Swing Guitar

Dedicated to pre-bebop jazz guitar.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Swing Guitar on YouTube!

With Time magazine giving "us" collectively person of the year due to innovations like blogging and youtube, it's about time I picked out some of the best swing guitar clips currently on youtube. Some of these clips are really inspiring and some are just amazing historical rarities - as we all know, during the swing era guitar was not the feature instrument it is today.

Here are two rare ones to start.

Louis Prima/Pee Wee Russell - "
Isle of Capri" (Gerry McAdams - guitar)
Kind of a dixie tune with a slammin' chord solo from obscure player Gerry McAdams.

Les Paul - "and the Teenagers"
Les is playing the "Log" through a 40's Epiphone Electar Amp. Rad....

Django Reinhardt -
"J'attendrai"
one of the very rare vids of Django
"
La Route Du Bonheur"
A bad-ass clip of Django playing in a more bebop style from 1952.

Lester Young, et. al, - "Jammin' the Blues" (Barney Kessel - guitar)
This is easily one of the most inspiring film clips I've ever seen. Everytime I hear or see it, I just want start jammin'. The link above is just the up blues part, here is the whole film (10minutes).

Coleman Hawkins - "I Found a New Baby" (Mary Osbourne - guitar)
This is early TV jam session, featuring 1st generation Charlie Christian devotee Mary Osbourne. The story is that she heard CC play in '37 or so, and went out the next day to get a Gibson 150 set.

Benny Goodman - "One O'Clock Jump"
Check out the featured Electric Guitar solo on this! This film dates to 1943, so this still pretty early to feature a guitar solo. I can't remember the name of the player right now, but I'll update when I remember.

Basie All Stars - "Dickie's Dream" (Freddie Green)
This is pretty rad clip anyway, but there are several shots of Freddie chunking, plus you can actually hear him in places.

More to follow....

7 Comments:

  • At 8:08 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Very nice Blog and interesting suggestion on youtube. It's always a pleasure to not only listen but also saw those fabulous player!

    Daniel

     
  • At 8:09 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    yay for new posts

    heres the most distracting (read: bad) swing guitar i've ever heard:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-WU00UAVDw

    thx for the links. i need to learn how to chord solo like that one video. thats so rad.

     
  • At 6:40 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBsU0dmZywA

    this has a cool chord solo

     
  • At 10:44 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    The guitarist playing electric on the Goodman "One O'Clock Jump" is Dave Barbour!

     
  • At 10:07 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Great site Jonathan! Gerry McAdams was the coolest but seems to have disappeared after his association with Prima, where Frank Federico takes over. McAdams is one my favorites. Have you ever come across footage of Jack Skiles?

    Best,

    TedG

     
  • At 4:06 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    new posts!

     
  • At 2:51 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Good quality info. Lucky to me I came to your website not on purpose, but now I have bookmarked it. Moon Jams

     

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