![]() ![]() Starting with a base of folk and blues – in fact, Fahey’s style has been described as American Primitive, a term coined to define a self-taught, minimalist style prominent in those genres – his music incorporated everything from Eastern ragas and cosmic psychedelia to soaring modern classical and eerie funereal notes.ĭespite the myriad influences, the sound itself was oxymoronically simple: sometimes invented on the spot, Fahey’s brilliance typically played out on an unaccompanied steel-string acoustic guitar. The aural equivalent of leftovers’ night, his style basically threw everything in a pot, simmered their disparate flavors into each other and served it. The music of acoustic guitarist John Fahey went beyond original and unique it was flat-out weird. He died in 1942, of tuberculosis, at just 25 years old. ![]() Unfortunately, Christian didn’t get to witness the outsized influence he’d have on jazz. Notably, his playing also was decidedly horn-like, so much so that people who heard (but not saw) him play often thought he was playing the saxophone. He was wrong, and the epic wail that followed made Christian a band member and, shortly thereafter, the electric guitar a popular mainstay in jazz starting in the early 1940s.īoth “Rose Room” and “ Solo Flight”, Christian’s other major showpiece with the Benny Goodman Band, displayed the sort of intuitive swing and fluid single-note runs that came to define the electric guitar’s contribution to the genre. When Goodman noticed, he started playing a ditty called “Rose Room” that he assumed Christian didn’t know. During a break at a concert in Beverly Hills, Hammond, as clandestinely as possible, slid Christian onto the stage and into the band. Luckily for jazz fans, talent scout John Hammond insisted. So when an associate asked him to consider adding a talented young musician – an afficionado of the them-fledgling electric guitar – Goodman was disinterested. ![]() In 1939, his group was among the most popular in the U.S., and he wasn’t keen on fixing something that wasn’t broke. Benny Goodman, the jazz clarinetist whose bandleading skills earned him the nickname “The King of Swing,” was unconvinced. ![]()
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