29/07/2024
A Very Happy Birthday to Charlie Christian from Old Friends Radio - www.OldFriendsRadio.org -
Charles "Charlie" Henry Christian (July 29, 1916 – March 2, 1942) was a swing and jazz guitarist. He was among the first electric guitarists and was a key figure in the development of bebop and cool jazz. Charlie gained national exposure as a member of the Benny Goodman Sextet and Orchestra from August 1939 to June 1941. His single-string technique, combined with amplification, helped bring the guitar out of the rhythm section and into the forefront as a solo instrument. For this, Charlie is often credited with leading to the development of the lead guitar role in musical ensembles and bands.
Charlie Christian was born in Bonham, Texas. His family moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, when he was a small child. His parents were musicians. Charlie had two brothers: Edward, born in 1906, and Clarence, born in 1911. Edward, Clarence, and Charlie were all taught music by their father, Clarence Henry Christian. Clarence Henry was struck blind by fever, and in order to support the family he and the boys worked as buskers, on what the Christians called "busts." He would have them lead him into the better neighborhoods, where they would perform for cash or goods. When Charles was old enough to go along, he first entertained by dancing. Later Charlie learned to play the guitar, inheriting his father's instruments upon his death when Charlie was 12.
Charlie attended Douglass School in Oklahoma City, where he was further encouraged in music by an instructor, Zelia N. Breaux. Charlie wanted to play tenor saxophone in the school band, but she insisted he try trumpet instead. As Charlie believed playing the trumpet would disfigure his lip, he quit to pursue his interest in baseball, at which he excelled.
In a 1978 interview with biographer Craig McKinney, Clarence Christian said that in the 1920s and 1930s, Edward Christian led a band in Oklahoma City as a pianist and had a shaky relationship with the trumpeter James Simpson. Around 1931, Simpson instructed guitarist "Bigfoot" Ralph Hamilton to secretly school the younger Charlie in jazz. Hamilton taught him to solo on three songs, "Rose Room", "Tea for Two", and "Sweet Georgia Brown". When the time was right, he took Charlie to one of the many after-hours jam sessions along "Deep Deuce" in Oklahoma City, where Edward's band was performing, and after some encouragement, Edward allowed Charlie to play. Edward was surprised that Charlie knew the tunes, which were well received by the club.
Charlie soon was performing locally and on the road throughout the Midwest, including states as far away as North Dakota and Minnesota. By 1936 he was playing electric guitar and had become a regional attraction. According to the record producer John Hammond, Charlie Christian jammed with many of the big-name performers traveling through Oklahoma City, including Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, and Mary Lou Williams, the pianist for Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy.
In 1939, Charlie Christian auditioned for John Hammond, who recommended him to bandleader Benny Goodman, who was only the fourth white bandleader to feature Black musicians in his live band. Goodman had previously heard electric guitarists Leonard Ware and Floyd Smith, among others, and he unsuccessfully tried to buy Smith's contract from bandleader Andy Kirk.
There are multiple accounts of Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman's first meeting. The former recalled in a 1940 article in Metronome magazine, "I guess neither one of us liked what I played." Despite this, Charlie Christian claimed that Goodman invited him to a show that evening. According to another account, Hammond decided to install Charlie Christian as the band's guitarist without consulting Goodman.
Benny Goodman's band, including Charlie Christian on guitar, played that night at Victor Hugo's restaurant in Los Angeles. The bandleader called out "Rose Room", a tune he assumed Charlie Christian did not know. However, Charlie knew the tune and took an unprecedented twenty choruses of improvisation. Benny Goodman hired him that night as a member of the band.. In the course of a few days, Christian went from making $2.50 a night to $150 a week.
Charlie Christian joined the newly formed Benny Goodman Sextet in September 1939, which included Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Artie Bernstein, and Nick Fatool.
Amateur recordings made in September 1939 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by Jerry Newhouse, a Benny Goodman aficionado, capture the newly hired Charlie Christian while on the road with Benny Goodman and feature Goodman's tenor sax player Jerry Jerome and then-local bassist Oscar Pettiford. Taking multiple solos, Charlie Christian shows much the same improvisational skills later captured on the Minton's and Monroe's recordings in 1941, suggesting that he had already matured as a musician. The Minneapolis recordings include "Stardust", "Tea for Two", and "I've Got Rhythm", the latter a favorite of bop composers and jammers.
