Kansas jazz is alive and well! Master guitarist Wayne Goins’ new release reveals a musician of deep feeling, unassailable generosity, and exquisite taste. Chronicles of Carmela is, in fact, the most breathtakingly beautiful new jazz release I’ve heard in years. Goins composed, arranged, and produced all eleven songs and gave his musicians plenty of room to improvise. On the opening tracks, Goins, tenor saxophonist Craig Treinen, and pianist Bill Wingfield conjure images of Wes Montgomery and/or young George Benson sitting in with Atlantic-era John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner. To put …

One of the first electric guitarists on record, Floyd Smith played an important role in jazz from the 1930s through the 1950s. Born in 1917 and raised in St. Louis, he first went on the road in 1934 with Eddie Johnson’s St. Louis Crackerjacks. Two years later he joined the Jeter-Pillars Club Plantation Orchestra, playing both standard and Hawaiian-style guitar onstage. In August 1937 Smith used an electric guitar to solo on Jeter-Pillars recording of “Lazy Rhythm.” In 1938, while on tour with the Sunset Royal Entertainers, he was spotted …

While honored today as the first influential electric guitarist in jazz, Charlie Christian was not the first to feature the instrument on a record. In our interview, producer John Hammond noted two others playing electric guitar before Christian: “One was Leonard Ware in New York. He was very good, but he was not in Charlie’s class. The other jazz guitar player was Floyd Smith, but he played a Hawaiian guitar.” Ware, who didn’t do much recording, used an electric guitar on several 78s cut with Sidney Bechet and His Orchestra …

In 2002, Lynn Wheelwright was flipping through an issue of Vintage Guitar magazine, hoping to improve his database of descriptions and catalog numbers. He chanced upon an ad for a Gibson ES-250 archtop. For collectors and researchers of early electric guitars, this is a highly desirable model, since Gibson only manufactured them between 1938 and 1940. Gibson had published a catalog photo of the great Charlie Christian playing one with a natural finish. An astute researcher, Lynn quickly realized that the advertised guitar was none other than Charlie Christian’s actual …

When he was 16, Barney Kessel jammed with his hero, Charlie Christian. The year was 1940, and the venue was the Oklahoma Club in Christian’s hometown. Kessel, still in high school, was playing electric guitar with a college band called the Varsitonians. One evening he looked at the audience and was “absolutely astounded” to see his hero Charlie Christian, on a break from the Benny Goodman Sextet, smiling up at him. Kessel happily loaned him his guitar to sit in with the band. After the show, Christian invited Kessel to …

John Hammond, father of the bluesman with the same name, was a towering figure of 20th-century recorded music. Born into the Vanderbilt family, Hammond was an unsurpassed talent scout and unswerving advocate of racial integration in music. Within a year of joining Columbia Records in late 1932, he produced 78s by the Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Chick Webb, and Benny Goodman orchestras, as well as with the Joe Venuti Blue Six, Chocolate Dandies, Teddy Wilson, and Bessie Smith. He also discovered an unknown 17-year-old singer named Billie Holiday …

Charlie Christian expanded the boundaries of jazz and left us an unsurpassed collection of early electric guitar recordings. A brilliant soloist, Charlie departed Oklahoma City in August 1939 to try out for Benny Goodman’s band. Playing the electric guitar, then a fairly new instrument, Christian quickly proved that he had the tone, imagination, and finesse to create long, flowing melodic lines that were equal to those of Goodman’s horn players, who were among the best in the country. Within weeks, the 23-year-old guitarist had recorded “Flying Home,” “Stardust,” “Rose Room,” …

Saunders King was the first “King of the Blues.” More than sixty years after buying his first Saunders King 78, another King, B.B., still beams at the mention of his name. “Saunders King – I’m a big fan of his! He was one of the first of the people that played blues and had the beautiful sound of the electric guitar. He was a great singer. In fact, he was one of the people I idolized. I especially liked ‘S.K. Blues’ – still do! There was a part one and …

I spent the morning of Saturday, January 12, 1985, at a hotel in San Francisco, interviewing Yngwie Malmsteen, the extraordinary Swedish metal guitarist, for his first English-language cover story. As soon as that meeting was over, I switched cassettes in my tape recorder and headed over the Golden Gate Bridge to meet Grateful Dead spokesman Dennis McNally at a restaurant in San Rafael. Dennis led me to the home of a Grateful Dead supporter who, it turned out, was letting Jerry Garcia live in her basement. My mission: Interview Garcia …