I couldn't find review for this album so there is more about Charlie:
His jazz samba recordings helped to popularise the bossa nova.
It took a mix of wilful character and happenstance not to copy Charlie Christian if you happened to be a a postwar jazz guitarist. Though he almost inevitably cited Christian as an influence too, Charlie Byrd, who has died aged 74, exhibited a particular chemistry.
Almost all of his guitar contemporaries opted for the standardised modern jazz electric guitar package of the 1940s - bass pickup turned up for the warm, rounded sax-like effect, soft plectrum, long, intricate lines, stripped down chords. Byrd, who had studied with Andres Segovia, played jazz for much of his career with a flamenco-derived finger-style technique, on a classical acoustic instrument. In the 1950s he regularly gave classical recitals as well as pursuing a jazz career.
Byrd could sometimes be the kind of jazz musician favoured by listeners who didn't like jazz. Even passers-by to the music in the 1960s would have been likely to remember Byrd for his delicate, chiming contributions to the rare jazz chart-hits of saxophonist Stan Getz during the "jazz samba" boom of 1962. His references to other musical traditions and the mellowness and lyricism of his sound were highly accessible qualities, yet he was a musical sophisticate who did not play below his skills and sensibilities to sell a more commercial package. Like Ralph Towner today, Byrd believed it was a waste of its resources to try to turn the multi-voiced, richly harmonic, pianistic guitar into a single-line melody instrument just to chase the chimera of bebop's flying sax and trumpet lines. He developed an approach to the instrument that was jazzy and swinging, yet full of ambiguous and subtle nuances.
At the age of 10, Byrd began his guitar studies with his father, who played in a swing style, using a plectrum. Highschool dances were Byrd Jnr's main showcase until the second world war, when he played in France with an early idol, Django Reinhardt, while on military service. Post-war, Byrd first played professionally in swing and Dixieland bands, appearing in 1947 in the ensemble led by the Benny Goodmanesque clarinettist Sol Yaged, joining saxophonist Joe Masala and pianist Freddie Slack at the end of the decade.
Byrd was already showing signs of being torn between classical music and jazz. In 1950 he moved to Washington DC to study with Sophocles Papas, then took master-classes in Siena with Segovia. Though he was to join the Woody Herman band on his return to the United States, he was becoming increasingly absorbed by classical guitar technique, and frustrated that the jazz world of the time offered few opportunities to make use of it.
Byrd concluded the best bet was to set out his wares and wait for an audience. He formed a trio with drummer Keter Betts and bassist Bertel Knox at Washington's Showboat Lounge. Jazz was the primary agenda, but Byrd would vary the fare with classical guitar music. His reputation grew during this period because his sound was so distinctive, and he offered bandleaders a palette quite different from other post-Christian guitarists. Woody Herman, who frequently combined straight-ahead swing with richly impressionistic arrangements, hired Byrd for tours and recordings at the end of the 1950s. But it was the elegant, classically-symmetrical music of the trio at the Showboat, conveniently based in the US capital, that attracted the state department's attention and brought Byrd a fateful tour of South America.
During that trip, Byrd became fascinated by the Brazilian samba, and the work of guitarists and composers rooted in the idiom such as Joao Gilberto, Luiz Bonfa and Antonio-Carlos Jobim - the latter played piano and guitar, and also sang. The following year, in partnership with the romantic, soft-toned saxophonist Stan Getz, Byrd recorded the album Jazz Samba and in the process popularised Jobim's "bossa nova" (new beat) in the US.
Having won a new audience, it was perhaps inevitable that commercial instincts as well as musical affection for Brazil should lead Byrd to repeat the formula more than was probably good for him. A four-square swing player underneath, he rarely sounded loose enough for the fluid, undulating rhythms of the samba, though he complemented Getz's saxophone in highly creative ways on such classics as the indestructible Desafinado, revealing his gifts as a listener and accompanist.
Recycling the Brazilian sound contributed to Byrd's creative doldrums during the 1970s, and the dominance of head-banging electric guitar bravura further eclipsed him. He made a number of agreeable trio recordings (some involving his bass-playing brother, Joe "Gene" Byrd) balancing Latin music and jazz standards, but his qualities as a textural player frequently made collaborations with horn players sound like his most appropriate setting, as had occurred with Getz. The trick also often worked in contrasting partnership with electric guitarists, and Byrd collaborated in a highly successful and forthrightly-swinging all-guitar group with Barney Kessell and Herb Ellis - Great Guitars was a regular attraction at the world's jazz festivals from 1973.
For all his considerable talents, Byrd sometimes sounded - as one commentator deftly put it - like a man auditioning for Carnegie Hall even while he was playing the Village Vanguard. It was fascinating therefore, that in the 1990s, approaching 70, a straightforward relish for formerly reined-in improvisational skills seemed to overcome a lifetime's conservatism.
Byrd made a succession of fine late recordings, some featuring the Washington Guitar Quartet, some involving quite startlingly audacious improvisations on swing with vibrant partners like clarinettist Ken Peplowski. It was perhaps an indication that the big-time diverted him too early in the 1960s. But Byrd's sound confirms the jazz impulse for players to develop special voices of their own, and his approach remains alive in the guitar textbooks he wrote, and in the sound of guitarists such as Towner and Earl Klugh.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
Charles L Byrd, musician, born September 16 1925; died December 2 1999
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