The first jazz guitar virtuoso, Eddie Lang
was everywhere in the late '20s; all of his fellow musicians knew
that he was the best. A boyhood friend of Joe Venuti, Lang took
violin lessons for 11 years but switched to guitar before he turned
professional. In 1924, he debuted with the Mound City Blue Blowers
and was soon in great demand for recording dates, both in the
jazz world and in commercial settings. His sophisticated chord
patterns made him a superior accompanist who uplifted everyone
else's music, and he was also a fine single-note soloist.
He often teamed up with violinist Venuti (including some classic
duets) and played with Red Nichols' Five Pennies, Frankie Trumbauer,
and Bix Beiderbecke (most memorably on "Singing the Blues"),
the orchestras of Roger Wolfe Kahn, Jean Goldkette, and Paul Whiteman
(appearing on one short number with Venuti in Whiteman's 1930
film The King of Jazz), and anyone else who could hire him.
A measure of Lang's versatility and talents is that he mostly
played the chordal parts on a series of duets with Lonnie Johnson
(during which he used the pseudonym Blind Willie Dunn), yet on
his two duets with Carl Kress (whose chord voicings were an advancement
on Lang's), he played the single-note leads. Eddie Lang, who led
some dates of his own during 1927-1929, worked regularly with
Bing Crosby during the early '30s in addition to recording many
sessions with Venuti. Tragically his premature death was caused
by a botched operation on a tonsillectomy.
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