Bucky Pizzarelli – An Anniversary Memoriam

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:

 

While I'm Still Here.

These days, I sit in the window of my loft in late morning, to get ten minutes of sun, sometimes twenty, while I read a book. It’s the only exposure to natural light to which I have access. I can’t go to the rooftop, where I could give my whole body a sunbath; there is no mandate for social distancing and masking up there. Even if there were, it wouldn’t be carefully followed, and I can't take the risk.

There are too many people living in my building who behave as if this isn’t the end of the world.

With all that I’ve experienced and endured in my years, I refuse to give my life over to this virus. So, I wait until the wee hours to take out my trash, or ride the elevator five floors to get my mail, just to avoid exposure. Sometimes, I get away with it; I have only the security guard behind the Plexiglas shield to acknowledge. Sometimes, there are unmasked people in the lobby chatting away, laughing, shouting, giving no mind to the unfettered droplets spitting from their mouths. As if there were no others in their vicinity who might be at risk of infection by their personal aerosol.

As if they were the only people in the building, the city, the world.

I only show my back to the sun, which seems to be getting hotter. My shoulders are covered by a thin t-shirt, and they start to burn. I lean forward, giving my shoulders a break from the heat that sears through the cotton, and wonder if it’s the angle of the sun, or the filter of particles from the faraway fires, or just the inevitable change in climate that will be ending life as we know it sooner than we’d hoped.

Life as I’ve known it has already ended for me.

There are those who will read that thought and chastise me for my pessimism, who will hasten to share a word of hope to lift me out of that bleak perspective. Friends in real life who love me and don’t want me to give up, or friends who only know me in the virtual world, posting comments filled with encouragement. No one wants to accept the facts I’m facing head-on. But we are always uncomfortable with change; we are ever in denial about death, even if we deny the denial.

Don't worry; I'm fine. I'm just telling the truth.

I say I won’t risk my life, but it’s been put at risk for me. Even I, who can so clearly see the shortness of my life, am not willing to endanger what’s left. We don’t understand how brief life is when we’re in our teens and twenties and thirties. But I quit smoking cigarettes at 29, and quit drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana when I was 39, so I must have understood. I clearly wanted to live as long as I possibly could.

I still do.

Friends generously offer to pick me up and take me to the ocean or to the mountains or to the park. It would be good for me to breathe the air, to walk in the sand, to sit in the grass under a tree. I decline, reminding them that I am on the list of people with risk factors. And I cry, because I want to go to the beach so badly. I cry because I am touched by their kindness, and because I envy them their seemingly fearless ability to move about the world. I cry because I can't bring myself to trust people Out There. I cry because hundreds of thousands of people in this country who went Out There are dying of this virus, and I don't want to be one of them. I don't want my friends to be among them.

Under these circumstances, can one be too cavalier? Can one be too careful?

The sun doesn’t beam into my loft for very long, and I go about my business. There is coffee to be drunk, there are communications to be exchanged, words to be composed and edited, music to be celebrated. There is stuff to keep and discard, food to be ordered and cooked. There are bills to be paid, programs to be watched. I sit too much behind the computer, so I walk the length of the loft, twenty strides back and forth, while I’m on the phone. I play music and dance around the room. I remind my body that it knows yoga, and I ask it to stretch. All within 1100 square feet of space. Every day and night and day and night and...

I used to count the days, thinking there’d come a day when I could stop counting. That day hasn’t come, but I’ve stopped counting, anyway. Now, it’s months. Exactly seven today.

I prefer to count my blessings. I am a freelance writer, and I work at home. I am an only child who was a latchkey kid. I have lived in my head for as long as I can remember, so being alone is easier for me than it is for others. I have a meditation practice. I have faith in a higher power. I am a realistic optimist, even if the limits of my optimism are being tested. And I have loving friends, who want only the best for me.

If you asked me what I miss, a hundred things come to mind. But the two things I miss most are the simple acts of hugging a friend and taking a deep breath of fresh air.

While I'm still here, I'll sit in my window and take the sun. I'll sleep until I wake up. I'll hold love in my heart, to hold fears at bay. I'll pray for the fires to subside, for no sizeable earthquakes, for the virus to get bored with us. I'll vote my conscience, and encourage others to do the same.

