If you go back far enough, it gets hard to tell genres apart. Just under a century ago, it wasn’t totally clear yet what was jazz and what was blues, or what was becoming R&B and what would soon turn into rock ’n’ roll. And the guitar was near the center of them all.
Hear the fast, swinging fretwork of Lonnie Johnson or Teddy Bunn, playing in single-note lines, and you’ll hear jazz history being made — though their music is usually remembered as blues or early R&B.
As jazz ensembles grew, the six strings of the guitar sometimes had a hard time fitting in. But if the guitar hasn’t always been a central player in jazz, the best guitarists have usually had both the challenge and the advantage of having to define their own relationships to the genre.
Amid the bebop revolution, a young Charlie Christian blazed into Harlem jam sessions with one of music’s earliest electric guitars, sounding like a hot knife. Django Reinhardt, a Romani guitarist, invented perhaps Europe’s first-ever homegrown genre of jazz, working with only three fingers on his left hand. In the 1950s, hard-bop guitarists like Grant Green and Kenny Burrell helped reassert the blues’s role at the core of jazz. In the jazz-rock fusion era, John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey and others used six strings to seek something like spiritual release through the current of electrified sound.
Below, we asked 14 musicians and writers to name the tunes they would play to help a newcomer fall in love with the sound of jazz guitar. Read on, listen to the playlist with the article and don’t forget to leave your own picks in the comments.
◆ ◆ ◆
Ben Ratliff, former New York Times pop & jazz critic
Charlie Christian, “Swing to Bop”
Charlie Christian’s importance to the early jazz-guitar lineage is settled fact, but everything about his posthumously titled “Swing to Bop” remains uncodified. Here is a piece of life force from a jam session at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, in May 1941. It’s an amateur recording, an early bootleg; it’s been a gray-market item since its first illegal release in the ’50s. Christian enjambs and resolves his eighth-note flows over a rhythm section, altering rhythmic emphasis, listening at least four bars into the future. He phrases like modernist fiction: super-long sentences of wicked syntax followed by a dead-simple one, with provocative repetition; at the bridge of each chorus he explodes through the implications of the moving harmony, while shadowing and feinting with the drummer Kenny Clarke. Bop — that word in the title — didn’t quite exist yet in 1941. (The tune is really “Topsy,” recorded by his employer at the time, Benny Goodman.) The practice of playing an electric guitar in single-note patterns, like a horn, barely did either. Christian was 24 and would soon be dead of tuberculosis. There wasn’t a name for what he was doing here, and there isn’t a name for the way the music can make you feel.
◆ ◆ ◆
Miles Okazaki, guitarist
Grant Green, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”
Recording on a cold January night in New Jersey in 1962, this band lights a fire and fans the flames for over 10 minutes. In the hands of Grant Green, the guitar sings, shouts and joyfully swings through an epic, 18-chorus improvisation. After a quick take on Gershwin’s melody, Green eases into the solo, showing how he’s the master of using a raw, soulful tone to do a lot with a little. An exclamation a couple of minutes in lets you know that things will be heating up, as does Art Blakey’s relentless shuffle. The magic for me here is in the dynamic between the guitar and drums. The push and pull is irresistible — tap your foot or else. Three and a half minutes in, Green unleashes one of his signature repeating loops, as if to say, “Do I have your attention yet?” After he lands gracefully and seems to be winding down with some stutter steps, Blakey shouts “Go!,” urging him on for a final four rounds. This is the opposite of pretentious music — it’s from the heart and the earth, and if you surrender to the groove it can’t fail to move you.
