By Max Babi

The jazz guitar has had a strangely checkered history in the last century or so. Checkered because it has reached dizzying heights with the likes of Charlie Byrd, Charlie Christian, to some extent Les Paul and unquestionably, the inimitable Django Rheinhardt, et al. And yet, it has sometimes been relegated to the backbenchers' crowd when the popularity of jazz instruments is taken into account. The jazz piano, brass instruments, woodwinds and even the drums seem to be much more popular than the guitar. One cannot deny the fact that the jazz guitar aficionados have never really numbered in millions, nor have they constituted a forever-perpetuating clan of diehard fans who could swear by the guitar. The guitar became too easily identified with popular music, perhaps. Shades of rock music, or a vague resemblance, can put some jazz lovers off, perhaps.

The acoustic guitar had dropped out from the race long ago, and the acoustic amplified guitar remained faithfully with the jazz musicians, whilst it was the electric guitar popularized mainly by magically gifted bluesmen like B.B. King or Albert King, or Freddy King et al, which went through many weird avatars -thus putting off more and more incipient jazz guitar fans. The explosion of rock music, with the impulsive antics of rock stars didn't help either. Some of queer shaped guitars looking like pieces straight out of a 'star wars' type of intergalactic bar room, with their abominable color schemes gave the heebie-jeebies to many a genuine guitar fan indeed.

Jazz guitar during the heyday of jazz, meaning the era between the waning of the big bands / the swing genre of jazz, and the birth of cool, even the parallel development of hard bebop, found itself dragged to the fore indeed. This may not have been an isolated case of sudden coming into focus for an instrument so consistently neglected, since there was something similar happening to the other instruments too.

The trumpet even before the wild popularity of Miles Davis, had been an instrument holding fairly good importance as a solo instrument. So was the piano, and the clarinet. The jazz guitar as a performer's instrument, during those days might have been at par with the vibraphone or marimba, perhaps. There's perhaps no need to consult the sales charts or examine the Top Twenty records. The fact that there were only a handful of jazz guitarists, who were not merely accompanists, but forceful soloists, speaks volumes for the sparse popularity of the instrument.

All these reasons and many more not so conspicuous factors ensured that the mainstream jazz musicians didn't look upon the jazz guitar as an essential instrument. Even when the collective popularity of the jazz guitar was rising in the '60s, there was a continual sort of tug of war, between jazzmen and jazz critics regarding the place of the jazz guitar in the general scheme of things. Very few realized that the future of music seemed to be determined more by recording company executives and marketing experts than by the musicians themselves or the critics. Many desirable outcomes may have materialized this way, but the jazz guitar seems to have suffered during this spate of commercial promotion. The reasons are not impossible to decipher either.

For instance, some of the leading lights during that era who really gave new directions to Jazz e.g. Miles Davis, Cannoball Adderley, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk et al., would have stood no nonsense regarding what the public wants to hear. They believed strongly that public wanted to hear whatever they played. In reality, when the marketing experts arrived, a whole lot of mushy-sounding strings were often superimposed upon a genuinely powerful jazz improvisation, just to soften its image. Or to boost its sales, for a different new class of music buyers wanted these 'softened' pieces. The advent of elevator music, the lounge music, and the lunch-hour background music etc., did create a push-and-pull atmosphere wherein jazzy improvisations and true talent took a backseat and marketing gimmicks took over with an iron hand.

That sort of nonsense did happen with younger jazz guitarists struggling for survival and looking for the right direction to take. A good example would be Wes Montgomery, whose fate as a jazz guitarist was shaky from the start, eversince he started playing popular tunes [albeit he did impart his wonderful sense of improvisation to the chewed out melodies]. Jazz diehards might have wanted this genius to concentrate more on the legitimate jazz standards rather than sentimental movie themes and worse still, tunes straight out of the pop charts. Music arrangers and composers polished such recordings to such an extent by drowning out the original performance in a sea of strange un-jazzy background scores, that some of the guitarists might have wondered privately if these were their own performances… worse was to follow with the premature death of Wes Montgomery because George Benson, who followed in the steps of Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery both, had to put up with much more insolent interference in the name of marketability. Probably Benson went the same way as Herbie Hancock did with his piano -too much funky music killed all jazz out of his performances. Nevertheless it is definitely to Benson's credit that he has maintained a crucial, razor's edge type balance between the funky sound and the blues-tinged improvisations, for instance, in most of his albums recorded during the '60s when jazz-rock had overpowered pure jazz styles right off the market for a while. In his album The Boss Guitar, he has performed some pretty intellectually fulfilling sort of improvisation-based jamming with Bro. Jack McDuff on the electric organ. That remains as a favorite album of mine, since all of it sounds so radically different from the usual The Shadow Of Your Smile sort of ditties, deeply mushy and overdubbed with strings, making Benson himself sound like a sideman and not the leader of his own band!

