A real modern: Charlie Christian, the world’s first electric guitarist
“He wasn’t the most imposing figure in the world, but by gosh, when he sat down to play the guitar he was something… He was way ahead of his time, and a joy to listen to.”
Benny Goodman
His TB worsened. Contrary to the doctors’ advice, he carried on drinking and smoking; according to one account, he was doing so even in the sanatorium. When he died, like so many musicians of his era, he was buried in an unmarked grave. It took years for his reputation to posthumously take flight, but it eventually did: seventy years after his death, any halfway capable record shop will sell you a CD titled The Genius Of The Electric Guitar, whose packaging features a reproduction of his death certificate. “Male…black…24 years,” it says, though he was actually 26. As is often the case with such paperwork, it suggests a tragedy so routine as to have been pretty much anonymous — but the music inside is anything but. Its author was a visionary: his music, and the way he played, pointed to a world in which we still live.
Charlie Christian was a guitar player, at time when guitar-playing was not something much talked about. For sure, before he appeared, Django Reinhardt was acclaimed for bringing the acoustic guitar to the fore of jazz, and a Philadelphian named Eddie Lang — who died aged 30 — was the first American to follow suit. In 1938, Eddie Durham — who was from Texas, and famed chiefly for being the arranger of Glenn Miller’s In The Mood — became the first musician to play a recorded solo on an electric model, threading rather clumsy lines through a song titled Hittin’ The Bottle. But Christian went much, much further, decisively putting the electric guitar alongside jazz’s staple solo instruments, minting a breathtaking new virtuosity, and confirming a whole host of new possibilities. What he did led on not just to Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, and the other great jazz guitarists, but further still: to Buddy Guy, Scotty Moore, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Mick Ronson, Jonny Greenwood, and so many others. The future stirred in everything he played, and one other marvel merits comment: that he achieved so much in under two years.
How strange, too, that his essential vision has endured, well beyond the parameters of jazz. The electric guitar remains an icon of both music, and design. Models invented over half a century ago are still the uncontested best; the sound of a vibrating string being passed through an electro-magnetic pick-up into an amplifier remains one of the pre-eminent noises of the industrialised world. You would not be exaggerating if you said that in the late 20th century, it came to be understood as the quintessential sound of free human expression, making the electric guitar the most ubiquitous musical instrument anyone has ever invented.
The names of its biggest manufacturers — Gibson, Fender, Rickenbacker — still evoke no end of glamour; people still fall into animated conversation about great guitar solos; at the peak of their renown, the best lead guitarists have been over-excitedly hailed as virtual Gods. And when did all this start? Right at the end of the 1930s, one night in California, as Philip Larkin later described:
When critic John Hammond smuggled Charlie Christian through the kitchen and on to the stand of the Victor Hugo in Los Angeles in August 1939, he was unwittingly setting one of those legendary scenes that jazz abounds in. The leader, Benny Goodman, was having dinner. Arriving back, he was furious to see this 20 year-old gangling, unpolished Negro planted, amplifier and all, among the Sextet: he might have ordered him out. Instead, he called for Rose Room. It was a wise decision. That was the longest Rose Room Benny ever played, forty-five minutes of trading new exciting phrases with a jazz stylist of complete originality. It was not only that amplification brought the guitar at one stride into the solo line: Christian’s long-running single-note phrases and seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary of riffs were utterly contemporary — even, perhaps, a hint of things to come.
This is beautifully put, but wrong in one important regard. Given that Charlie Christian was not just world’s first electric guitarist, but a pioneer of the textures and techniques that would come to define jazz’s creative adulthood, that last ‘perhaps’ is misplaced.
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Charlie Christian was born in 1916 in Bonham, Texas, a small town that once the home of the 19th century outlaw John Wesley Hardin. His family soon moved to Oklahoma City. He was a childhood friend of the black writer and novelist Ralph Ellison, who later recalled him painstakingly making ad hoc stringed instruments with cigar boxes. He and his two brothers were encouraged by their blind father to go busking, so as to earn the family much-needed money: at first, Charlie danced, though when his father died, he inherited his guitar. He was 12 years old.
Those who knew him described him as reserved, and laconic. Using an American slang word for an unsophisticated out-of-towner, Benny Goodman said he was “an impossible rube”. No film footage of him exists, and photographs of Christian do not tell us much, aside from the fact that he tended to stare intently at his instrument while he played it, in the manner of someone operating complex machinery. Here, one perhaps gets to heart of the paradox at the heart of great musicianship: that to sound unbounded and instinctive requires real discipline, and steel.
