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Liner Notes : Benny Goodman At Carnegie Hall 1938Label: Columbia/Legacy In the liner notes, rhythm guitarist Turk Van Lake offers commentary (written July 1999) about Freddie Green's solo during the jam session on "Honeysuckle Rose": The startling move by Benny Goodman to signal rhythm guitarist Freddie Green to solo is an illustration of insensitivity. Goodman's ignorance is probably the culprit in creating this awkward moment. String instruments, particularly guitars, have their function governed by the "action", the distance of the string to the fingerboard. Putting it another way, the distance the string is pressed down to the board can be of various heights, particularly on guitar because F-hole archtop guitars have a bridge that is movable up and down. A soloist uses low action, while rhythm guitarists need high action, thus preventing them from gliding all over the fingerboard like a pyro-technician. Freddie Green used the highest action of any guitarist in jazz history. To ask him to solo with the setup his guitar had was a complete blunder! However, Freddie went about his business by chording his way through two choruses of unamplified guitar. Twenty-four years later (1962), Benny Goodman pulled the same stunt on "yours truly" at Freedomland in New York City after a six week tour of the Soviet Union, and "yours truly" remembered how Freddie handled the situation and thus I played just about the same type of solo. In fact, it was the same song, "Honeysuckle Rose." |