While I’m still here, I’ll write about the way it was, and support others in creating their own stories. I'll talk to myself and sing aloud, and not care about being heard.

While I'm still here, I’ll cherish all the hugs and breaths I’ve given and taken. I’ll choose to believe it will someday be safe enough to again do all the things I took for granted. Someday, I'll feel safe enough to be Out There.

Someday. Just not today.

Should I Stay, or Should I Go?

In my latest post-quake musings about why I live in Los Angeles (that is, why I STILL live in Los Angeles), I found this photo of me at 12, during my first visit to California. Dad was on tour in Sweden and Czechoslovakia with Paul Anka, Mom met him in Amsterdam at the end of the tour...and I got to frolic in the Pacific waves, in front of my godparents' beach house in Paradise Cove. It was as far in distance and lifestyle from New York City as I'd ever been–and I'd spent summers on Lake Champlain in Vermont and springs in the foothills of North Carolina, which were already big leaps away from life in Manhattan.

I returned to Malibu the next summer, and the summer after the next, falling in love a little more each time. Was it Malibu I adored, or all of LA? While the former's an obvious choice, I'd say the latter, since we often drove into town for Billy's work in the Hollywood film, television and music studios, or to stay at Yuriko's parents' sweet Steinkamp Spanish house in Leimert Park. In fact, we drove all over Los Angeles, from Topanga Canyon to the Downtown Fashion District (Yuriko’s relative had a warehouse filled with samples we could purchase for a pittance), from Studio City for Peggy Lee's birthday party to Dogtown for the last days of Pacific Ocean Park. In the three summers I spent here at 12, 13 and 15, I was able to access an unguarded spirit, a relaxed energy that had no place in my hometown.

In my 23rd year, after leaving the Upper West Side for the Bay Area to work with Dad, who died three weeks after my arrival, I had a few options: stay in the East Bay, move into San Francisco, move back to Manhattan, or move to the city of my teenage dreams. My choice was the last, but I’m not sure it’s the last choice I’ll make.

I miss my first hometown all the time; moreso, living in the most urban of Los Angeles neighborhoods. There is simply no comparison to be made between Manhattan and DTLA, which is still learning how to be a real city. I’ve been down here over 14 years, and my frustrations with its slow evolution (and current devolution) grow daily. But I’m not moving so soon after Mom’s death. And, while I talk about the possibility of living in other towns, other states, other countries, it’s too much to seriously consider right now.

I will say this: I’ve noticed that every time I arrive at JFK, I feel like I’m home. And every time I arrive at LAX, I feel like I’m on vacation. Even after all these years. I can’t explain it; it just is. Do I want to be home or on vacation? Is there a third alternative?

Maybe it was Confucius, or Bill W. and Dr. Bob, or Buckaroo Bonzai, who stated this irrefutable truth: “No matter where you go, there you are.”

It was definitely The Clash who asked the musical question I’m asking now.

Although I’m certainly no longer that girl in the photo enthralled by West Coast waters, I am absolutely this curious woman wondering about the next wave.

On this World AIDS Day...

...I'm remembering my precious cousin, Jack Dennis Adams, one of the finest human beings I've ever known, or will ever know.

Born April 2, 1945 in Portsmouth, Virginia, Dennis (as the family called him) grew up in North Carolina, graduating in 1968 from the University of North Carolina with a BA in Theater and Arts. That was the year he got a job as a window dresser at Saks Fifth Avenue's flagship store...the same year he came out to my parents and me, as fellow artists and the only progressive members of his family.

After less than a year, Dennis (now known to his new friends and colleagues as Jack) moved from New York to San Francisco, and began his career with San Francisco State University, starting out as the Properties Manager for the School of Creative Arts.

When my mother and father moved from Manhattan to the Bay Area in 1975, Jack attended as many of Dad's performances as possible...and one of mine, when I sat in with Dad's group that Christmas. When Dad died suddenly in 1977, Jack, joined by his older brother Gary, was there to support me and Mom through our shock and bereavement.

