telecaster and then the
Stratocaster, a template
of American archetypes that now constitutes one of the great guitar lineages and
has the surf music to prove it.
Gibson saw its arch top demand fall off sharply after World War II. Though it
matched Martin model for model in the flat-top acoustic field (Martin opted for
the traditional-they never successfully went electric,
Gibson had promoted "electrical"
arch-top guitars as early as 1936. Charlie Christian used an
ES-150, and the bar
pickup it featured is now nicknamed for him. Yet when Les Paul brought a
homemade solid-body electric to Gibson in 1941, a pine plank on which he'd
affixed two pickups and a bridge, surrounding it with pieces from an Epiphone
guitar body to make it look less alien, they referred to it as a
broomstick and
passed.
The company could hardly ignore the stir that Fender was creating. Already the
Telecaster was influencing guitar phrasings; the bright, brittle sound could cut
through drums and bass and the most unruly audiences. So in alliance with
Les
Paul, who by now had graduated to his own garage studio and the wonders of
multi-tracking, Gibson designed a guitar with low-end authority and endless
sustain, a slightly carved top to recall its violin inspirations, and gold
finish, because "what other colour?" It became the Les Paul in
1952
and remains a fitting namesake for a man
who was in the forefront of guitar invention. Regardless of which one reached
the Pole first, "The Log" is arguably the first pure electric guitar.
Adolph Rickenbacker was not about to miss out on this frontier opened up for
settlement. Even after he retired in the 1940s, his company continued their
off-the-beaten-path explorations. They were a favourite with the new English
bands, especially the Beatles' John Lennon, and they had a unique item with
their electric twelve-string guitar, which would be anointed the mediator
between folk and rock. The '60s
sparked the fuse to a guitar boom. A host of manufacturers rushed in to answer
the skyrocketing demand. Some, like Epiphone and Kay, were older firms
modernizing; others, like Guild adapted themselves to the times. Soon the sound
of a painstakingly formed E chord was echoing from garages across the land.
Luthiers became modern assembly-line factories, churning out literally millions
of guitars. Though the sheer numbers gave the instrument a workaday, journeyman
quality, it didn't necessarily mean any less emphasis on personality. If
anything, guitar makers seemed only too anxious to indulge their most
extravagant fantasies. Gretsch had been manufacturing guitars in Brooklyn since
the 1930s, but their association with Chet Atkins in
1955 prompted a Nashville
swivel for the company. Gretsch's zenith would be reached with the exquisite
White Falcon, a six-stringed metal-flaked spangle of C&W fashion. There were
individual high end artisans crystallizing tradition, the exquisite arch tops of
D'Angelico and D'Aquisto; and budget lines, with everybody's first guitar,
Guitars were sold in department stores, passed around and traded like
good stories, had their own display in pawnshops. Pretty soon, as the '70s
tolled their way to that ultimate in slash chord reductionism, punk rock, it
seemed like every bed had a guitar stashed under it. Sometimes they'd be taken
out and played every day; sometimes they'd be found years later, with the tags
still on.
To immerse oneself in the guitar is to experience the panorama of our collective
musical memory. As for older instruments, highly individualized products of
someone's acoustical imagination, this is as close as we'll get to reliving what
they might have sounded like, pre-recording. Some are to fragile to string to
pitch; we may not be able to revel in Antonio Stradivari's 1700 five-course
guitar at standard A440, but we can try to fathom its voice by reading its
rings, like the tree it once was.
The remarkable thing is that more than half a millennium of progress hasn't
altered our conception of what a guitar can mean. Distorted by a vacuum tube or
lightly brushed in a late-night bedroom, the guitar accommodates change without
altering its basic nature; this is what gives these varied instruments their
lifeline. No matter who picks it up or when, the guitar will play the same song.
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Shape is fluid, within the reasonable bounds of what a guitar basically is.
Start from the premise that you need a board on which to stretch the strings, a
means to tune them and project them, only two hands (at the outer limits of
which you invent the pedal steel, but they-musician and instrument-are a breed
apart). The basic blueprint of the guitar is established. From there, it becomes
a matter of custom shopping. 
Gibson's arch vs.
Martin's flat-top. The note swirled around the belly of one,
spun like a centrifuge from the circulatory soundhole of the other, neck and
inlaid neck through the first third of the century. The tone shapes within the
outer shell of the instrument, moulding a frequency of interior space, pumped
through the body's soundhole or in 1923, the arch top's scrolled
f-holes to
awaiting ears. Now Eddie Lang didn't have to keep time on the banjo, and could
chop and dice his comps on the big Gibson L-5; Martin's Dreadnought series would
become a bluegrass standard. Not all sounds are burnished in the instrument's
rib cage: there is the scrape of the pick striking the strings, the thump of the
forearm as it hugs the guitar body, and the ever-tapping foot.
With the mirror-image twin streams of country blues-Charlie Patton, Willie McTell, Robert Johnson
and country string bands-Carter Family, coming to
prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, both driven by the guitar's sidekick
accompaniment, and the blue yodelling figure of Jimmie Rogers perhaps straddling
both, the instrument was well positioned to attack the flanks of the hit parade.
But in the swing era, only western combos allowed the guitar a prominence; back
East, where horns ruled the urban bandstand, the guitar's role was still
essentially rhythmic. 
The great Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt brought a dapper
flair to the instrument, perhaps one of the first crossovers plying a folk
tradition into a more sophisticated Hot Club musicality (though even there, jazz
was a little suspect). Along with Charlie Christian who had just
acquired one of
the first amplifiers to trade solo fours with Benny Goodman's orchestra,
Les
Paul, Alvino Rey, and Merle Travis helped extend the instrument's wingspan
through World War II, by which time Muddy Waters, Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith,
and Link Wray were ready to plug in.
