A year ago today, when we learned that jazz guitar great Bucky Pizzarelli had died, it hit me hard for a variety of reasons...not the least of which was the fact that Bucky was the last of the musicians from my father’s generation who raised me in the New York music business.
I have so many memories of Bucky––with Dad, long before they formed their magnificent duo, then during their time together––and long after, right up until our last meeting in 2009, and our phone conversation a year or so later. He was a great musician and a good man, and was unthinkably followed exactly a week later by his lovely wife Ruth...both taken as the result of exposure to a virus that had only just started to steal so many loved ones.
I thought of their children––Mary, Anne, Martin, and John––and tried to imagine the shock of losing both parents, one right after the other. It wasn’t long before the virus took whole families, breaking hundreds of thousands of hearts. But I knew these people, these hearts. I had known Bucky all of my life.
He and my father started running into each other in the New York City recording studios of the early 1950s. More than a decade before, Chicago-based George Barnes had become a teenage national radio sensation on NBC’s National Barn Dance and Plantation Party when Bucky first heard him spilling out of his radio in New Jersey. Now they were colleagues, and played on dozens of sessions together––including The Drifters’ 1959 hit, “This Magic Moment.” Dad was the lead guitarist on all of The Three Suns recordings made from 1952 until the Number One Sun, Al Nevins, died in 1965. Bucky (who had played with them on the road) often joined Dad on rhythm in the studio.
This photo of six-year-old me holding one of Dad’s guitars, and Bucky holding a few of his own, was taken by bassist Milt Hinton at RCA 24th Street after a Three Suns date. It was around one a.m.
Bucky played on three of the four recordings Dad made for Mercury Records: 1960’s Guitar Galaxies, 1961’s Guitars Galore (both featuring Dad’s ten-guitar section) and 1962’s Bach Fugue in G minor, an arrangement that was meant to be one of ten classical pieces performed by his Jazz Renaissance Quintet, an album that the short-sighted execs at Mercury deemed "too esoteric."
This heavily degraded Polaroid of the JRQ was taken in 1962 by Mom at a club somewhere in the tri-state area; it was the first, and only, time they performed the fugue live. That’s the elegantly coiffed and clothed Ruth Pizzarelli in the foreground, listening intently.
Bucky sometimes dropped by our Manhattan penthouse on 58th and 7th when he and Dad were between record dates, and they’d play chess, one of Dad’s favorite hobbies. Bucky commemorated those times with one of his favorite hobbies: a painting of the two of them.
Around the same time, Dad was divesting himself of every guitar he owned in favor of the instrument of his dreams, the George Barnes Acousti-Lectric archtop he designed for Guild. Bucky bought Dad's rare dark burst D’Angelico L-5 copy for $125; as Bucky later said, it was a steal.
In 1965, Carl Kress, Dad’s dear friend since 1951 and guitar duo partner for three years, died in Reno, at a gig they’d booked on their way back from a triumphant tour of Japan. My father was bereft. Mom and I had never seen him so depressed; it was a loss from which he never completely recovered. But there was still music to be made, and after my family left Manhattan for a ten-month detour to Colorado and Texas, we returned to the East Coast, landing in Northern New Jersey, where Dad founded the first guitar course to be offered on cassette tape, funded by Billboard Magazine and Prentice Hall Publications, and produced in Dad’s Upper Saddle River studio...just a three-minute drive from the Pizzarelli homestead.
While Dad was out of town, Bucky had started playing a seven-string guitar, and took it to the studio one afternoon in 1969, just for a jam. That was the day Barnes and Pizzarelli decided to form their own duo. Mom immediately dubbed them, “George and Buckyfunkel,” which mercifully stayed in the family!
Mom snapped these photos of the momentous jam in Dad's office...and yes, that's young John Pizzarelli, taking it all in.
