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I thought some of you may enjoy seeing Wayne Goin's Wes Montgomery video lesson in Issue #1 of Pure Guitar magazine, which has just gone online. A fine jazz guitarist in his own right, Dr. Goins is director of Jazz Studies at Kansas State University. First he speaks about Wes' enduring influence, and then demonstrates how to play Wes-style octaves. http://www.pureguita...wes-montgomery/

After recently posting some Charlie Christian-related interviews with Benny Goodman, Barney Kessel, and others on my website, I heard from a guitarist in Kansas named Wayne Goins. Dr. Goins had written a book on Charlie Christian and offered to send me a copy. Along with the book, he included his new CD, called "Chronicles of Carmela." I gave it a spin, and this album is amazingly good. Several tracks conjure images of Wes Montgomery and/or a young George Benson sitting in with Atlantic-era John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner, and there are also nods to Kenny Burrell and Freddie Green. During my twenty years as an editor for Guitar Player magazine, I listened to stacks of jazz guitar albums, and this one holds its own against the best of 'em. Goins himself composed, arranged, and produced all the songs. I've posted a review of it here: Wayne Goins: Chronicles of Carmela BTW, from my reading so far, Goins' book about Charlie Christian is well-written and immaculately researched.

Back in June 1978, while the great fusion band Dixie Dregs were on their "What If" Tour, I did interviews with Steve Morse and Andy West for Guitar Player magazine. Two weeks ago Steve gave me permission to retranscribe the original tapes, and it turns out that about 80% of the material was never published. A lot of the stuff in this 10,000-word interview is amazing! Steve starts by going way deep into his gear -- at the time, he was playing the hybrid Telecaster with a Strat neck and five pickups, all of which he assembled himself. Then he covers his background, with many funny and insightful stories that have never before been published. Highlights include his descriptions of the culture shock he endured after moving from Ypsilanti, Michigan, to Augusta, Georgia, how he kept getting kicked out of school, and his entry into the underground hippie scene in what he describes as a redneck community. There are also a lot of details about the evolution of his playing style and bands, the formation of the Dixie Dregs, the band’s first three releases -- The Great Spectacular, Free Fall, and What If -- and their strategy for recording. Steve also covers his approach to composing and how to arrange guitar with violin and bass. If you’re interested in seeing the whole conversation, it’s posted here: Jas Obrecht Music Archive: Steve Morse -- The Complete 1978 Dixie Dregs Interview

This is a wonderful movie about an extraordinary woman. I've shown it many times to students in my college-level courses in blues history, and it never fails to charm everyone in the room. It's right up there with the gospel-themed "Say Amen, Somebody" with Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey. This film is a great contribution to blues history and to our overall culture. A solid *****!

Jimi Hendrix never took formal lessons, learned to read music, or cracked open guitar instruction book. Like most players who learn by ear, he was influenced by recordings of other musicians. Based on the recollections of his dad and his girlfriend in London, Kathy Etchingham, I've just posted an article tracing the evolution of the music that influenced Jimi during his boyhood in Seattle and the album collection he amassed after moving to London. One of the best journalistic assignments of my life was co-authoring the book "My Son Jimi" with his dad, Al Hendrix. Al recalled that Jimi's love of music first kicked in during junior high, when he was sharing a room with his cousin Bobby. “They had a record player,” Al explained, “and Bobby remembers that that’s when Jimi became really interested in music. Jimi liked to listen to a 45 of Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog,’ and he liked Little Richards’ 45s. When he was around 14, Jimi went to an Elvis concert to see what it was all about. Jimi liked Elvis, and he sketched a picture of him." That sketch, which Al showed me, included many song titles from the rockabilly era, which gives us good insight into the first songs that thrilled young Hendrix. Al goes on to describe how and why Jimi began playing guitar and the songs he covered in his first band. Finally, he talks about acquiring their first stereo while Jimi was in high school, and how Jimi would watch TV and then jam along to blues records during the commercials. Interesting stuff from someone who was actually there! The second half is devoted to the albums Jimi purchased after he moved to London in 1966 and began making money. Kathy named the stores he shopped at, their home stereo system -- Bang & Olufsen turntable run through a Leak-70 amp and a pair of Lowther 30-watt speakers -- and best of all, Jimi's very wide-ranging purchases of albums. His jazz titles included Wes Montgomery’s A Day in the Life, Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery’s The Dynamic Duo, Jaki Byard’s Freedom Together and Sunshine of My Soul, the Free Spirits’ Out of Sight and Sound with Larry Coryell, Acker Bilk’s Lansdowne Folio, the Roland Kirk Quartet’s Rip, Rig and Panic, and the Charles Lloyd Quartet’s Journey Within. I’ve also included information from when the London collection was sold to the Experience Music Project during the 1990s. If you want check all this out, and see a very detailed listing of the albums Jimi actually owned, it’s all posted here: Jimi Hendrix's Personal Record Collection

