How Charlie Christian taught the world to swing

Stupidly, I failed to pick up Columbia's magnificent boxed set of Charlie Christian's recordings when it was first released a couple of years ago. I am indebted accordingly to Charles Bolden, a sometime jazz reviewer for these pages, who on finding this out insisted on lending me his copy.

I have spent much of the past week listening to it with an ever-increasing sense of wonder. It is in my view an absolutely essential buy for any serious fan of jazz, the electric guitar, or both.

The reason I didn't buy it on release was that I already had what I considered to be a pretty fair Charlie Christian compilation CD, and most of the bonus tracks were alternate takes. I am increasingly dubious of the value of many of the extras that now routinely appear on reissue CDs, but these additional tracks are of an entirely different order. Listen to these discs and you can hear not only the future of the electric guitar being mapped out - the beginnings of Jimi Hendrix's approach are almost as clearly audible here as Barney Kessel's or Grant Green's - but the beginnings of the transition from swing to bebop.

Nothing I have previously read on Christian puts him into context quite as well as the accompanying booklet to this set. What is generally known about him is that he was, though not the first electric guitarist, one of the first, and the first significant one in jazz, and that as well as cutting some exhilarating sides with Benny Goodman he participated in the jam sessions at Minton's with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and others that are generally credited with being the starting point of what we now call bebop. He died of tuberculosis, in March of 1942, at the age of just 25.

The tacit assumption has generally been that Christian's role in this revolution was essentially a supporting one. However, Peter Broadbent's essay here argues that Monk, Parker and Gillespie were strongly influenced by Christian, and that elements of his playing are prominently present in their own idiosyncratic styles.

He may well be right. Certainly, to listen to these sides is to hear a restless, questioning musical mind developing at an extraordinary pace, and all without ever losing that solid bluesiness that is the bedrock of virtually all truly durable jazz.