Great Guitars of Jazz
Charlie Byrd is recognized as a music giant throughout the world. The role of the guitar bridging classical and popular music forms is a matter of history, but the emergence of a guitarist equally at ease in both classical and jazz idioms is an event of singular exception. Born in Chuckatuck, Virginia on September 16, 1925, Byrd learned the basic of guitar from his father and began to perform regularly with local bands. While in Paris during the war, he had occasion to meet and hear the great gypsy guitarist Django Reingardt, one of the founding fathers of the very concept of jazz guitar. That encounter served as the inspiration for Byrd's decision to enroll in the Harnett National Music School in New York to study jazz composition and theory. By the late 1940's, Charlie Byrd had become an established figure in the East Coast jazz scene, but he felt the need for a new direction. He decided to pursue a career as a concert guitarist. In 1950, Byrd moved to the Washington, DC area to begin the study of classical guitar with Thomas Simmons and Sophocles Papas, and subsequently traveled to Italy as the pupil of Andres Segovia. While he did not consciously synthesize his jazz and classical training into a new form of music, the subtleties of both began to have their inevitable effects, with the result that Byrd reached new performance levels and created a new sound-- jazz played on an acoustic (classical) guitar without using a pick or electronics. After a tour of South America sponsored by the United States Department of State, his interest in Latin music intensified. The next year, 1962, along with Stan Getz, Byrd recorded Jazz Samba and, according to Leonard Feather, "the entire bossa nova craze in the United States may be said to have spring directly from this album."