Oops. Make that Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy.

One of the first electric guitarists on record, Floyd Smith played an important role in jazz from the 1930s through the 1950s. With the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra in the mid 1930s, he played both standard and Hawaiian-style guitar onstage. His solo on the band’s August 1937 recording of “Lazy Rhythm” is surely one of the very first uses of an electric guitar on a jazz recording. Then, during his March 16, 1939, session with Andy Kirk and His Mighty Clouds of Joy, Smith recorded “Floyd’s Guitar Blues,” the first hit record to feature a blues-style solo played on an electric guitar. Soon afterwards Benny Goodman tried to recruit Smith, but due to contractual obligations Smith was unable to accept his offer – in his place, he recommended Charlie Christian. During World War II, Smith jammed with Django Reinhardt in the Gypsy jazz guitarist’s Paris home. He spent much of the 1950s playing “knock-down, drag-out swing” with pioneering Hammond organist Wild Bill Davis, and then spent six years with Bill Doggett’s band. In 1979, I had the opportunity to do an hour-long interview with Floyd, who recounted his experiences with all of the musicians and recordings mentioned above. He also had many insights into touring in a black band the 1930s, Benny Goodman’s personality, the evolution of guitar playing, and his big band contemporaries Eddie Durham, Leonard Ware, Alvino Rey, Jimmy Shirley, Charlie Christian, and Teddy Bunn, whom he credited as “the original thumbpicker.” A very cool guy, Floyd also talked about his guitar collection and the fact that he’d been using the same tortoiseshell guitar pick for 25 years. If you’re interested in seeing the entire conversation, I’ve posted it here: Jas Obrecht Music Archive: Floyd Smith Interview

During the past few weeks, I’ve posted several Charlie Christian-related articles, including interviews with Benny Goodman, John Hammond, Barney Kessel, and Lynn Wheelwright, who found and now owns Charlie’s ES-250. I’ve just posted another Christian-related article, which includes the recollections of pioneering electric guitarist Eddie Durham and a scan of a handwritten letter from jazz guitarist Floyd Smith, who recorded “Floyd’s Guitar Blues” on electric guitar several months before Christian launched his recording career. Eddie Durham’s 1935 recording of “Hittin’ the Bottle” with Jimmie Lunceford has been credited as the first amplified jazz guitar solo on record. Long before that, though, he had been experimenting with ways to make a guitar sound louder onstage. With Benny Moten’s band in the 1920s, he’d carved out his acoustic guitar’s top and inserted a pie tin to act as a resonator, and played through a megaphone. Then he got a National guitar and lowered its action with an acoustic guitar bridge. Finally, he got a DeArmond pickup. “But they didn’t have sound amplifiers,” he remembered, “so I’d get any kind of amp I could find and sit in the corner of the stage and run the cord to the guitar, and that was it. And if we were in an auditorium, I’d go directly into the sound system. You couldn’t play rhythm like that because it was too loud. I used to blow out the lights in a lot of places. I’d just play solo work, and I think that at the time I was the only guy playing that kind of guitar in a jazz band.” In 1937, while on tour with Count Basie, Durham met both Charlie Christian and Floyd Smith. In our 1979 article in Guitar Player, Eddie remembered, “Charlie was only playing a little piano then – he wasn’t playing guitar. He wanted to know technical things, like how to use a pick a certain way. So I showed him how to sound like I did. I said, ‘Don’t ever use an up-stroke, which makes a tag-a-tag-a-tag sound. Use a downstroke – it gives a staccato sound, with no legato, and you sound like a horn.’” Durham went on to describe how he met Floyd Smith in Omaha, Nebraska, and convinced his mother to buy him a guitar. As soon as that article hit the newsstands, I received a hand-written letter from none other than Floyd Smith, responding to some of the things Durham had said. It’s an interesting piece of jazz guitar history. If you want to learn more about Durham, Christian, George Barnes, and the other early electric guitarists, I’ve posted the info here, along with a scan of the Floyd Smith letter: Jas Obrecht Music Archive

