by Carolyn Bednarski

While C.F. Martin’s flat-top guitars dominated the country and folk fields, it was Gibson’s arch-top models that dominated the jazz world during the pre-electric era. After Orville Gibson’s death in 1918, the Gibson company continued to flourish due largely to the work of Lloyd Loar, who joined the company in 1920. It was Loar who first experimented with magnetic pick-ups and amplification, although it took almost ten years for the method to reach fruition. Beginning in 1924, it was he who was behind the design of several legendary arch-top guitars. The first of these models, the Gibson L-5 was an instrument that practically replaced the then-popular banjo’s role in dance bands. Gibson’s top of the line arch-top, the Super 400, was produced in 1934, and even after Loar’s departure in 1933, The Gibson company began to give serious attention to the electrification of its guitars—a pursuit that Loar instigated.

While all of this was going on in the production world of the guitar, the instrument was still heavily restricted in the playing field to rhythm work as it was unable to compete with the volume of brass and reed instruments. It took New York guitarist Eddie Lang to prove to the music world just how well the guitar worked as a solo instrument. His work, Stringing The Blues (1931) with violinist Joe Venuti demonstrates the earliest examples of the single string playing, as opposed to using the guitar exclusively as a rhythm instrument. His work provided a blueprint for the first great guitar soloist, Django Reinhardt, who first toured in the U-S with Duke Ellington in 1946. Lang is regarded by many as the father of jazz guitar.

The father of electric jazz guitar is probably more of a household name. It was Charlie Christian (1916-1942) who revolutionized not only jazz, but also the role of the guitar. Through his exceptional playing, he gave a whole generation of guitarists a glimpse of the instrument’s potential to compete volume-wise with instruments such as saxophone and trumpet. Although his recording career lasted scarcely four years, Christian was one of the forerunners of bebop in the early ‘40’s, and the player that others studied and watched--until the next great jazz master, Wes Montgomery, came along in the ‘50s.

What eventually paved the way for the electrification of the guitar? While Gibson’s Loyd Loar was the first to experiment with pick-up design in the early 1920’s, the first solid breakthrough came in 1931 when Paul Barth and George Beauchamp joined forces with Adolph Rickenbacker to form a company called Ro-Pat-In, which later became the Electro String Company. Through the Electro String company they eventually created the famous Rickenbacker guitar brand name. Leading up to that creation, they experimented with electrical amplification and first produced a pair of lap-steel guitars--the A22 and A25 models. These were commonly known as “Frying Pans” due to their shape, and although they were not technically guitars in the conventional sense, they were the first commercially produced electric instruments. After that particular invention, the Rickenbacker trio continued to plug away at creating an electric guitar model that would be commercially viable, and within a year had introduced the first genuine electric guitar, the Electro-Spanish which was modeled after the Spanish guitar.

Even though this did not have huge commercial success, and was no longer produced after 1935, it has an important place in the history of the electric guitar and influenced many other models, including the first generation of electric guitars produced by Gibson. The first of these was the ES-150, which was launched and mass-produced in 1934, and was soon picked up by Charlie Christian. Other key jazz players include: Stanley Clark, an innovator of the double bass finger technique; Jaco Pastorius of Weather Report, who is responsible for the popularity of the fretless bass; George Benson, the biggest-selling jazz guitarist; and Pat Metheny, a jazzman who without compromising on creativity or originality has managed to achieve the widespread popularity held usually only for rock musicians

Another Gibson model favored by jazz musicians was the ES-175, which hit the market in 1949. This instrument paved the way for a similar model that was launched in the early ‘50s, the Les Paul Gold Top. Since Gibson was at the top of their game in the ‘40s, they weren’t interested when a young country-jazz guitarist, Les Paul, tried to sell them his prototype. As competition from Leo Fender’s new electric guitar, the Broadcaster, knocked though, Gibson called upon Paul to collaborate on the design for a new solid-body guitar. 1952 was the year the first models to bear his name came off the production line. Variations of Les Paul models have continued to be produced on and off throughout the remainder of the century. Although Gibson abandoned the Les Paul design in 1961 due to market dominance by Fender, a revived demand by certain Blues guitarists such as Eric Clapton in the early ‘60s, forced them to reissue the original design. They made the more subdued Les Paul Standard model available again in 1975.