CHRISTIAN, CHARLIE

born 1916, Dallas, Texas, U.S. died March 2, 1942, New York, N.Y. Charlie Christian. byname of Charles Christian American jazz guitarist, one of the first to produce improvised masterpieces using electrically amplified equipment. His recording career, tragically brief though it was, helped raise the guitar from an accompanying to a dominant solo instrument. Reared in Oklahoma City, Christian studied music with his father. After a false start as a string bassist, he soon won a reputation in the Midwest as a guitarist of rare talent. In 1939 he was recruited into the Benny Goodman orchestra. He contracted tuberculosis in 1941, however, and died the following year. Christian's playing was marked by great originality, and his harmonic tendencies anticipated the new styles of the bebop era. He is generally considered to have been one of the major soloists to straddle the swing era and the bebop era that followed; although he left few recordings apart from his dazzling performances for Goodman, it seems probable that he would have taken his place with such men as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as a leader of the great chromatic revolution in jazz of the late 1940s.