Sixty-five years ago today, Charlie Christian died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 25. Despite his short lived career, he left behind some ground-breaking single-string solos for electric guitar.

Many people cite Charlie Christian as the father of jazz guitar. Although his solos perhaps sound fairly complicated on first listen, only a few simple formulas seem to actually make up more than 90-95% of his improvisatory material.

The foundation and home base for Christian is the blues, and I think any guitar players comfortable in the blues can easily use Christian as a transitionary example to add some jazz licks into their repertoire.

Aside from the common blues riffs, which often appear on the tonic, Christian uses the applied diminshed chords discussed in my post about Lionel Hampton to transition between harmonies.

As well, Christian has two main melodic patterns that appear over and over again in song after song. Almost exclusively, these patterns are used on dominant-seventh chords, especially when the chord is the dominant (V) chord itself. Whenever these patterns seem to appear on the tonic harmony, it is typically only because the tonic is moving to the subdominant (IV) and thus acting as the dominant of the subdominant.

The first melodic pattern let’s call the V13 lick. That’s a fairly arbitrary label because there are more chord extensions going on than just the 13th, but the 13th plays a prominent role in the harmony. Here is a watered-down, straight up-and-down version of the riff on an E7 chord:



Christian will use this basic pattern, but of course he will sometimes add more chromatic passing notes, shift the riff into a variety of metric positions, repeat parts of the riff, and generally not just run the lick up and down. It’s more of a collection of notes on the fretboard with which to play.

Listen to the following excerpts of Christian’s solos and see if you can hear the characteristic sound of this formula:

The other melodic pattern let’s call the V9 lick since the 9th is prominently emphasized usually at the beginning and/or end of the riff due to where the pattern lies on the fretboard. Again, the formula is rarely played straight, so take this tablature as more of a paradigm than a literal example. Over an A7 chord, it would be:



Here are excerpts of the V9 pattern in a variety of Christian’s solos. Can you hear the formula?

The real payoff for these formulas is that they can be strung together over a constantly changing sequence of dominant-seventh chords. The harmonies from “I Got Rhythm” (otherwise known as the “Rhythm Changes”) have a particularly quick circle of fifths progression in the B section. It’s in places like this that trotting out such patterns can come in particularly handy. Take a listen to Christian’s solo over the B section of “Honeysuckle Rose” from Nov. 22, 1939 and listen to how it all comes together:

Merely knowing the blues or outlining triads won’t get you through such sticky spots. Both patterns are used in this excerpt. Can you tell which one is being used when?

The trick to these formulas, of course, is to know them inside and out, i.e. how they can be morphed and molded into a variety of linear phrases as needed. The great thing about Charlie Christian, really, is that he can use such a limited set of basic improvisatory materials and create a seemingly endless stream of interesting and engaging solos that never sound cliched or tired.