For the next three years, they performed in clubs and concerts and on Johnny Carson, David Frost, and Mike Douglas, and provided part of a soundtrack for a Spaghetti Western titled “The Ruthless Four,” and donated their time to a couple of Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day telethons, and survived the devastating 1971 Sylmar earthquake (see sidebar at the end of this post), and were invited by Duke Ellington to jam with him at his Upper West Side apartment for his birthday. They recorded two albums: Guitars, Pure and Honest and an entire side of the two-disc The Guitar Album: The Historic Town Hall Concert featuring Seven of the World's Greatest Guitarists (the others being Charlie Byrd, Chuck Wayne, Joe Beck, Tiny Grimes, and John McLaughlin). Dad and Bucky’s performance that August 1971 evening blew away the SRO crowd, many of whom were in their teens and twenties; but that was true of every one of their performances...which made their break-up in 1972 especially puzzling to some and disappointing to all. Of course, Mom and I knew the reason...and so did Bucky. It was very simple, actually. Dad didn’t want to play the Top Ten hits of the day; he wanted to stick with the Great American Songbook. He said he’d stopped doing studio work in the mid-1960s because he’d had enough of pop music; it wasn’t melodic or lyrical enough for him, he couldn’t feel it, make it his own. He fought to pull a handful of contemporary hits from their repertoire, but Bucky wanted to include them, and add to them, in the interest of expanding their audience and getting radio airplay. There was nothing wrong with either of their intentions; but they were both stubborn, and their manager-cum-performer, Carly Simon's uncle Peter Dean, was ineffective in appeasing them both. I wasn’t in the St. Regis Room the night Dad said he’d had enough and walked off the stand...but I knew he was in a lot of pain that had nothing to do with Bucky as a partner or a person or a player, and he handled it badly.
The photo in the November 1971 New York Magazine feature by Albert Goldman, who waxed rhapsodic about Barnes and Pizzarelli: "Best of all, the two men, so wonderfully together, are yet splendidly distinct...George as impassive as the Buddha and Bucky with an expression of barely-contained glee, like Coppelius the mad dollmaker..."
In February 2009, I called Bucky from LA before one of my trips back to my hometown, telling him that I’d had the Bach Fugue session digitally remastered––the engineer's slates, the chatter between takes, and all––and it was to be released on my friend’s Art of Sound label. Bucky was enthusiastic about the idea and wanted to hear it. He called his friends at Nola Sound on West 57th Street and booked a room for playback. He hadn’t heard it since they recorded it at A&R’s original 48th Street studio on a Sunday afternoon, February 25, 1962––almost exactly 47 years before. We talked about that session, the other guys in the group (Hank D’Amico, Jack Lesberg, Cliff Leeman), the guy who recorded them (Phil Ramone), the other work they did together, the duo, the reason they parted ways––and the fact that they reconciled one day on a Manhattan street.
Here we are at Nola, a studio at which both Dad and Bucky recorded many times in their studio musician days...one of the last NYC recording studios in 2009 that is now no more. Pay no attention to Bucky's black eyes; merely a red-eye correction gone much too dark...
We laughed at the fact that Dad kept The Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere” on his set list with every subsequent group, and endured the same objections from Ruby Braff while they co-led their acclaimed quartet as Bucky had heard from Dad a year and a half before! Bucky remembered when I’d sat in with them on Christmas night in their early days at the Upstairs at the Downstairs. I was 16, and trying out my jazz vocal chops. He generously said, “You were good, Zan, even then.” He was glad to know that Dad had been sober for 17 months when he died, and was happier than he’d been since Carl departed. We got misty about the fact that Dad died so young, and so suddenly, just as he and I were preparing to perform and record, the way Bucky and his kids had done. So much bittersweetness.
Over a year later, Bucky called me after he’d received the two Bach Fugue CDs I’d sent him; he loved the final product, including the cover art collage I’d created from Mom’s photo and Dad’s score, and said just the thing I'd hoped to hear: “George would be proud of you.” He and I talked about what it would take to get Pure and Honest and The Guitar Album re-released. He’d recently recorded a couple of tracks with Paul McCartney for Paul’s Kisses on the Bottom album; at the session, Paul told Bucky that the Barnes-Pizzarelli “Eleanor Rigby/Here, There, and Everywhere” medley from the Town Hall concert was his favorite instrumental cover. “I think George would have gotten a kick out of that,” he chuckled. No doubt.
“I loved George, you know,” Bucky said. I was so glad to be able to respond with the truth: “He loved you, too, Bucky.”
We all loved you, Bucky.
And now, The Earthquake Story, as told on the George Barnes, Guitar Legend Facebook page:
