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Following in his father Bucky's footsteps on the seven string guitar, John Pizzarelli has established himself as one of the finest contemporary jazz entertainers. With his brother Martin on bass and Ray Kennedy on piano, the John Pizzarelli Trio has spent ten years swinging hard and delighting jazz novices as well as the jazz cognoscenti. Combining original songs with interpretations of contemporary pop and Great American Songbook standards, the Trio is not only a model of instrumental virtuosity, but one of the rare acts on the jazz scene that takes their role as entertainers as seriously as their musical chops.
The Trio's unique combination of talents is in full display on their latest Telarc release, Live At Birdland, a two disc set that captures the spirit and spontaneity of their work. Pizzarelli took the time for a Cosmik Conversation about his career, past present and future, his approach to the seven string guitar and his philosophy about jazz performance as entertainment.
Cosmik: The new CD celebrates ten years for the trio, but your career is much longer than that....
John: Actually, this is my 20th year as a singer, recording. My first record was in 1983, and I recorded with Bucky in 1980, so it's 23 years as a recording artist, yeah.
Cosmik: So the first solo album was in '83?
John: Yep. It was called I'm Hip, Please Don't Tell My Father, on Stash. It's available in certain parts of the world, still.
Cosmik: Is that a good thing?
John: Actually, that record's OK. I made three for Stash. The second one is OK, [pianist] Dave McKenna's on it, he's terrific and those cuts are fabulous. The third album isn't so hot but they keep releasing that one. But you get to see what the hell was going on with me, anyway, so....
Cosmik: So what the hell was going on with you?
John: Well, the first one was with my father's trio, guitar, bass and piano, with me singing. The second record, half the record was with a rhythm section which was Dave McKenna, my father, a bass player and a drummer and half of it was my own group, so I was sorta mixing the styles, sort of finding my way. It wasn't until I got to Chesky in 1990 that I realized I was going to concentrate on the Nat King Cole sort of style and that era, or that style of music, swing jazz and those songs, no attempts to try to do anything wacky in any other directions. I sort of pinpointed my style by 1990.
Cosmik: It fascinates me that you could grow up with Bucky Pizzarelli, who is a legend himself, and it's Nat King Cole who inspires you to want to play jazz full time.
John: Well, my father pointed me in that direction, because of the nature of my voice and looking for material. I had found the song "Straighten Up And Fly Right" through a guy named Frank Webber, who was a pop artist who made a record of that song, and a girlfriend had given me that record. I played it for my dad and he said "Well, it's Nat King Cole's first hit. You should just get all of Nat Cole's songs, that's what it's all about!" In 1980, Capitol had rereleased The Best Of The Nat King Cole Trio, Parts I & II. I immediately found "Route 66," "Baby, Baby All The Time," "Frim Fram Sauce," "Paper Moon" and "Straighten Up And Fly Right" and I said "That's what I want to do. I want to make that the foundation of what I can do singing and playing."
Cosmik: In the beginning, was singing more important than playing?
John: What had happened was I was singing and playing songs in restaurants and coffee houses in college and playing Kenny Rankin and Michael Franks songs, James Taylor songs, I was just constantly looking for material that would fit the way I sang. So the Nat King Cole stuff really centered what I was going to do. I really felt that it had all the ingredients of what I wanted to do as a musician.
Cosmik: And that's when you put together the Trio.
John: Well, I put together the Trio in 1990 with a different piano player, with Ken Lubinsky on piano, and we made two records for RCA with big bands. Kenny left the group in the beginning of '93 and Ray Kennedy was hired shortly thereafter, in March of '93. That really solidified what we were doing as a trio.
Cosmik: That was a good hire!
John: Yeah, that was a good acquisition.
Cosmik: If you were a baseball manager, you'd have a lifetime contract.
John: That was Frank Robinson for Emil Pappas.
[Mutual laughter.]
Cosmik: It's hard now to imagine the trio without Ray Kennedy, and my question is how do you keep him? He's got a bass playing brother of his own and his own act to pursue with that.
John: You know, we even talk about it at times, and the thing that makes the group so special is that everybody gets to do in the group what they really want to do. I think Ray loves the fact that he's able to play the songs he wants to play in the style he wants to play, and we're an established group. Everybody gets paid well and we get to play great gigs, everybody's sort of established their names within the group.
Cosmik: Sure. On the new album, there's room for his originals as well as yours. It's called the John Pizzarelli Trio, but there's room for everybody.
John: Oh yeah, everybody gets a fair shake. I encourage Ray to write stuff and I make a point to feature him. It's about the group as a whole. We just say "Whattaya got? Write something for this gig." We never say don't.
