Jazz guitar

When guitarists in big bands switched from acoustic to semi-acoustic guitar and began using amplifiers, it enabled them to play solos.

Traditionally, jazz electric guitarists use an archtop with a relatively broad hollow sound-box, violin-style f-holes, a "floating bridge", and a magnetic pickup.

Lucas built the foundations for Jazz guitar through his development of various rhythmic, single string, and sweep picking techniques.

By the 1930s, the guitar began to displace the banjo as the primary chordal rhythm instrument in jazz music, because the guitar could be used to voice chords of greater harmonic complexity, and it had a somewhat more muted tone that blended well with the upright bass, which, by this time, had almost completely replaced the tuba as the dominant bass instrument in jazz music.

The most important jazz guitar soloists of this period included the Manouche virtuoso Django Reinhardt, Oscar Moore who was featured with Nat “King” Cole's trio, and Charlie Christian of Benny Goodman's band and sextet, who was a major influence despite his early death at 25.

In the hands of George Barnes, Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, Jimmy Raney, and Tal Farlow, who had absorbed the language of bebop, the guitar began to be seen as a “serious” jazz instrument.

In the 1940s through the 1960s, players such as Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Al Caiola[2][3][4] Tony Mottola[5][6][7] and Jim Hall laid the foundation of what is now known as "jazz guitar" playing.

In keeping with such an aesthetic, young guitarists of this era sought a clean and round tone, and they often played traditional hollow-body arch-top guitars without electronic effects, frequently through vacuum tube amplifiers.

As players such as Bobby Broom, Peter Bernstein, Howard Alden, Russell Malone, and Mark Whitfield revived the sounds of traditional jazz guitar, there was also a resurgence of archtop luthierie (guitar-making).

Today, the jazz guitar continues to evolve, influenced by advancements in technology and the creative vision of contemporary musicians.

Guitar amplifiers have equalizer controls that allow the guitarist to change the tone of the instrument, by emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain frequency bands.

Jazz rhythm guitar often consists of very textural, odd-meter playing that includes generous use of exotic, difficult-to-fret chords.

Jazz guitarists integrate the basic building blocks of scales and arpeggio patterns into balanced rhythmic and melodic phrases that make up a cohesive solo.

Some guitarists used Jimi Hendrix-influenced distortion and wah-wah effects to get a sustained, heavy tone, or even used rapid-fire guitar shredding techniques, such as tapping and tremolo bar bending.

[9] Jazz guitar players tend to improvise around chord/scale relationships, rather than reworking the melody, possibly due to their familiarity with chords resulting from their comping role.

This provides jazz guitarists with a source of "licks", melodic phrases and ideas they incorporate either intact or in variations, and is an established way of learning from the previous generations of players.

In jazz big bands, popular during the 1930s and 1940s, the guitarist is considered an integral part of the rhythm section (guitar, drums and bass).

When jazz guitarists play chords underneath a song's melody or another musician's solo improvisations, it is called "comping", short for "accompanying".

In many popular styles of music, such as rock and pop, the rhythm guitarist usually performs the chords in rhythmic fashion which sets out the beat or groove of a tune.

Exponents of this style often come from a country, folk or ragtime background, such as Chet Atkins, although it is also sometimes employed by straight-ahead jazz practitioners, for instance Martin Taylor.

Chord-melody is often played with a plectrum (see Tal Farlow, George Benson and others); whereas fingerstyle, as practised by Joe Pass, George van Eps, Ted Greene, Robert Conti, Lenny Breau or hybrid picking as practised by Ed Bickert, Laszlo Sirsom and others allows for a more complex, polyphonic approach to unaccompanied soloing.