C&A:

Recorded at the “Monte Proser Dance Carnival,” this turned out to be the final Rose Room Charlie Christian would ever record.  One of the two slower versions and only two choruses long, CC is again the featured soloist and, as usual, solos on the second chorus but this time it’s only for 24 bars (the ensemble comes in for the last eight bars of the chorus).

As on the 28 October 1939 aircheck of Rose Room, Charles takes one aback with his solo opening on this version.  Bars 6-8 are well worth comparing to two other CC solos on this tune—it’s a revised sequence of what he played almost two years earlier (2 & 28 October 1939) on the same measures.  The G♭7 (relative dominant of the D♭m) that begins on the last beat of bar 8 starts out with same line as the A♭7 that begins at bar 4.

Measure 12:  CC runs through an exquisite F7 progression closely related to the one he played on the 2 October 1939 studio date but whereas he played triplets on the much earlier date, here he double-times it with 16ths.  Bars 15-16 (E♭7) also have a phrase related to the October 2nd date.

Bars 20-22 contain the beautiful A♭7 sequence that had first appeared earlier on the partial aircheck of Rose Room on 19 February and then again on the first chorus of his second solo at the 13 March 1941 Rose Room studio jam.  The double-time closing of the solo (mm 23-24) can be found in various guises on several other tunes—sometimes inverted, sometimes reversed—almost always over a major chord, at least once over a dominant chord.

Despite the similarities in some of the sequences, this beautiful solo is very different from the three sextet versions recorded in 1939, especially in the phrasing.

Rose Room may well have been Charles’ favorite tune to solo on.   This rendition was one of his very last recorded solos.  Interestingly, it was also one of three tunes on which he soloed in his first public performance in his early teens when he sat-in with Don Redman’s band at Honey Murphy’s in OKC.