Cosmik: The really unsung member, though, who may have the hardest job in the group, is your brother, Martin. Without drums, and with either you or Ray apt to take off in any direction at any moment, he's often left holding things together in the middle by himself.
John: He does a great job. He really is the unsung hero. We're fortunate to have him, his understanding of the way the time in the band is. He creates a lot of excitement within what he does. It's very instinctive playing, and he reharmonizes things at the drop of a hat. We look over at him sometimes and think "Where does he come up with these notes?" He does these great little reharmonizations. He's a terrific player, and really is what a bass player in a group like that is all about.
Cosmik: In a sense it seems natural. I mean, he's your brother, of course he's in your group. But what are the odds of two brothers liking this music enough to want to go out and play it every night.
John: And one of them being a bass player and the other a guitar player. We just sort of put the bass in his hands years and years ago, and didn't realize what a great musician he was. He hears everything that goes on on all the records he listens to and can point things out to you that make you go "No, you're kidding." and when you listen back you go "He's right!" He hears everything that happens and he's aware of what's going on. It's like a basketball player who can see the whole play before him before he goes down the court.
Cosmik: Well, listening to the Trio and knowing about the Kennedy brothers, sometimes I think I should have taught my kid sister to play bass.
John: Right! (laughs) The Kennedy's are true musical freaks. They've been playing like that since they were in their early teens. They're just tremendously gifted musicians. Tommy's equally adept with Fender and upright. There's something in the water in St. Louis [the Kennedy's hometown], that's for sure.
Cosmik: You took a page from Nat Cole, but you've never limited yourself to that. You've covered the Great American Songbook expansively, and your original material, but of all the GAS composers you might have devoted an album to, you kind of threw the world a curve when you did Meets The Beatles.
John: (laughs) We're good curve ball pitchers!
Cosmik: Meets Gershwin, meets Porter, you could have met a lot of people, but here comes The John Pizzarelli Trio Meets The Beatles.
John: Well, we had done "Honey Pie" on the Love Is Here To Stay record, and a lot of interviews that I'd done had asked about it. "It was really neat the way you worked that Beatles song, we thought it was a standard," and this and that. People who didn't know anything about it. So I just thought it would be a great way to introduce a younger listening audience to our style of music, if we reinvented these Beatle songs and reintroduced them in our style to younger listeners, and others who wouldn't ordinarily buy these kinds of records. That was the attempt, and in some ways it was quite successful. In other ways it wasn't.
Cosmik: I did catch that little snatch of "Jumping Jack Flash" at the top of the second disc in the new release, and I'm kind of waiting for Meets The Rolling Stones....
John: (laughs) We're going to do that, then we're going to go to Aerosmith, I think. That's the logical progression.
Cosmik: Just the fact that you tossed that in, though, is an example of how much fun your performance is, and how much fun it is to listen to. One of the things I think is killing jazz for the mass audience is that a long time ago someone decided to make it hard for the audience....
John: Right.
Cosmik: ....challenging the audience with "Look at what we can do, can you keep up?" And you put a lot of emphasis on the entertainment aspect of your music, as well as playing excellent music.
John: What we do, in a sense, there's obviously an audience for the style of music that we play. Our goal is to get beyond the people who naturally listen to our style, to get the non-jazz listener to come out to our gigs and we've got to do that through entertainment, and through stories, and saying to the person that may be there for the first time "Everything's going to be fine. You may not like jazz, but you're going to like what we do." We want you to have a good time when you're in the audience and discover these songs and realize that it's not about 'That's a song from 1938,' but it's just another song. It might be a song written in 1978 or '88. It's just about a style of music that we like to play and we're going to make you like it."
Cosmik: And even while you draw on the Great American Songbook, you bring in new material. There are James Taylor pieces on the new album. Is that something you're always looking for? Contemporary music that fits into your format?
John: Sure. We're constantly looking for any song that works within our framework. The thing we try not to do is go outside of the framework of the group. We play a certain way and we try to make the songs work for that. If we had played it and it wasn't so hot, then we'd say no. Sometimes we find a song, and when we try it we say, you know, that's not exactly it. So we just think it's about a style of music, and not an old song or a new song. Just songs that we can play within our style, and we enjoy finding songs from all different eras.
Cosmik: So who's actively writing material that could work for the Trio?
John: Well, we've done a good job within the group. I think my wife and I, and even Ray, we've written a lot of great songs. I think "Better Run Before It's Spring" is a great song, and Linda Rose wrote that lyric. It's a lyric that was given to my dad in the 80s, and I stole it from him and wrote the melody to. There's some good rhythm songs that we've written, my friend Grover Kemble and I have gotten some things together. James Taylor still comes up with something that works within our framework, there's even Billy Joel songs that would be fine, and Joni Mitchell has written a lot of great songs over the years that would work, too. We're always looking to see what people have out there, if they'll work for us. Michael Franks, too. Michael Franks has written some things that are terrific, too, that we like.
Cosmik: So a lot of the stuff you were doing in the Jersey clubs back in the day could be brought into this context.
John: Oh sure, yeah. I recorded "Popsicle Toes" on the first album in '83. There's one called "Everywhere The Lady Goes," there's "Under The Apple Tree," that's really terrific. There's one called "Hideaway" that I've always liked. There's a number of Michael Franks things. So there's people writing stuff for us, we've just got to find them.
Cosmik: And there's a taste of those early club days on Live At Birdland when you bring Grover (Kemble) onstage....
John: He's one of my dearest friends. It's all explained on the record, how I met him and everything. We used to have so much fun working together. He was always a real entertainer, singing great songs, really swinging hard, and I just said "Come and sing those two songs." We didn't rehearse it or anything. I said "Come do Vera's ("Headed Out To Vera's")," because we recorded that years ago and wrote it together, and "My Castle's Rockin'," I just wrote the chords out backstage and said to the guys, "We're gonna do this song." It's just about how we are, you know, we're just about [to make] that fearless jump on the stage and get everybody rocking the room kind of thing. And Grover's so great at that.
Cosmik: And he's still very active on that club circuit.
John: Oh yeah, he still runs all around Jersey, and he's just a great guy. I love him.
Cosmik: Again, it's one of those fun elements of the album. I wonder, the album was recorded over four days. How much were you involved in sequencing and putting the album together?
John: It was just a matter of listening to the eight sets, two sets a night for four nights, a matter of listening to it and saying what take was good. Did we get a good "Three Little Words"? Yeah, the fourth night, first set. I think "Three Little Words" was the last night, 'cause that's when I was fooling around a little and did "Jumping Jack Flash." I remember the night that came from. It was all a matter of how the crowds were. The early second sets, the first two nights, we played some of the things we've played over the years, songs a trio fan would know like "The Polliwog Song," "Oh How My Heart Beats For You," "Three Little Words." Those have been staples for our group over the ten year period. We pretty much knew when we had a good take of a new song, and to keep track mentally of what we had. Also to play relaxed and not get caught up in the fact that the tape was rolling, because that can throw a wrench sometimes, in the engine.
Cosmik: I was wondering about that, how you approach recording live, as opposed to the studio, where you can do it again, change it around....
John: We were lucky in that, we did have that feeling, knowing that if we messed something up on the first night, we could do it the next night. The only difficulty was, you know, I don't want to do "Just You, Just Me" twice in a night. I don't want to do it in both sets. We were still trying to maintain the fact that there were people coming to the shows, and we don't like to repeat sets in the same night. We are very self-conscious of the tape rolling. That's one of the things that's always bugged Ray and me especially, like "Oh, that would have been a great take but we messed up somewhere." We did sort of get over that, but that's probably the toughest thing. We're the same way in the studio. There'll be a great take and somebody will say "You know, I just missed that one note."
Cosmik: Well, that's jazz. If you don't miss a note once in a while, you're not trying hard enough.
John: Exactly. When you do it over the course of four nights, you get looser with it. The first night, the first set was really frantic, and I remember coming in the second night and saying "Listen, everybody, let's not worry about the tape and just play the way we play. We've got material and we've got nothing to worry about. Let's just get up there." And we really settled in after the first night.
Cosmik: Well, it sounds as good as you expect a Telarc album to sound from an audio standpoint...
John: Yeah, they did a great job. We actually put the piano backward to the audience so they could seal it off and get a good sound from the piano without compromising the way we set up. You can see the picture on the back. It sort of looks backward, but it's the way we were.
Cosmik: But on top of that, it's really put together beautifully. It's sequenced like two great sets, like you came to a show and it was so good you decided to stay for the second set.
John: Well, thanks a lot. That's a great compliment. I appreciate that.
Cosmik: Well, it's got that kind of structure and intimacy, and it's great to listen to that way. In fact, speaking of effusive praise, I play all kinds of music around here, and some of it's pretty aggravating for my wife, so eventually she'll just say "Turn off that stuff you're listening to and put on some Sinatra."
John: There you go.
Cosmik: But for the last couple weeks she's been saying "Play that new one!" That's about the highest praise I can offer you.
John: That's great praise. I'll take it. Thank you very much.
Cosmik: One of the ways you've followed your dad that I'd like to touch on is playing the seven string guitar. I got turned onto George Van Epps kind of late in life....
John: So did I.