In 1940, 16-year-old Barney Kessel met and jammed with Charlie Christian, back home in Oklahoma City during a break from the Benny Goodman Sextet. Forty years later, I asked Barney if he’d be willing to talk about Charlie. Barney not only agreed, but spoke non-stop – and with great insight and enthusiasm – for nearly an hour. He covered many, many aspects of Charlie’s personality, technique, tone, recordings, and legacy. At the outset of our conversation, Kessel revealed, “Charlie Christian’s contribution to the electric guitar was as big as Thomas Edison’s contributions and Benjamin Franklin’s contributions in terms of changing the direction of the world. He changed the guitar world. He changed it not so much as being a superb guitar player, but rather the music that he made. And anyone that would study him can see where all the other guitar players who came after him evolved, that they came from his fountainhead. He was as much a way-shower as any philosophical giant that other people have come along and patterned themselves after.” In another passage, Kessel praised Christian’s harmonic knowledge: “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. And yet they’re refreshing and they fit, but he’s playing more chord changes in his lines, and also interesting ones, different ones than existed at the time.” Regarding Charlie’s tone, Kessel said, “It’s more like the velvety sound of some of the saxophone players and trombone players. 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. They’d think it was somehow a rather slightly percussive tenor sax, maybe even someone that is slap-tonguing it a little bit.” What set Charlie apart from his predecessors, Kessel observed, was that unlike players like George Van Eps, Allan Reuss, Dick McDonough, and Carl Kress, Christian had no background in playing banjo. Instead, Barney said, his major influence was Lester Young. “When I hear Charlie Christian, I don’t think of him as a guitar player. I think of him as a person who possessed a great amount of feeling for expressing jazz, and he happened to choose the guitar.” Barney reveals a wealth of other info about Charlie Christian and his contemporaries, as well as astute insights in what it means to be a musician. If you’d like to see the complete interview, published for the first time in its entirety, it’s at Jas Obrecht Music Archive: Barney Kessel on Charlie Christian

Wow. This is wonderful! Thanks so much. I'll be using this artwork for the posting. This Kessel interview, which I haven't listened to in 30 years, has never been fully transcribed before. There's some great stuff in it. It turns out that when Barney was 16, Charlie showed up at a gig in Oklahoma City, 1940, and watched Barney play electric guitar. Then Charlie borrowed his guitar and sat in with the band, which was called the Varsitonians. The next afternoon they jammed together at the club, and 40 years later Barney still had vivid recollections about Charlie's technique, how he talked, how he played. Barney was so excited about the subject, he talked non-stop for nearly 50 minutes. I'll probably post it tomorrow.

