VARIOUS ARTISTS
Progressions: 100 Years of Jazz Guitar

Sony

The guitar has a long and interesting history in popular music, and one of its most interesting chapters is that found in its lineage of jazz players. Progressions: 100 Years of Jazz Guitar tells that part of the instrument’s story in a panoramic fashion, and manages to include everything from early banjo players to fusion shredders in its swath.

Disc One begins with a banjo performance by Vess Ossman since it was initially banjo, not guitar, that figured into early jazz and ragtime music. Sam Moore, whose “Chain Gang Blues” is also included, played the octa-chorda an eight-string instrument whose invention is sometimes credited to him, sometimes to the Lyon-Healy company. Moore’s music is a surprising blend of country blues, Hawaiian slack-key music, and ragtime, and in some ways brings to mind roots guitar iconoclast John Fahey. Johnny St. Cyr and Lonnie Johnson, two banjo players who took up the guitar, are the first guitarists proper, featured on “Savoy Blues” with Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. Eddie Lang is usually thought of as the first true jazz guitarist and the most influential up until that point. Those he influenced in turn, such as Carl Kress and Dick McDonough, are all included here in the first half of Disc One.

Still, the most incredible moments of jazz guitar history featured on the first disc are undoubtedly Django Reinhardt with the Quintet of the Hot Club of France playing “Honeysuckle Rose” and Charlie Christian performing “Solo Flight” with Benny Goodman. Both of these performers created the language of the guitar, and the fact that one was European while the other was African American may help explain, in part, the extremely diverse paths that the guitar has taken through jazz and improvisational music in general. There are some other great stops along the way, though: Casey Bill Weldon’s “Guitar Swing,” George Barnes’ “Little Rock Getaway,” both country western swing numbers, and the jump blues of Slim Gaillard’s “Palm Springs Jump.”

Disc Two begins with the bebop years in full swing, and we get some prime examples of bop guitarists: Bill de Arango with Dizzy Gillespie on “Old Man Rebop,” and Barney Kessel on “On Green Dolphin Street.” These are prime examples of the integration of the guitar into the modern jazz ensemble. In the 1950s the electric guitar, first played by Charlie Christian, became the mainstay of the small jazz group, and musicians like Tal Farlow, Johnny Smith, and Jimmy Raney helped create a cooler, after-hours tone for the instrument that made it more intimate. At the same time, other instrumental genres were being influenced by the electric guitar, and by the possibilities of studio technology as well. Les Paul and Mary Ford’s recording of “Running Wild,” included here, demonstrates that the guitar was becoming predominant in modern popular music, and jazz guitarists were bound to be influenced. Country music was also influenced by the new technology, as demonstrated by Chet Atkins’ “Mountain Melody.”

Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery, two Midwestern musicians from Detroit and Indianapolis, respectively, were the next to put their stamp on the jazz guitar sound. Burrell was a hard bop stylist who collaborated frequently with organist Jimmy Smith, while Montgomery pioneered the technique of improvising in octaves. The arrival of Grant Green was the culmination of this part of the guitar’s history, creating the ultimate mix of swinging jazz sophistication and rugged R&B swagger.

Disc Three starts in the end of the guitar’s gritty, jazz organ combo days, with George Benson with Brother Jack McDuff on “Clockwise” in a performance that still astonishes—Benson was the logical progression of the work of Burrell, Montgomery, and Green. We also hear Pat Martino in an organ combo version of “Just Friends.” Next are Charlie Byrd, who was exploring Brazilian rhythms (“How Insensitive”) and Gabor Szabo was exploring World fusion on tracks like “Gypsy Queen,” which Carlos Santana later turned into a big hit.

Next comes a series of rock/fusion/electric experiments, including Larry Coryell and Gary Burton (“June the 15th, 1967”) Sonny Sharrock (“As We Used to Sing”) and Derek Bailey’s complete abstraction “Should Be Reversed.” By now the guitarist was experimenting with the far sonic reaches of his instrument, and Jimi Hendrix’s inclusion here (“Manic Depression”) should raise no eyebrows, because without his radical reinvention of the realm of acceptable sound for the electric guitar none of what follows would have happened. That certainly includes John McLaughlin’s high-powered electric work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, represented here by the track “Birds of Fire.”

Interestingly, a number of guitarists declined to succumb to the temptation to pump up the volume and distortion and engage in displays of six-string pyrotechnics. John Abercrombie, for example, played improvisational music with a prog rock sensibility, but the more muted dynamics and superior musicianship give gems like “Ralph’s Piano Waltz” a lot of staying power, even this many years later. Ralph Towner, on the other hand, played a kind of acoustic, meditative music that never goes out of fashion. Towner, Abercrombie, and fellow ECM recording artist Pat Metheny carved out a new role for the guitar, using both electric and acoustic and merging their jazz influences with outside sources that included country, rock, flamenco, and jazz fusion.

Disc Four takes us through the more commercial fusion years, offering some of the best guitar voices to come along during what was sometimes not the most creative period of the instrument’s history. Phil Upchurch, who played with George Benson on such groundbreaking guitar records as White Rabbit is featured playing his trademark cool, Benson-esque style on “Inner City Blues.” Eric Gale, who recorded as a sideman on CTI dates often in the 1970s, contributes the disco-laced “Thumper.” While Gale is a fine guitarist, this track really shows where the dance-oriented guitar music eventually spawned Quiet Storm and its successor, Smooth Jazz. Larry Carlton and Lee Ritenour both played on a large number of pop music sessions, thus their sounds became synomous with the commercial guitar sound of the time. Ritenour’s “Captain Fingers” and Al DiMeola’s “Race With the Devil on a Spanish Highway” are both exhibitions of raw technique that sound a bit dated. Allan Holdsworth, who replaced John McLaughlin in Tony Williams’ Lifetime, sounds more contemporary on “Mr. Spock.”

As the eighties beckoned, more interesting times came again to the electric guitar. James “Blood” Ulmer, now a blues interpreter, was, in 1983, plying a raw, open style of electric guitar that inherited some of its harmonic content from the application of Ornette Coleman’s theory of harmolodics. John Scofield, Marc Ribot, and Mike Stern all made their marks in the 1980s or 1990s, and that period is a little under-represented here. Technically, Bill Frissell’s 2001 track “Ron Carter” is the latest recorded piece here, but even that doesn’t represent what Frissell has done since then. But it’s inevitable that more recent developments are harder to represent well on anthologies such as this one, and all things considered, it’s really a minor quibble in the light of such a well though-out, well-presented box set.