Jonathan Stout’s Swing Guitar Blog

Nicolai Foss

With his “Campus Five,” Jonathan Stout plays late 1930s small group swing. There is plenty of Stout on YouTube. As you can hear on these clips, Stout plays a mean swing rhythm guitar and his single-string work is more than decent. To quote from his bio on Campus Five page,

Jonathan has worked to preserve the sound of the original swing era, and pre-bebop jazz guitar. Jonathan specializes in the rhythm guitar style of Freddie Green, the chord melody style of Allan Reuss, the gypsy-jazz style of Django Reinhardt, and the electric guitar style of Charlie Christian.

Stout runs an extremely informative and well-written “Swing Guitar Blog” (“Dedicated to Pre-Bebop Jazz Guitar”). Lots of interesting stuff on swing harmony, essential swing CDs, essential rhytm guitar voicings and much else, plus some fascinating discussions of how radically different bebop really was/is from swing — rather than the logical continuation of swing that some musicologists have claimed.