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. In Blanton's case, he fractured the 4/4 meter straitjacket that had shackled bass players before him.
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