He played a Gibson ES-150: to all intents and purposes, the first proper electric guitar. It was introduced in 1936; its tone was warm, bass-heavy, and sometimes close to the tender honk of a saxophone, which defined Christian’s jumping-off point. In contrast to the flash schools of guitar-playing that came in his wake, he did not use vibrato, nor bent notes: what he played sounds like the acme of understatement, as modest and subtle as he was. But when he started to really soar — as on the self-explanatory 168 seconds titled Solo Flight, recorded with the full Benny Goodman orchestra in march 1941 — you can almost hear his quiet delight at what he was discovering. As one jazz history later put it, “to this presynthesiser generation, electricity was a practical matter, linked with streetlamps and lightning rods, not musical performance.” Things aligned so that a twentysomething from the back end of nowhere decisively fused one with the other, and how incredible was that?
Goodman, the clarinetist and bandleader who was Christian’s boss, was an ideal mentor. He was the first jazz musician to bring the music to Carnegie Hall: his concert there on January 16th 1938, which paid tribute to the music’s beginnings as well as showcasing where it was headed, has long been hailed as the occasion when jazz was confirmed as a modern art form, conscious of both its own history, and the imperative to develop. In its wake, Goodman began to assume the mantle of an experimentalist, recruiting not just Christian, but the vibraphone player Lionel Hampton, whose playing added another beguilingly new sound to his music. By 1940, he was extending his reach into the classical repertoire; when you review his career history, it’s clear he was a restless innovator, more than worthy of the same high-art accolades that were later given to the giants of modern jazz.
The music made by Goodman’s ensembles — which ranged from trios to a full orchestra — is of a piece with what was created by Duke Ellington and Count Basie, in that it pulled jazz away from its good-time beginnings, into something altogether more sophisticated: not just more complex, and virtuosic, but decidedly modern, and urban. But the best Goodman material sounds that bit more edgy and iconoclastic — and in that sense, Christian’s unprecedented contribution sums up what the music embodied. Electricity is only half the story: within his playing, there were also pointers to the great leaps forward that were about to propel jazz somewhere new — harmonic innovations, and the kind of riffs and runs that no-one, on whatever instrument, had yet played. What lay around the corner, of course, was bebop; and in addition to all his other accomplishments, Christian was around when it started to stir.
Which brings us to Minton’s Playhouse, on the first floor of the Cecil Hotel, in Harlem: an after-hours hang-out where such musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and the drummer Kenny Clarke would jam together, rapidly alighting on a new musical form. During the early summer of 1941, in between playing with Goodman, Christian would sprint uptown to join in. “Charlie Christian was in there a lot,” Clarke once recalled. “He and Monk were hand in glove. If Charlie had lived, he would have been a real modern.” He arguably already was, as his soloing on three recordings from Minton’s suggests. Particularly on a version of an Eddie Durham piece titled Topsy, you can hear the most incredible sound: of fingers finding possibilities no-one else had yet conceived, let alone played. And Clarke’s drumming is perfect: the product of someone being led into virgin territory, rising to the moment, and loving every second. The essences of bebop are all there: this was not the sound of dissonance and destruction against which musical conservatives like Larkin railed, but an exultant music, full of joy and freedom.
In the context of Christian’s fate, all that highlights a tragic contrast — for while he played into the night at Minton’s, he was ailing. As Larkin wrote:
Promotion to the big time and $150 a week brought with it chicks, drink, drugs and reawakening of tuberculosis. Most of the time he sat playing the chords with the band, then dashed down to Minton’s to play with the young boppers. By the end of 1941 he was in hospital. In March 1942 he died.
In 1966, the American magazine DownBeat belatedly included Charlie Christian in its Hall Of Fame. In 1990, in recognition of the trail he had blazed for the electric guitar, the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame followed suit. In 1994, a headstone — featuring the inscription “your music will never be forgotten” — and plaque were placed on the presumed site of his grave in Texas. There is also a Charlie Christian Avenue in Oklahoma City: a shabby looking out-of-town strip whose most remarkable feature is a huge soap shop, though it’s probably the thought that counts.
Whatever, it is only right that he is remembered, but sad that he is still to be celebrated as much as he deserves. So little time, so much done, and a legacy revived whenever anyone picks up, and plugs in: more than most jazz musicians, Charlie Christian’s achievements need shouting about again and again.