By February 1940, Charlie Christian dominated the jazz and swing guitar polls and was elected to the Metronome All-Stars. In the spring of 1940, Benny Goodman laid off most of his band, but he retained Charlie, and in the fall of that year, Goodman led a sextet with Charlie Christian, Count Basie, longtime Duke Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams, former Artie Shaw tenor saxophonist Georgie Auld and later drummer Dave Tough. This all-star band dominated the jazz polls in 1941, including another election to the Metronome All-Stars for Charlie Christian.
Charlie's work on Benny Goodman's sextet sides "Soft Winds", "Till Tom Special", and "A Smo-o-o-oth One" show his use of a few well-placed melodic notes. His work on the Sextet's recordings of the ballads "Stardust", "Memories of You", "Poor Butterfly", "I Surrender Dear" and "On the Alamo" and his work on "Profoundly Blue" with the Edmond Hall Celeste Quartet, 1941, show hints of what was later called cool jazz. Although credited for very few, Charlie Christian composed many of the original tunes recorded by the Benny Goodman Sextet.
Charlie Christian was an important contributor to the music that became known as bop, or bebop. Some of the participants in early after-hours affairs at Minton's Playhouse, an after-hours club located in the Hotel Cecil at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem where bebop was born, credit Charlie with the name bebop, citing his humming of phrases as the onomatopoetic origin of the term.
Examples of Charlie Christian's bebop playing can be heard in a series of recordings made at Minton's Playhouse by Jerry Newman, a student at Columbia University, on a portable disk recorder in 1941, in which Christian was accompanied by Joe Guy on trumpet, Kenny Kersey on piano and Kenny Clarke on drums. Charlie Christian's use of tension and release, a technique employed by Lester Young, Count Basie, and later bop musicians, is also present on Newman's recording of "Stompin' at the Savoy." Further recordings were made in 1941, shortly before Charlie Christian's illness and death, at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, another late-night jazz haunt in Harlem, with Oran "Hot Lips" Page. Other recordings include the tenor sax player Don Byas. Beboppers "Dizzy" Gillespie and Thelonious Monk were regulars at the jam sessions, with Monk a regular in the Minton's house band.
Kenny Clarke claimed that "Epistrophy" and "Rhythm-a-Ning" were compositions by Charlie Christian, which Charlie played with Clarke and Thelonious Monk at Minton's jam sessions. The "Rhythm-a-Ning" line is heard on "Down on Teddy's Hill" and behind the introduction on "Guy's Got to Go" from the Newman recordings. It is also a line from Mary Lou Williams's "Walkin' and Swingin'". Clarke further commented that Charlie Christian first showed him the chords to "Epistrophy" on a ukulele.
The Minton's and Uptown House recordings have been packaged under a number of different titles, including After Hours and The Immortal Charlie Christian. On the recordings, Christian can be heard taking multiple choruses on a single tune, playing long stretches of melodic ideas with ease.
Charlie fathered a daughter, Billie Jean Christian (December 23, 1932 – July 19, 2004) by Margretta Lorraine Downey of Oklahoma City.
In the late 1930s, Charlie Christian contracted tuberculosis, and in early 1940 he was hospitalized for a short period in which the Benny Goodman group was on hiatus because of Goodman's back trouble. Goodman was hospitalized in the summer of 1940 after a brief stay at Santa Catalina Island, California, where the band stayed when they were on the West Coast.
Charlie Christian returned home to Oklahoma City in late July 1940 and returned to New York City in September 1940. In early 1941, Charlie resumed his hectic lifestyle, heading to Harlem for late-night jam sessions after finishing gigs with the Benny Goodman Sextet and Orchestra in New York City. In June 1941 Charlie was admitted to Seaview Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium on Staten Island in New York City. He was reported to be making progress, and DownBeat magazine reported in February 1942 that he and Cootie Williams were starting a band.
After a visit to the hospital that same month by the tap dancer and drummer Marion Joseph "Taps" Miller, Charlie Christian declined in health. Charlie Christian passed of tuberculosis and joined his Old Friends on March 2, 1942, at the age of 25. Charlie was buried in an unmarked grave in Bonham, Texas. A Texas State Historical Commission Marker and headstone were placed in Gates Hill Cemetery in 1994. The location of the historical marker and headstone was disputed, and in March 2013, Fannin County, Texas, recognized that the marker was in the wrong spot and that Christian was buried under the concrete slab.
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