Saxophonist Ornette Coleman's arrival in the late 1950s stunned the jazz world, and the biggest shock was his demolition of the chord-progression railroad, on which improvised melody was supposed to run. Coleman's early bands used only melody instruments (sax, trumpet, double-bass) and drums, and the musicians interacted in a kind of spontaneous free-counterpoint, underpinned by a flexible swing.
It might have come as a surprise to the saxophonist's first fans to discover that a constant thread in the Coleman-curated 2009 Meltdown festival at the South Bank has been a chordal instrument; the electric guitar. Guitar stars like Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Fred Frith and James Blood Ulmer have been among the saxophonist's guests in London last week. But their inclusion isn't an indication that Coleman softened the line of his harmony revolution over the years. He has changed the guitar (which he began to incorporate into his groups in the mid-1970s) like he has changed improvisers' attitudes to many instruments, rather than the other way around.
And those electric guitarists, and countless others, wouldn't have been here without an earlier jazz revolutionary whose impact was made all of 70 years ago - Charlie Christian.
Christian was the electric guitar's first superstar, (he even made the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame, even if it was almost half a century after his death) but he wasn't the first electric guitarist. Experiments with pickups and amplification began in the early 1930s, with the Rickenbacker company, and Christian's famous arch-top was developed by Gibson in the middle of the decade. Oklahoma prodigy Christian bridged the swing era of the 1930s to the leaner, faster, and more demandingly intricate small-group style of bebop in the 1940s, and he put the now ubiquitous sound of the electric guitar on the map.
Christian had the briefest of recording careers - barely two years. Tuberculosis claimed him in 1942, aged 25, but not before he had blazed a trail that not only inspired generations of guitarists (in both pop and jazz music), but also significantly influenced the development of the bebop revolution.
In our last Great moment we traced jazz's journey in the 20s and 30s from the dives and dancefloors to the classical shrine of Carnegie Hall, and the huge influence of swing bandleader Benny Goodman in 1938. Goodman's pioneering mixed-race band recruited Christian the following year. The guitarist developed a single-string plectrum style, delivering comparably complex improvised lines to a sax (tenorist Lester Young's melodic ideas were a big influence on Christian), and the amplification hauled the guitar out of swing-band rhythm-strumming anonymity and into the front line.
Christian was born in Texas on 29 July 1916, but raised with two brothers in Oklahoma City, with all three children being taught music by their father. He began learning guitar around 1931, and was soon jamming in clubs on Oklahoma City's Northeast Second Street, known as Deep Deuce. By 1936, he was a local hero in the midwest, and three years later the Andy Kirk band's pianist, Mary Lou Williams, brought him to the attention of impresario John Hammond and via Hammond to Benny Goodman.
Neither Christian's playing nor the sound of the electric guitar much appealed to the short-fused Goodman at the first audition, but a determined Hammond smuggled Christian on to Goodman's bandstand at a Los Angeles gig, where among many dazzling improvisations he soloed spectacularly on Rose Room for 40 minutes, and was hired the same night.
Christian became a key member of Goodman's sextet and big band, and the most admired electric guitarist in the world almost overnight. His advanced musical thinking and spirit of adventure was soon to make him a pioneer of the bop revolution to come.
