The Wrong End Of A Megaphone

Published: Thu, 08/12/21

I have any number of reasons for my decades-long affinity for the Benny Goodman/Charlie Christian sextet recordings, but at the moment, it's the fact that, as some of the first original swing recordings I heard, they introduced me to the idea of the shout chorus. The shout chorus is that moment, typically in a big band arrangement, where all the horns play together for maximum impact, generally as the climax to a soloing section or to the arrangement as a whole. It's what the classical cats would call a "tutti" section, but really, it's probably called a shout chorus because it sounds like the whole band is shouting at once – presumably out of sheer exultation at occupying the center of a swing maelstrom. At least, that's how it sounds when done right.

If, as Beethoven supposedly quipped between scowls, the guitar is an orchestra viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, the Benny Goodman Sextet of 1939-1940 is a big band heard through the wrong end of a megaphone. Instead of the usual five reeds, seven or eight brass and a rhythm section, the Sextet consisted of piano, bass, drums, Goodman on clarinet, Lionel Hampton on vibes and Christian on guitar. It was occasionally expanded to a septet with the addition of Georgie Auld on saxophone or Cootie Williams on trumpet, and the piano chair was occupied on more than one studio occasion by one Count Basie, whose own band was of course no slouch in the shout department.

By many accounts, including Rudi Blesh's (anthologized in editor Robert Gottlieb's Reading Jazz), a good number of the Sextet's pieces were built off of riffs Christian had been playing since before John Hammond, Sr. plucked the guitarist out of an Oklahoma City combo and shoehorned him onto Goodman's bandstand one legendary night in 1939. That alone makes much of the Sextet repertoire a particularly good point of entry for any guitarist looking to find their way into jazz, as I was in my late teens and early twenties. But it also means when the band gets cooking and the solos – often as short as eight bars in length, never more than thirty-two in any case – have built up sufficient head of steam, it's a riff pulled straight from the fretboard and played with hypnotic intensity by for clarinet, vibes and guitar that hammers the whole thing home. Check out the last few choruses of "Gone With 'What' Wind," "Wholly Cats," "Royal Garden Blues" or "Benny's Bugle" and you'll see just what I mean.

When I finally realized what I really wanted to do was reconcile what I loved about small group jazz with the fact that I play solo fingerstyle guitar, the shout chorus proved to be a key piece of the puzzle. Gene Bertoncini once described the arrangements for his duo with bassist Michael Moore as a safety net; the shout chorus can provide some of that same function in a fingerstyle blues arrangement. There's this notion that improvising means the great majority of what you're going to play on any given song has to be made up on the spot; in fact, with a good arrangement, the solo itself takes up maybe 20% of the whole thing, tops. Work out an intro, play a verse or two of the song, improvise for a chorus or two, go into your shout chorus, vamp for a bit to cool down and regroup, come back in with a final verse, play some kind of tag or outro, and you're done.

In a solo guitar context, the shout chorus also helps insure that your solo ends with a bang. No, you don't have a horn section at your disposal, but if you build your solo properly, you can make a worked-out chorus of chord hits sound both inevitable and climactic, the logical conclusion to your improvisation and the perfect wrap-up to take you back into the melody. Having something cool worked out can also save a less-than-inspired improvisation, giving you a strong place to land if for some reason you don't quite catch the wave on a given pass through the tune.

So in this week's Youtube lesson, I show one way to think about playing a shout chorus on the blues in A.

How To Play A Shout Chorus

You can find the tab for the lesson here:

Download the Tab

More soon,

David