
Sleazier sounds: electric guitar solos are descended from saxophone solos - tintinnabula
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/01/08/alex-abramovich/sleazier-sounds/
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> A shitty thing about standard histories of rock and roll – ones that tell us
> that the music is half country and western, half rhythm and blues – is that
> they always slight jazz

Kind-of. Thing is, "country and western" as a genre can itself be seen as "one
half traditional folk, one half jazz." The "father of country music," Jimmie
Rodgers, was a vaudeville performer/hobo who knew the traditional songs from
the railroad workers, but who aspired to be a jazz performer. The result was a
fusion of "hillbilly music" and jazz. He even worked with Louie Armstrong in
1930:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BFbY9Vw8DM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BFbY9Vw8DM)

Western Swing would spring up a few years later, which is clearly part-jazz
just looking at its name, and would remain popular through the 1940s. This was
the "country and western" that Elvis was listening to. If you check out some
of the tracks from the 40s, the electric guitar solos are eerily pre-rock-and-
roll, see 2:05 in this recording from around 1946:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aChNp0ePdMg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aChNp0ePdMg)

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ArkyBeagle
Jimmie Rodgers is dang near more just blues than anything else.

Commercial C&W ( is there any other kind? ) has always been a melting pot,
much to the contrary of its self-image.

And don't forget Woody Guthrie - the folkies claim him, but he left a big
imprint on especially California, although there's no telling how far it
travelled.

Past a certain date, most of the musicians in Nashville had a pretty strong
jazz background. By the time Hank Garland was doing sessions, it slipped into
the foreground. Most Nashville stalwarts recorded a jazz album or two,
especially the steel players. Buddy Emmons had a really interesting
relationship with Lenny Breau.

Bob Wills melded more styles together than you'd think possible at the time,
and in places where there was strong Jim Crow. He was a giant and a legend.

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> Most Nashville stalwarts recorded a jazz album or two, especially the steel
> players. Buddy Emmons...

I love this, I bought a copy of Emmons' Steel Guitar Jazz a few years ago and
it's a fantastic album. I wish there was more expansion/experimentation in
that vein -- are you aware of any other steel guitar jazz albums worth
checking out?

> Bob Wills melded more styles together than you'd think possible at the time,
> and in places where there was strong Jim Crow. He was a giant and a legend.

I'm a HUGE fan of Bob Wills. My most listened to artist on last.fm by a mile,
I've spent a lot of time with his Tiffany Transcriptions. I remember thinking
about how his music was very close to some ideal of what music "should" sound
like -- energetic, uplifting, exciting, danceable, diverse, improvisational,
and most of all, fun. I love the rest of the western swing gang: Milton Brown,
Hank Penny, Spade Cooley, Tex Williams, but Bob Wills really was the King.

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ArkyBeagle
> are you aware of any other steel guitar jazz albums worth checking out?

Yes! Anything by Maurice Anderson, an awful lot of Curly Chalker, some of
Lloyd Green... This is a pitifully incomplete list...

They are of course hard to find. There is always the Steel Guitar Forum.

> ... Bob Wills really was the King.

Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa used to have these... ten foot high face shots of Bob
on the walls. Put a lump in my throat just looking at 'em.

FWIW, Leon Macauliffe taught/(teaches?) steel at Rogers State outside Tulsa.
Take it away, Leon...

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6stringmerc
The article is a neat primer and quite a good look into some of the band
dynamics. The ending is particularly on-point as well, which I think is good
for a lot of non-jazz people to hear about/research themselves:

> _But the truth is that electric guitar solos are directly descended from
> saxophone solos via Charlie Christian, who defined his instrument (which was
> once seen as a joke among jazz musicians, much as the saxophone’s a joke in
> rock) by being the first guitarist good enough to cop saxophone riffs in
> cutting contests_

I've listened to a lot of Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery over the years.
The similarities to great horn players is quite up front, I believe.

One thing that could be of interest, if one were to actually write a book on
the subject, would be tracing the cost & technology & 'market forces' between
guitars and horns (sax) during the past 50 years - as in, if guitars got
cheaper and better (amps, effects, etc), and saxophones kept a higher barrier
of entry cost, that might be a factor in the transition. Also public
perception. Like the hits Guitar Hero and Rock Band - I'm pretty sure there's
no way to plug in an Akai EWI or Yamaha piece to jam out on, just because
there's not really a market I suppose.

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Grishnakh
A little nit-pick: I don't believe a saxophone qualifies as a "horn". The term
"horn" usually refers to wind instruments where the player blows into it and
vibrates their lips. These would be trumpets (very commonly also called
"horns"), trombones, French horns, and tubas. A saxophone is a derivative of a
clarinet, which is a reed instrument. The player blows into it, but the sound
is produced by a vibrating reed which the player manipulates with their
tongue.

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zhemao
Jazz and brass band musicians refer to all wind instruments as horns. It's a
colloquial term, not a technical one. If we were to go with the technical
definition, trumpets and trombones wouldn't be considered horns either,
because they have cylindrical bores instead of conical bores.

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VOYD
That only took 50 years to figure out.