Cosmik: In a way, he was kind of like your dad, in that, while you grew up knowing who Bucky Pizzarelli was, for a lot of people he wasn't a name, he was just a guy they saw playing guitar in a band on late night TV. [Bucky Pizzarelli was a longtime member of the Tonight Show band.]
John: Right.
Cosmik: People who know players know he's one of the great players, and Van Epps was like that. Almost everyone's heard him, they just don't know it, from his studio work and soundtrack work.
[Pictured: Bucky and John Pizzarelli.]
John: He wasn't really a concert player, that much, Van Epps. What Bucky did, just through sheer tenacity, after doing all the studio work he'd go out at night and become this solo guitar player, or this duo guitar player with either George Barnes on guitar with him or Zoot Sims or Les Paul or Slam Stewart, and over the years you just realized that this guy's been playing with everybody and he became known as being a performer with me or with his own group or things like that. You weren't familiar with Van Epps' work like that, but Van Epps' record Mellow Guitar kept making the rounds of all the guitar players and is now being released on CD and people are realizing this style of guitar he played and the extra string. On "Paper Moon" and "They Can't Take That Away From Me," I play these little chord solos ala George Van Epps, because I'm delving more and more into that thing. It's another ingredient the guitar has that you can play for people. Along with single notes or rhythm, there are these great little chord solos that I love to play and that I work on all the time.
Cosmik: Can you explain in simple terms what that seventh string does?
John: When you hear those solos, basically you can hear bass notes that you wouldn't hear on a six string guitar, because you now have notes below the E. Because of the low A string, now you can have an Eb, D, Db, C, B, Bb, A, so the chords, you can actually play a C chord with a low C in the bass. It makes the chords sound bigger and there's just a much broader sound to it because of those low bass notes.
Cosmik: And that's something your dad plays as well. You don't see it a lot.
John: He always knew about Van Epps, and then Gretsch mass produced a seven string guitar around 1967, '68. My father tells the story, he says, "There were eight guitar players in New York, we all went down to the Park Sheraton Hotel where Van Epps was playing this guitar to show us how it went, and then we left there and went right to Manny's on 48th Street and we all bought one." I think from the day he got it, he didn't play any other guitar. From there on in he always played the seven string to get used to it. He really made it the right instrument. He used it as an accompanying tool, and he used with George Barnes, and he used it to play with Zoot Simms. He was smart enough to figure out how it became useful to him. And they were free, they were in my house. I learned how to play them when I was 16. He showed me the chords and off I went.
Cosmik: So you've played seven string forever?
John: Since I was 16. I toyed with it, and when we started playing in duo form I was originally like the George Barnes to his Bucky, and then he said "Why don't you play the seven, so then you can accompany me while I solo and vice versa." So I just started playing it, and we were off to the bases.
Cosmik: Six strings are confusing enough for me!
John: I get confused now when I go back to the six string because I keep looking for those bass notes.
Cosmik: Other than the trio, you've done a lot of other work over the last ten years. You had a working relationship with Rosemary Clooney....
[Pictured: Pizzarelli with Rosemary Clooney.]
John: Yep, I made a record with her called Brazil, I got to work as a sideman on Natalie Cole's Stardust record, I was a sideman on Rickie Lee Jones' last record, which was all standards of sorts, and I was on James Taylor's last album, October Road. I just do a lot of different things, people call up and I got to meet those people and I get to work with some great big bands on the records. I made a great Christmas album with a lot of different arrangers. That was a fun album to make.
Cosmik: Are you looking for more session work?
John: I like to do it when it seems to fall into place. I just did a bossa nova record with a small group, doing classic bossa nova songs. It came out really well. We just finished it last week. Russ Titleman produced it and we had some great people involved.
Cosmik: Were you the leader on that?
John: Oh yeah, that was my record. That will be the next Telarc record, next year. We just finished that in the studio. It was a great experience. So we're still cranking away. It's a matter of what mood we're in and what we think would be nice to follow up every record with. This is sort of an exclamation point at the end of ten years with the trio, to say we're still going and here's what we've done for ten years. The bossa nova is something I've wanted to do since I heard the Amoroso album Joao Gilberto did. I so love that record, and that style of guitar. I wanted to explore that, and got to on this record, and we'll see where we go from there. We could do a record of ballads with a string quartet, and I'd love to record with the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, that would be fun.
Cosmik: And there's still that Jagger/Richards project too.
John: Or the Jagger/Richards thing!
To find out more about John Pizzarelli, visit The Pizzarelli Fan Page, where you can keep up on record releases, concert tours and whatever else might be going on in the life of this gifted artist.
(C) 2003 - Shaun Dale