But then to the true jazz lovers, all this crass commercialization and market savvy has in reality robbed them of legitimate jazz, and brought in distortion in the basic structure of jazz music too, albeit in a transient manner. It is a separate matter that the popularity of these hybrid varieties was short-lived.

The late '60s and '70s saw too much of all this experimentation and dalliance with dazzling sort of packaging to allow normal growth of jazz mainstream varieties. This occurred in the wake of jazz-rock fusion, when hordes of youthful listeners had formed a new chunk of record-buying public in the jazz category. Too many performers started singing, one also noticed, instead of playing their hearts out on the instrument of their choice : never mind if singing skills were not really exalted. The listener felt cheated outright, when more than half of the tunes on an album turned out to be commercial and needlessly experimentative. Quincy Jones the brilliant arranger, has also gone through such a phase. That sober tenor sax specialist Grover Washington Jr., has also disappointed his fans this way. If the effect on listeners was so profoundly irritating, one wonders what agonies the artists themselves would have endured during those times… One wonders if geniuses of the rare gifted ability like Wes Montgomery burned out in the prime of life, tortured and mauled by this needless and crass commercial exploitation. One also wonders what could have been the outcome, if recording companies' had given a free hand to these brilliant jazzmen at least once in a while.

The tradition of expressing the musically creative ideas, lending impossibly complex improvisations to the familiar jazz standards began with Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, even to some extent with Les Paul. However later on, a guitarist who touched dizzying heights with the clean and crisp sound, was Howard Roberts, whose guitar sound has always been rather distinctively melodious. Jim Rainey, Jim Hall, Barney Kessel, Grant Green and Tal Farlow were some other jazz guitarists who lent their own personal signatures to guitar playing. Johnny Smith also recorded some pretty good albums during those years.

Great heights were reached by the Electric Blues guitarists who somehow seem to be excluded religiously when it comes to jazz guitars. This is yet another unresolved controversy -whether blues guitar can be a part of the jazz guitar heritage or not…

Another strange fact, allied and relevant is the fact that even the best of the big bands which specialized in performing the blues and swing era numbers with a bluesy touch, hardly ever used a guitarist as a soloist. New Orleans type bands and Dixieland bands often had the banjo or mandolin as a solo performing instrument, a legacy of the blue grass music perhaps, but none had a guitar in the forefront. It seems as if the melodic improvisation on the guitar was not the 'done thing' during those times. Perhaps the band leaders thought the fluffy sounds of the acoustic-amplified guitar could not have carried the melody in contrast to the thundering herds…. the brass sections which always brought the roof down, figuratively speaking. But then Lionel Hampton's vibraphone seems to have done that consistently. Why not the guitar?

More perplexing is the fact that during the 40s and prior to that too, big bands like Benny Goodman's did utilize the wild swinging styles of jazz guitarists like Charlie Christian, who was amongst the first pioneers as far as the status of the guitar as a solo instrument was concerned. Charlie's career was abruptly cut short by tuberculosis, a tragic event for the future of the jazz guitar indeed. His sudden departure left a sore lacuna in the development of this excellent instrument as a pillar in the imposing edifice of jazz. The story of jazz would have been different, had he lived longer.

Amongst the stalwarts who have played the jazz guitars in various styles under a long list of leaders, but has not really gone under, is Kenny Burrell whose emphasis on the melodic patterns more than any other aspect of jazz music, affords him an outstanding position in style and presentation.

There was thus a dizzying up and down movement for the jazz guitar in the 60s and 70s. Things changed ever so slightly in the 80s with the brilliant use of jazz guitar by the jazz-rock fusion masters of the class of Billy Cobham. Though basically a drummer and arranger, he for example, has exploited the jazz guitar's attractive nature as a solo instrument quite masterfully in his highly skilled compositions all through the masterpiece album Total Eclipse. It sounds almost like a wordless jazz opera, this album,

where the tunes have been written so well that one can easily visualize the various phases of the eclipse, the passage of clouds lending a diffuse cover to the moon, the sudden breaking out of the moon from the shadows, and a soft ending. Truly a collectors' item. John Abercrombie on the jazz guitar, which sounds like a solid body electric guitar with minimum electronic gadgetry, has displayed his musical genius very competently on this album. Even in the earlier albums like Spectrum, Cobham had used the twanging sounds of the electric guitar with a solid electric bass back-up almost as if his band were playing soft rock.

