Lang died in 1933 at the age of 30, after a botched tonsillectomy, and he’s largely forgotten today except by aficionados of 1920s popular music.

Most importantly, he served as a foil for cornetist Bix Beiderbecke on saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer’s 1927 recording “Singin’ the Blues,” one of jazz’s foundational documents. Though often pegged as a blues artist, New Orleans-born Lonnie Johnson was a masterly improviser who memorably recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1927 (he had several later brushes with fame, scoring several rhythm and blues hits after World War II and riding the folk wave of the early 1960s).Įddie Lang, whose career was as abbreviated as Johnson’s was expansive, established the guitar’s role in jazz in the late 1920s, recording with virtually every major white jazz artist in that formative decade. Reinhardt, who died in 1953 at the age of 43, continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary scene, evidenced by the proliferation of bands inspired by the groundbreaking band he created with French violinist Stephane Grappelli, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.īut Reinhardt wasn’t jazz’s first great guitarist. Django Reinhardt, the gypsy jazz legend who became the toast of Paris in the mid-1930s, is such a vivid and irresistible figure that it’s no wonder he gets the lion’s share of the credit as jazz’s first superstar guitarist.

Django band in a box