Charlie Byrd Guitar Solos, Arrangements, Transcriptions, Sheet Music, DVDs, Lessons

   Charlie Byrd was one of the most unique and fascinating guitar players in jazz and pop music. Charlie Byrd was a leading supporter of the nylon string guitar as a jazz solo instrument when everyone else was going electric and a pupil of classical guitarist Andres Segovia that sought to combine classical guitar methods along with jazz improvisation.

   In the 1950s Charlie Byrd was transforming the popular music scene with his combination of jazz and classical guitar techniques in a sympathetic 3 piece group that included bassist Keeter Betts and percussionist Bertel Knox. Their repertory merged standard small combo jazz along with Charlie Byrd's solo classical guitar pieces. The trio experienced fantastic popularity in the Washington D.C. area and quickly rose to the positions of traveling American jazz ambassadors sponsored by the State Department. Charlie Byrd's primary achievement will certainly always be seen as bringing the South American music understood as bossa nova to America pop charts and inevitably the world's listeners. In a bigger sense, his efforts and excellence expedited the now typical genre of world popular music, then a curiosity and a niche market, to the majority of listeners. Along with Charlie Byrd's recordings the fine art of jazz guitar music obtained yet another avenue of expression still considerably in use today, a half century since Byrd first made his initial mark with "Desafinado".

   The year 2012 commemorates the fifty year celebration of bossa nova guitar music entering the popular culture, facilitated by Charlie Byrd and his collaborator, saxophonist Stan Getz. Their hit single "Desafinado" got to No. 15 on the American Top 40 charts in October, 1962 and was an early crossover success story, one of a handful in jazz. "Desafinado" continued to be in U.S. pop playlists for 10 weeks as well as reaching No. 11 on the U.K. radio stations in 1962. What began as a notion and musical experimentation envisioned by Charlie Byrd swiftly assumed greater proportions and opened up the floodgates for the bossa nova trend that followed. Consider the following outing by Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, launched as the British Invasion was in full speed. "The Girl From Ipanema" reached No. 5 in 1964 and won a Grammy for Record Of The Year in 1965.

   The unique sound, feel, and approach of bossa nova guitar music affected countless pop superstars, entertainers of all backgrounds, and famed composers after that and since. The short list features Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Herb Alpert, Oscar Peterson, Cannonball Adderley, Dusty Springfield, Stephen Sondheim, George Michael, Kenny G, Eric Clapton, Nina Persson, Norah Jones, and Diana Krall. The success of bossa nova in the U.S.A. set the stage for the importing and global promoting of regional Brazilian composers such as Antonio Carlos Jobim, Luiz Bonfa, Joao Gilberto, Bola Sete, Baden Powell, and Sergio Mendes. It has come to be indicative of and synonymous with sultry South American seasides, romantic love stories, and an easy going exotic way of life!

   In retrospect, Charlie Byrd's impact on the world's music has actually been profound and transcendent and remains to reverberate in practically every section of the globe. Charlie Byrd started playing the guitar at age nine. He originally studied along with his dad who played a range of stringed instruments. Charlie Byrd's very early influences were jazz and swing guitar players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. He listened to and played with Django in Paris in the mid 1940's while in a traveling U.S. Army stage band.

   Charlie Byrd was at first a plectrum or pickstyle guitarist however he became curious about classical guitar and fingerstyle guitar playing in the late 1940s. By 1950 he had actually dedicated himself to the nylon string classical guitar as his instrument of choice. Charlie Byrd studied in Washington, D.C. with regional jazz-classical guitarist Bill Harris and later with classical guitar expert Sophocles Papas. He likewise studied theory and harmony along with musicologist Thomas Simmons. In 1954 Charlie Byrd went to a classical guitar master course in Sienna, Italy which was taught by classical guitar virtuoso Andres Segovia.

   In 1961 Charlie Byrd took a trip to South America on a U.S. State Department sponsored tour. There he obtained the inspiration to integrate Brazilian bossa nova guitar music along with American jazz elements and his very own classical guitar methodologies. Charlie Byrd's early recordings featured music pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Luiz Bonfa, Joao Gilberto, and various other important Brazilian guitarists and artists.

   Charlie Byrd is sonically unique and instantly identifiable from his jazz guitar associates of the 1950s and 1960s through his usage of classical music tinged fingerstyle techniques and nylon string acoustic guitar tonality. Initially a plectrum or pickstyle guitar player, he very often applied fingerpicking sequences based upon the classical, flamenco, and Spanish guitar techniques and repertory to a jazz context. His fingerstyle articulation of jazz chord sonorities and improvisational melodic lines resulted in an amazing and uncommon musical blend!

   Charlie Byrd's early background in swing and bop music combined along with classical guitar techniques made his playing style one-of-a-kind among jazz guitar players surfacing from the conventional swing and bebop schools of thought of the 1940s and stayed so through his lifetime. One instance of his merging of classical and popular guitar music was his use of the right hand index fingertip to strum chords and to make extensive tremolo passages as if with a plectrum. In other situations, Charlie Byrd plucked chords and chord partials to generate impressions of saxophone-horn section figures or pianistic structures as in his solo on "Air Mail Special" with The Great Guitars.

   One more facet of Charlie Byrd's individuality was his application of American jazz concepts and classical methodologies to Brazilian rhythms and repertory. That is arguably his greatest contribution to the form and a combination he tried to keep at the center of his music throughout his career. What is unique about the bossa nova guitar music Charlie Byrd nurtured is the sultry feel of the samba and various other Brazilian tempos with their normal syncopation, in contrast to the pulsing feeling of most mainstream American jazz.

   Although pieces like "Air Mail Special" showed he never abandoned typical American jazz, his style and feel was carefully aligned with the South American guitar music he introduced to the U.S.A. in the very early 1960s. The Brazilian rhythm feeling afforded Charlie Byrd and many musicians of the time a different and a lot more unique path to experiment with in their improvisations, still quite in vogue today and definitely a crucial dialect of jazz and pop music languages.

   While soloing in bossa nova songs, Charlie Byrd favored jazz elements. His solos were loaded with contemporary blues licks, swing jazz figures, groove riffs, free modal lines, and bebop melodies. These he voiced as inherently American jazz lines juxtaposed over Brazilian samba rhythms delivered with a classical tone and fingerstyle articulation. Charlie Byrd's innate musicianship effortlessly reconciled these apparently disparate components, as exemplified by his numerous single note solos in his repertory.

   Charlie Byrd often inserted chordal phrases and intervallic designs into his single note solos. He adhered to no specific format or template, preferring to expand melodic lines with unplanned arpeggiations, chord partials, or complete chord figures as if accompanying himself. His harmonic resource material invariably came from jazz with its' extended and altered chords and characteristic chord progressions and was true for Charlie Byrd's core approach.