In 1982, Jack became Assistant Director of the SF State Student Union, a position he held until July of 1992, when his deteriorating health forced him to resign.

Aside from being adored by his family, Jack was a beloved campus figure, well known by hundreds of SF State students, faculty, and staff. He committed much of his time to backing student causes, and worked closely with Associated Students. His co-workers and friends described him as a warm, funny, and passionate man...which is exactly how I think of him.

The last time he and I spoke on the phone, his voice was a mush of sandpaper and gravel; thrush lesions were stealing his speech. I told him I wanted to drive up the coast to see him, to hold his hand, to give him a hug. He was so sweet in his refusal: "Please, Zan. Stay there, and know I love you."

On November 21, 1992, at the age of 47, Jack died of AIDS-related complications. On March 11, 1993, the SF State Student Union Governing Board passed a resolution to rename the Barbary Coast Room Jack Adams Hall, for the warm, funny, passionate man who resolutely championed student interests. And in 2011, the ASI Board of Directors established the Jack Adams Memorial Scholarship to honor his life and legacy.

My cousin Dennis is certainly not the only dear friend I've lost to AIDS...but he is (as far as I know) the only member of my family who was taken by this devastating virus. It's heartening that so much progress has been made to obliterate HIV...but I join the millions of others who've lost loved ones to AIDS in anticipating the day it no longer exists.

[That's Jack doing the work he loved, smiling in tie and shirt sleeves, with a shiny head and impeccable beard, standing on the roof of the hall that he didn't know would one day bear his name.]

My brilliant and glamorous actress mother, Evleena Barrens...

In the late 1940s and early '50s, Mom and Dad had a darkroom in their Chicago penthouse; both of them shot and developed hundreds of photos of their city, their friends, and each other. 

Dad extended the hobby to create little stories from the pictures they took, including this parody of an article (and a print ad for Coca-Cola) in a “fan magazine” he called MoviMag, featuring Mom as a character fashioned from his imagination...

No rest for the weary. Not today.

I'm bone tired, for personal, professional, and political reasons. I’m angry, and not a little afraid. 

But I'm not giving up.

If the Continental Army had taken a negative attitude, we'd all be British. If the Union Army had hopelessly laid down their arms, we'd be living in the Confederate States of America. If the Allies had cowered and thrown up their hands as the Nazis encroached, well, God only knows...but, from the history I've studied, and the stories my Greatest Generation parents told me, going to war was the only option, if we were to destroy Hitler's dream of world domination.

They didn't have social media on which to debate and denigrate and complain with ugly rhetoric and fatuous memes. They weren't bombarded with conflicting, confusing 24-hour cable news commentary designed to manipulate minds and grab ratings rather than inform and educate. My father was drafted, and gladly served as an intercept operator in the U.S. Army, even though it meant putting his lucrative career on hold. My mother, a young and beautiful woman who was just starting to find her way in the world, stepped into coveralls and stuffed shells with gunpowder for the U.S. Navy. They, and millions of other citizens, did their duty as proud and loyal Americans. These people suffered and sacrificed in ways the current culture seems to forget in this Age of Entitlement.

In the words of Sean Connery’s Jim Malone, when Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness was charged with taking down Robert De Niro’s Al Capone, “What are you prepared to do?”

We are facing (no, we're smack in the middle of) a terrifying Trumpublican coup, orchestrated by the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, delivered by a lying, cheating, narcissistic reality show host, and bolstered by a sycophantic Congress filled with old white Republican men and righteously indignant Democrats. There are good, decent, hardworking humans in the U.S. Capitol right now...but in this climate, even the best of them are looking like neutered buffoons.

Like our forefathers and foremothers, it's up to us to fight in whatever ways are available to us to preserve, protect and defend our country. I'm not advocating the bearing and discharging of arms, mind you. I'm saying we show up in the real world with our real voices however we can: protest, march, call, write, and (most important of all) gather our friends and neighbors of all stripes to VOTE OUT THE EVIL MEN AND WOMEN WHO PRETEND TO REPRESENT US, in favor of those who represent the best interests of ALL Americans. We must reject the wealthy, xenophobic, homophobic, racist misogynists who currently occupy our White House and every state house and city hall in our country, every one of them who feeds garbage to the masses in a perverse, and deadly, power play.

