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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. ~ Scott Yanow