A couple of weeks ago I began posting a series of Charlie Christian-related interviews on my website at Jas Obrecht Music Archive. I am following up the Benny Goodman and John Hammond interviews with a long unpublished interview that I did with Barney Kessel in 1981. Midway through the interview, I asked Barney to name a half-dozen Charlie Christian cuts that he'd recommend, and here's what he said: "For one thing, it would be very easy just to get a two-record album on Columbia called Solo Flight: The Genius of Charlie Christian, which actually was not made under his name, but was repackaged by John Hammond. Now, that’s one. But that does not by any means contain all that he made or necessarily all of the best. I would say if you could get that album, and get another album on Columbia, Benny Goodman’s Sextets – I don’t know the name of it, but Columbia albums that have repackaged from singles, because Charlie never made an album. This might be under Benny Goodman’s name. There might be other takes on these things. Then there was a jam session that was recorded on a Wilcox-Gaye recording machine at one time. One label it came out on was called Vox. I don’t know if that is still under that name, but the record is available. And I know that if you buy it, on one side there will be that jam session at Minton’s, and on the other side it’s an example of early Dizzy Gillespie playing with Monk. The album I’m talking about is where he was jamming all night, and one of the songs on there is called 'Stompin’ at the Savoy.' "Now, in addition to that, there are about four sides that he made that would be part of some album – someone has collated these things – but he made four on acoustic guitar with a clarinet player named Edmund Hall. It’s the Edmund Hall Four. Edmund Hall played clarinet, and I think Meade Lux Lewis was on celeste, of all things. And then there was a string bass, and then Charlie played non-electric guitar. And that’s really the body of his work, because he died very young and did not record very much. [Author’s note: Charlie Christian also appears on many tracks of the From Spirituals to Swing box set.]" This interview pre-dates CDs, and I'd like to include the names -- and cover images, if anyone has them -- of the LPs Barney's refering to. Does anyone know which records he's referring to when he mentions the Goodman Sextet on Columbia, the "Vox" album with Christian on one side and Dizzy on the other, or the anthology that has the Edmund Hall sides? Someone at the Steve Hoffman Forum suggested I ask here. Thanks!

In 1979, a couple of years before my interviews with Benny Goodman and John Hammond, I located and interviewed both Eddie Durham and Floyd Smith. Both conversations focused on their early uses of the electric guitar. I also asked Eddie about the homemade pie-pan resonator he used for some of his pre-Jimmie Lunceford guitar solos with Benny Moten's band. I'll let you know when I transcribe 'em and post 'em.

Thanks to Rooster_Ties for mentioning my Benny Goodman interview about Charlie Christian. I’ve just posted the companion piece to the Goodman interview. In this previously unpublished Q/A, legendary producer John Hammond provides interesting recollections about meeting Charlie in Oklahoma City, where Charlie’s mother was working as a chambermaid in the hotel where Hammond was staying. With some difficulty, Hammond recalled, he talked his brother-in-law Benny Goodman into paying Charlie’s way to Los Angeles in August 1939 and then had to sneak the guitarist onto the bandstand while Benny was having dinner. As John tells it, “We set up the amplifier on the bandstand – luckily, there was an electrical outlet there. And poor Benny got up and got back to the stand and saw Charlie Christian there. He just had a fit! He beat off ‘Rose Room’ – I guess he figured maybe Charlie wouldn’t know ‘Rose Room.’ And if Charlie didn’t know ‘Rose Room,’ you’d never guess it, because 47 minutes later – that’s how long ‘Rose Room’ lasted. I think that was probably the most explosive session I ever heard with Benny’s group.” Asked if there were any important jazzers playing electric guitar before Charlie joined Goodman, Hammond said, “Yeah, there were two. One was Leonard Ware in New York. I had him on my Spirituals to Swing concert, in 1938, but unfortunately the machine in which he recorded had a ‘wow’ in it, so we were never able to put those things out. He was very good, but he was not in Charlie’s class. Charlie was an original. There’s never been anybody like Charlie on the guitar. He was a complete revolutionary. The other jazz guitar player was Floyd Smith, but he played a Hawaiian guitar, you know. And Hawaiian guitar is bad enough, but amplified, it was excruciating!” Hammond also covered a darker side of Goodman’s relationship with Christian, claiming that Charlie, in fact, was the sole composer of “Flying Home,” and that Goodman basically abandoned the guitarist once he became too ill to perform with the Sextet. In a lighter moment, Hammond described Charlie as a “wonderful” and “pretty naïve” guy, and added, “The two great guitar players in jazz, for my dough, were Eddie Lang and Charlie Christian. And they couldn’t have been more different, but they were both complete originals.” You can read our whole conversation here: Jas Obrecht Music Archive: John Hammond on Charlie Christian