Tag: Music

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Great Jazz Guitar Players.

Jazz guitarists are guitarists who play jazz using an approach to chords, melodies, and improvised solo lines which is called jazz guitar playing. The guitar has fulfilled the roles of accompanist (rhythm guitar) and soloist in small and large ensembles and also as an unaccompanied solo instrument.

Until the 1930s, jazz bands used banjo because the banjo’s metallic twang was easier to hear than the acoustic guitar when competing with trumpets, trombones, and drums. The banjo could be heard more easily, too, on wax cylinders in the early days of audio recording. The invention of the archtop increased the guitar’s volume, and in the hands of Eddie Lang guitar became a solo instrument for the first time. Following the lead of Lang, musicians dropped their banjos for guitars, and by the 1930s the banjo hardly existed as a jazz instrument.

Amplification created possibilities for the guitar. Charlie Christian was the first to explore these possibilities. Although his career was brief, it was influential enough for critics to divide the history of jazz guitar into pre- and post-Christian eras.

Influences from free jazz in the 1960s made its way to the guitar. Sonny Sharrock used dissonance, distortion effects units, and other electronic gear to create sonic “sheets of noise” that drove some listeners away when he performed at festivals. He refused to play chords, calling himself a horn player, which is where he got his inspiration.^[19] English guitarist Derek Bailey established his reputation as part of the European free jazz scene. Like Sharrock, he sought liberation for its own sake and the breaking of all conventions in the name of originality. He belonged to the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the 1970s. Beginning in the 1990s, he formed duos with DJs, Chinese pipa musicians, and Pat Metheny.^[16]

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