Test Pilot - George M. Smith
Born in 1912 in New York, George M. Smith started out like so many of his peers by first playing the banjo. When his family moved to Los Angeles he got his professional start working at the Paramount Theater. His big break came when he was asked to accompany Kate Smith, a popular radio personality, to accompany her on broadcasts. With the invention of “Talking Pictures” Smith soon found himself as a staff guitarist for Fox and Paramount where he pioneered the role of guitar in orchestras, movies, and television. A great source of information about George Smith and his importance can be found in a great article by Jas Obrecht on the “Golden Age of Studio Guitar”:
A very important fact to remember when discussing the early jazz and plectrum guitar greats is to remember the context of their playing. In the 1930s there weren’t a plethora of guitarists or guitar teachers around, let alone method books. When George wrote Modern Guitar Method for Rhythm and Chord Improvising in 1942 it was a seminal work setting the bar for future guitar method books.
Test Pilot
I first heard George Smith on the album Guitar Rarities Vol I where he plays on six tracks accompanied by a string ensemble and rhythm section. Of the six my favorite are Bang Bang and Test Pilot with both being transcribed in Mel Bay’s Masters of the Plectrum Guitar. Learning Test Pilot was a chore due to the many position changes happening at tempo. Once the piece was under my fingers the hard part was learning to play through cleanly, which I am still trying to do. If you listen to George’s recording his technique and fingering is flawless. He nails every chord and triplet run without any slop.
Originally written for guitar and strings Test Pilot translates well to solo guitar. The opening key is D major and the form is ABCA after the straightly played four bar introduction. The A section moves with a nice bouncy feel pushed along by the guitar with the final two bars of each repeat endings a great chordal run with the last repeat transposing to the B section’s key of G major. The B section drops most of the ‘bounce’ and instead prefers a more straight ahead feel. I chose to incorporate the violin pulse at the seventh bar as I felt that pulse really set up a nice juxtaposition against the cascading dotted-quarter/eighth-note chords. The final four bars of the B section is actually played with more of a triplet feel as compared to how it is written. The C section, now in C major, contains the piece’s tension being filled with several cascading 13th chords and ‘outside’ sounding double-stops. Of all the complicated parts of Test Pilot, the final two bars are the hardest to play cleanly as it is a quick transition back to the original key and bounce of the A section.
Anyone looking for a challenging solo piece to add to their repertoire will find Test Pilot aptly named as playing this piece at times feels like sitting in Chuck Yeager’s X-1.