In the later years, Larry Carlton with his bluesy improvisations, Lee Ritenour with his slightly more cerebral expressions and definitely low stress on rhythm or the 'danceability' index of tunes, Larry Coryell with his solid jazz and blues fundamentals with a touch of other influences, and George Benson on rare occasions when he did play jazz standards [ prompting some seniors like Ruby Braff to wonder why should a guitarist with such a frightening level of talent, be playing the humbug tunes that the dancing crowds wanted? When would he play some real jazz tunes ? ] Benson in the bargain, indeed fetched good popularity to the jazz guitar. The time finally had come when the jazz guitar had emerged from the closet, from the shadows of anonymity to the spot light.

Where does one place John 'Mahavishnu' McLaughlin in this kaleidoscopic collage of guitar talents ? He undoubtedly had mastery on the freakish 18-string double-necked guitar of his, and some of his quiet improvisations during his Miles Davis years, are indeed notable. Many purists would shrug off his later experiments with the fusion group Shakti wherein he seemed to have watered down his style and content to a large extent, to make this new brand of music more easily palatable for the world music fans, perhaps.

In spite of all the niggling doubts generated by this fusion exercise, McLaughlin's brilliant riffs whilst jamming with the enormously talented Indian violinist L. Shankar refuse to go away from the memory's imprints even after decades now. Al Di Meola, had made a name for himself when the boundaries between rock and jazz had dimmed for a few years. However in retrospect, his fluent fingering and the devilish racing pace does not sound too close to a jazz style of expression at all. Another borderline case with greater melodious merit remains Carlos Santana, whose Latin Rock garnished with an openness to other cultural influences, has lent him freshness despite thirty years or more in performing his act, and whose improvisations border on the jazzy sensibility, though he stubbornly keeps the other foot in the spotlight of rock, all the time. His creative talents and the unique style of presentation have always been impeccable and startlingly consistent.

What does the future hold for the jazz guitar ? Well, it withstood the worst of the low popularity phases, it sailed through the listening public's waning and waxing sympathy, and it successfully braved the often-mindless electronic innovations like the mouth-tube and rigging up of an electronic synthesizer to provide the guitar all sorts of unusual but worthless sounding varieties synthesized sounds from the crowing of a cock to the rumble of thunder. The initial phase of innovations on the synthesizer had threatened the existence of many a solo instrument, till it seemed that only a portable keyboard was needed by a skilled musician to ape the sound of any other existing [or future] instrument. Had those trends been sustained, perhaps the originality in jazz compositions and performances would have died a natural death much earlier than anticipated. As it turned out the 'unplugging' of the electronic gizmos and the subsequent wild popularity of acoustic sounds has given a new lease of life to the jazz guitar employing minimum electronics. Acoustic instruments have bounced back with vengeance, it seems.

During the heyday of the synthersizer, Herbie Hancock was rumored to have commented on Hubert Laws most probably that while he [Hancock] needed a truck to carry his equipment, and that guy [Laws] carried his flute in his pocket….[anyone better informed may please correct me here] -to which I wanted to add that Laws sounded much better with that tiny instrument, than several tonnes of electronics. I have personally felt immensely irritated at a concert by the great Joe Zawinul who used to stack up four or five keyboards and with continual irrigation of his throat, ultimately get royally confused with the miles and miles of wires running amok in all directions, spending up to an hour in looking for wrong connections -what a colossal waste of time and energy!

No one predicted the demise of jazz when the jazz giants of 60s passed away. A spate of new talent has always emerged from most unlikely sources. There's an inbuilt safety for the future of Jazz in the fact that despite the anti-music antics and punk rock garbage becoming universally popular, nothing seriously has affected the tastes of the jazz lovers anywhere. A degree of loyalty on part of jazz fans has always been taken for granted. As long as true aficionados of jazz are there, and those seem to be in endless supply, the future of jazz and jazz guitar seems to be in safe hands. Happy plucking !