Thursday, April 3 2008

There is an unbelievably tragic symmetry between the lives of Jimmy
Blanton and Charlie Christian. Both were string players who broke into
a major big band in the fall of 1939, completely rewrote the
vocabularies of their instruments, never led recording sessions of
their own, played at the prophetic birth-of-bop jam sessions at
Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, and died from the same illness in their
twenties in the same year.