Jookeyman wrote:Planetguy wrote:Super big Charlie Christian fan here. What an amazing trailblazer he was.....killer tone, phrasing, and a bottomless well of super cool ideas. He just had the total "horn thing" going.
Totally w/ you, especially the bottomless well. I don't hear any clichés except maybe that 6#9 interval (which pre-dates rockabilly by 15 years, +/-). I use that move a lot but I picked it up from Rockabilly.
What pulls me to Christian is the blues vibe. You catch this in his feel, unlike Reinhardt who sounds straight up Euro to me. I like both but gravitate more toward the blues side (since Jazz was born in the Blues). The Roma thing comes from Eastern European folk music, if I'm not mistaken. When I listen to Django, I hear some of this influence- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC2yEFpacIE
the big differences that i hear and consider important....Django like the other European musicians of that itme were getting their "jazz" second hand from American records and during the war from Allied Radio. so back then (and some would say 'Still') they just didn't SWING the way our homeboys did.
Much of gypsy jazz....all that minor key stuff is usually out of harmonic minor.....OUR (early) jazz not so much so....
yes, there's the bluesy thing that Christian always had going for him in all his stuff....but the other huge thing that's going on is that he's playing straight up BEBOP! you don't hear that in Django's stuff ( well some in his later stuff when he started playing electric). and Christian's groove was just ridiculous...that guy had such grease!
most people credit Diz, Bird, and Bud Powell for creating Bebop...but there's plenty of folks (like me) who believe it was actually Charlie Christian. who was playing bebop scales before him? and leaning so heavily on chord extensions???? maybe SOMEONE was... but if so, there's no recorded evidence.
