07/29/2026
Remembering Charlie Christian (July 29, 1916 – March 2, 1942)
“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
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?
Source: John Harris
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