Eddie Lang

And this thing with tonsillectomies, I just got to bring it up because I talked to Gary Giddens about Bing Crosby.

And of course, we talk about the great Eddie Lang, Bing's best friend and guitar player, who dies in a botched tonsillectomy.

And so hearing that Benny Moten had died in a botched tonsillectomy, it's like, what is it with 1930s musicians? And then the first promising Kansas City jazz player who was a white saxophonist also died from tonsillitis.

So there's something going on in people's throats.

So music historians note a striking paradox in Miller's career.

While his act relied on a highly offensive racial caricature, his musical backing band, the Georgia Crackers, consisted of progressive white jazz musicians like Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Jack Teagarden, and Eddie Lang.

So there was a lot of contradictions going on here, but again, this was the '20s, so we're looking at it from the lens of, of, of, of people 100 years later.

So I think you gotta try to think of it in this context.

And Charlie Christian's this Oklahoma guitar virtuoso, probably the first electric guitar virtuoso.

But he wasn't the first jazz guitar virtuoso, which was probably a guy named Eddie Lang, who was a white guy who played in the early 30s and played with a whole bunch of people from the top of the jazz world to playing on minstrel records.

with, I'm blanking on the guy's name, the guy that did Lovesick Blues.

Oh, Emmett Miller.

Emmett Miller, yeah.

And so Eddie Lang played on Emmett Miller records.

But he also does a series of duets with a guy named Lonnie Johnson, who's this enormously important figure in African-American music, who has hit records all through the 30s.

He's a virtuoso guitar player, although he's not marketed as jazz.

Um, but Crosby would nail these choruses, and, and suddenly he started getting written about in England because, uh, there were critics over there who said, "Who would have thought that the best jazz singer, uh, that would finally arrive on records would be a white guy, uh, and with Paul Whiteman?" And so, uh, everything began to change, and of course, eventually they left Whiteman and, and went on their own.

And, uh, while he was with Whiteman, he meets a pair of Italian jazz musicians, Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti, who are incredibly important.

Eddie Lang, widely considered to be the first jazz guitarist, before Django Reinhardt, before Charlie Christian, before Wes Montgomery.

And Joe Venuti-

Yeah

... uh, uh, it's a total inspiration for what Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli do later.

later.Well, yes.

There was one other great guitarist, uh, who was a contemporary of Eddie Lang, and they loved each other.

Besides the common misconception that Reinhardt's jazz style developed from gypsy folk traditions, there's another myth that needs correcting.

Oftentimes people will ask of his having been influenced by the guitar-violin duo of Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti.

A recent entry published in the Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians at jazz.com by a writer Donald James said this, Reinhardt's best work was done with violinist Stefan Grappelli and the group they founded, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, which was originally inspired by Americans Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti.

The Hot Club quickly developed its own sound drawn from gypsy's Django's gypsy roots, and his jazz manouche became enormously influential on both sides of the Atlantic.

If you read the most recent biography on Reinhardt by Dregne, you'll discover an interview with Stefan Grappelli who said that he, Grappelli, had been wowed by Venuti when he saw him at L'Ambassadeur in 1928, and Django may have been influenced by the recordings of Lang's single-string playing, but the Quintet sought to play true jazz with hot improvisation.

¶¶ Thank you.

That was Joe Venuti's Rhythm Boys featuring the brilliant guitar work of Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, of course, on violin, and none other than Tommy Dorsey on trombone, recorded for Columbia Records back in June of 1931.

Now, as incredible as Joe Venuti was on the violin, He was just as famous across the music world as the, well, I'll call him the undisputed king of practical jokes.

They nicknamed him the wild fiddler from Philly.

Right.

Um, and then you've got Gibson are making the arch tops, you know, especially the L5, you know, which then became the kind of the favored jazz guitar for, you know, people like Eddie Lang.

You know, 14 frets to the body.

Um, sometimes, I mean, you know, banjo players would want even more access than 14 frets.