Karl “Carl” Kress

Much of the most memorable work of Carl Kress’s long career was done in recorded duets with fellow guitarists. First with Eddie Lang, then with Dick McDonough, Tony Mottola and George Barnes, Kress produced a remarkable series of performances that helped to impress other guitarists with the range and versatility of their instrument. (1)

In all these performances, even when he was clearly the dominant member of the pair (as he was with young Tony Mottola in the early ‘40s), Kress consistently confined himself to playing rhythmic support for his partner’s leads. The reason for this was not that Kress was unwilling or unable to play lead-his sparkling chordal solo’s in works like ‘S Wonderful and I Wish I Were Twins, his speed and inventiveness in unaccompanied pieces like Peg Leg Shuffle and Sutton Mutton, give ample proof of his wide-ranging virtuosity. Nevertheless, he stuck to rhythm playing-albeit marvelously rich and imaginative rhythm playing-because his guitar, tuned in Kress’s own idiosyncratic fashion, was uniquely suited to the supporting style role in which he most often played it. (1)

Carl Kress's biography comes primarily from Time-Life Records' 1980 Giants Of Jazz series Guitarists written by Marty Grosz and a 1933 interview Frank Victor conducted with Kress for The Metronome (magazine).

“When the late Ed Lang came here from the West and introduced the six-string guitar in dance bands, he jolted banjo players all over the country from their usual routine. An immediate demand for guitarists arose and the scarcity of them made it difficult for the accomplished banjoist who could not play six-string tuning. So the four-string tenor guitar was introduced to substitute for the six-string. It seems that after a short while of experimenting with the four-string tenor, the leaders knew that it was only a poor imitation of the real thing and therefore demanded the six-string or something different in the form of a four-string guitar.” (2)

Early in his professional career, when he held down the banjo chair in the Nat Shilkret broadcasting orchestra, Kress had become dissatisfied with his instrument’s tuning. Because the tenor banjo is tuned in fifths, like the violin family, its chords often encompass two octaves, a very wide distribution with a lot of empty space between the notes of the chord. Kress pioneered inverted tuning, that is, he dropped the top (A) string down an octave, thereby closing up some of that empty space and giving a tighter voicing, while retaining the same fingering. (1)

“Here is where Carl Kress steps in the picture with an inverted tuning of the tenor guitar using a slightly longer handle thereafter and calling it a plectrum guitar. Carl tuned the A string an octave lower and tuned the C string an octave higher, therefore making the D string the melody string. Aside from this strange tuning, Carl played a style all his own which made him stand out as different from  the six-string king, Ed Lang. Incidentally, these two artists admired one another to a great extent making possible a few recordings they did together in later years which are still the talk of the guitar industry as well as the music field in general. These recordings are now classics.” (2)