C&A:

Christmas eve 1939 at Carnegie Hall in the select company of the best bluesmen in the business.  The “Kansas City Six” played two slow blues and a very up-tempo 28-bar tune at this “From Spirituals to Swing” concert.  Good Morning Blues was first with Prez taking an excellent solo on the two choruses preceding Charlie Christian’s solo.

Charles’s two-chorus solo is absolutely exquisite.  Lots of triplets and sixteenth-note runs in just the right places with lots of rhythmic surprises everywhere beginning with two in the very first two measures.  Lots of blue notes–G# (Ab) preceding the A, a flat-nine here and a sharp-five there, a dim7 leading to the dom7 at bar 8 and a Bbm resolving to the Fmaj at the end of each chorus.  Then there’s that beautiful sequence that leads off the second chorus—what absolute perfection.

After CC’s solo, a two-chorus trumpet solo winds up the tune and the Kansas City Six (half of whose members had roots in Oklahoma City) goes on to play the other blues number, Paging the Devil.  That was followed by a wild Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, an A(8mm)/B(12mm)/C(8mm)-structured tune on which Charlie Christian played his fastest recorded solo.