Transcription Page:     Flying Home  —  15 January 1940

C&A:

This version of Flying Home was one of two tunes of the sextet on a half-hour broadcast by radio shortwave from Rockefeller Center to Scandinavia.  The personnel and arrangement routine are the same but the tempo is a bit slower than at the Columbia recording studios three months earlier.  This would be the last time the vibes would be heard with the sextet on Flying Home – later versions would have trumpet following the guitar solo and on one occasion a guest xylophonist.

And this Flying Home is different from any other version, before or after.  Charlie Christian tosses aside any relationship to the theme on his solo.  To this listener, he seems to play the solo based solely on the chord changes.

A good solo with mostly typical CC phrases, it has an atypical sort of feel from the norm.  There is one sequence right after the bridge, at mm 26-28, that is quite unique.  The other sextet tune on the program was Star Dust which Charles played in his regular mother-dedication manner.

These recordings were not available to the general public until their release almost seventy years later on compact disc;  a multi-disc series was published from the music bequeathed to the Yale University Music Library upon the death of the bandleader.

For now, this is the sole existing transcription of this particular solo.