Is there an obvious history of improvisational work within earlier genres of guitar music?
I was thinking about how improvisational work in pre-progressive rock guitar based music doesn’t seem to have really been recognized or explored. C: There’s those great singles (45s) that fade out on the guitar solo / jam just when things start getting interesting. For improvisation to be considered legitimate or important these days it seems to need to be based on an extended time frame. It’s also about the search for non-guitar sounding guitar sounds, stereo reproduction consciousness, and captured volume reproduction, even when it is acoustic. So in that sense, no I don’t think there’s an obvious history, I just think pre-psych / prog it has to be conceived of in terms of seconds rather than minutes. If you think in terms of flamenco (for instance) or in terms of what exactly is or is not a “guitar” there is a lot of improv from before that period. But with rock music a lot of it must have happened when the tape machines were turned off, there were no tape machines, or there was no