As President Obama first said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention (and repeated many times after), "Don't boo. Vote." To those who didn’t listen to him, and are complaining now: you helped get us where we are.

Are you listening now?

Don’t whine. VOTE.

My Valiant Mom

She screams herself out of her sleep. Sometimes, it’s pain from the phantom limb, sometimes it’s pain in the existing limb; sometimes, it’s both.

And sometimes, it’s from the nightmares. She’s in pure terror. I don’t know if it’s the memory of being beaten by her mother when she was a girl, or the memory of being raped by two men when she was 91, and I don’t ask. But she’s clearly trying to get away, and she’s screaming.

I run to her every time, in the middle of the day, or the middle of the night. I find her leaping out of bed in her sleep, and I get there just in time to keep her from falling. I bring her a heating pad to calm the nerves in her leg, I talk her down from the physical pain, or the psychological disturbance, or both. Mostly, I just say, "You're okay, Mom. You're here." And she sleeps.

She has started to thank me profusely. She says, “I don’t know how you got to be such a good person,” or “You do so many nice things for me,” or "You're so sweet." Things she's rarely, if ever, said to me in my lifetime. I think it has taken her this long to learn how to express her love, to realize that she is loved, that she deserves love. I think her defenses have been stripped bare.

Her mind is still active and relatively clear, but she’s barely eaten in months. Chocolate Ensure and whole milk, and maybe a bite or two of food a day, have kept her alive all this time. We can still talk and laugh, we can still discuss our memories of Dad and our remarkable life with him. But her hearing is less than half of what it was, so she can't listen to his recordings, the music that has sustained her for over 70 years.

She is quite literally skin and bones. She barely bumps her leg on her wheelchair and bleeds, and I dress the wounds on her limb that used to have a twin, that ran after me when I was little, that walked every inch of Manhattan and Paris, that climbed tree branches, and played golf. When I change her pajama top, I see her protruding spine, looking like that of a starving child in a third world country, or the cautionary photos of anorexic women here in the first world. Her body is failing, and she mentions it occasionally. New for a woman who, as many times as she's faced it, really doesn't like to talk about death.

“I’m drying up,” she says softly. “Am I floating away?” She’s never before expressed this, and I don’t have the words to respond. I just hug her gently, tell her I love her, roll her to the bathroom because she’s becoming too weak to do it on her own. I replace the pee pads on her bed, and give her fresh protective underwear (“Don’t call them diapers!” she warns) when she doesn’t make it. She’s embarrassed, she apologizes to me, and I say she doesn’t need to. This is life, this is love, this is sacred service. “You did this for me when I was little,” I say. “It’s my turn to do it for you.” And she thanks me, like a shy child.

"I don't feel old. Do I seem old?"
"Well, Mom, your body is 94. But your mind isn't old."
"Oh, well, that's all that counts."
We smile at each other, knowing.

Bit by bit, moment by moment, I’m losing my brilliant, witty, proud, fiercely independent mother, my best friend, my chief confidante, the person with whom I’ve experienced and endured so much, the one person in my life who knows the most about me, who’s known me the longest. And it feels like I’m losing part of myself.

I don't cry in front of her. I save it for others, for later.

I'm in pain, too, physically and emotionally, and I'm exhausted; but I move through it. I depend on the Eastern philosophies that have gotten me this far. I'm grateful to have many years of sobriety. My closest friends know I'll need them to draw me a little closer after Mom departs. They also know I'll need space and time.

I hope I'll have at least as much time as Mom has had, and at least half her incredible will. I don't have a child to care for me, so it would be best if my elder years were easier than hers. But there's no way of knowing. There's only this moment, in which I'm too busy to think about how much I'll miss her when she's no longer here.

Sometimes, when Mom’s abandoned Southern Baptist teachings surface, she says philosophically, “It’s the Plan.” I like to think that comforts her somewhere deep, where no one but God can see.

Anything that comforts her, comforts me.