I heard this record when I was very, very young. My stepfather had just met my mother, and he happened to be a guitar player who was in love with Charlie Christian. And those records, he played all the wax off of them! He played them day in, day out. There was another artist, in fact a British artist… he was blind… George Shearing! I heard all of his too. That sound he created – those records made a big impression on me. But, of course, he was a pianist!

I was only seven years old. Here’s the situation. We lived in a house in the back of a hotel that my grandfather and grandmother used to own. When they died, we moved from that house, which was actually the maid’s quarters. It had no electricity, the whole place was run by gas lamps and things like that – way behind the times! – we moved into the hotel, which had electricity. So at that point my stepfather got his guitar out of the pawn shop, and his record-player out of the pawn shop, and plugged them in! I was around electricity for the first time in my life.

That was the first time I heard music in my home, because there wasn’t even radio before. When I heard the guitar, I wanted to play it; but my hands weren’t big enough. It was my stepfather who found a ukulele in a garbage can – somebody had smashed it up and thrown it out. My stepfather put strings on it, painted it, and taught me the first few chords.

One thing that was evident from bar one: everyone wanted to play like Charlie Christian. I heard lots of other guitar players attempt to play like him. But they were not right on the money like Christian – he had a great sound, and he could swing like the devil. And his formulas were like saxophone players’. That’s what he was at first, a saxophone player. When I started playing guitar, I only knew one guitar sound, so I was reaching for that.

Some of my later friends and constituents in the music world, like Kenny Burrell, even Barney Kessel, they took some of his style but they didn’t have quite… Kenny had a great sound, and Barney searched for it in the early days, but gave up on it. That didn’t stop him becoming one of the great guitar players of our time. He was a fabulous fellow. I did a tour of Europe with him and Jim Hall in 1967 and I learned gobs of things from him about the guitar.

This was after my time with Jack McDuff. Jack was a learning tool for me. He had no confidence in me as a guitar player – I was too raw, too new. I lacked knowledge of what was going on musically. It was my first tour out of Pittsburgh and I was only 19. So I didn’t have much knowledge of harmony and theory, and bebop, which was what I needed. Every day, he really put the pressure on me. I have to thank him for making me do something I had never done before – practice! I had good ears as a kid, but I had not worked out theories and reached for technique. Back then, I didn’t know how the great players reached that stage. Now I know! A lot of practice.

Charlie Christian playing with Benny Goodman was a real test for Goodman. He lost a lot of jobs in the south because people there wouldn’t hire a mixed band. But he was popular enough to stay working in the other parts of America, so the south was not essential to him. I ended up working in his band years later. Can you imagine? It was awesome to be in the middle of where Charlie Christian had been. But we had gone past that era, we were ready to move on. I went on some dates with his band and then I went into the studio and recorded Breezin’; and when that came out, it was like a rocket. I had no time left to play with Benny Goodman!

Back in the 1960s, my friend John Hammond – who had discovered Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman – told me: ‘Jazz artists don’t sell records, George’. I said, ‘How strange. I think if you put something on the record that people want to hear, they’ll buy it.’ Years later, after Breezin’, he came to my house and said ‘George, you were right.’ I’d forgotten I’d said that to him!

The Album

Charlie Christian With the Benny Goodman Sextet And Orchestra

Columbia (1955)

PERSONNEL Charlie Christian (g), Benny Goodman (cl), Lionel Hampton (vib), Cootie Williams (t), Georgie Auld (ts), Count Basie, Johnny Guarneri and others (p), Artie Bernstein (b), Dave Tough, Jo Jones and others (d).

TRACKS ‘Blues in B’, ‘Wholly Cats’, ‘Till Tom Special’, ‘Gone With What Wind’, ‘Breakfast Feud’, ‘Air Mail Special’, ‘Waitin’ For Benny’, ‘A Smooth One’, ‘Seven Come Eleven’, ‘Six Appeal’, ‘Gone With What Draft’ and ‘Solo Flight’.

This article originally appeared in the June 2019 issue of Jazzwise magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today!