His rhythm playing was outstanding. Through Barry I met his good friend, Julian Bream. Because of Barry, Jose consented to make me a beautiful classical guitar. Barry was on many of my albums and I could always count on his doing a superb job in whatever capacity I had hired him for. A real gentleman. They said it might take all day to shoot it and that we needed to show up at six in the morning with white pants, blue blazers and two blond guitars.
He said that they already had the audio tracks and just needed two players to sit up there and look like they were playing. We agreed and decided to bring our classical guitars so that we could practice between takes.
I guess it was the only time that either one of us ever got paid for pretending to play the guitar! Barry was such a great player. I love the way he does the single-line fills in these arrangements. He makes it so easy! Tony Mottola If one were looking for a guitarist who played superb rhythm, jazz, classical, etc.
It was always a pleasure to sit next to him in the numerous studio sessions we did together. Among the top jazz players today, there are many guitarists he has inspired. He was unsurpassed as a teacher and coach. Barry was a perfectionist who was diligent in writing out his arrangements and solos and it is my belief that this body of work is the wonderful legacy he left behind for other guitarists to benefit from.
The arranger had written the strangest part I had ever seen for the guitar. I remember following Barry in a studio band for some television show. I saw that Barry had edited the music for the guitar parts, crossing through unnecessary notes and leaving just the essence of the chords. He was so good at simplifying. Barry could do it all. Rhythm, comping, solo work, the most difficult reading, tasty melodic lines, great accompaniments for singers. All of it! It was a hillbilly band consisting of Dad on guitar, a fiddle player who kept time with his peg leg, and his wife, a piano player who, anticipating Errol Garner, required a phone book to reach the keyboard.
From this start, anything would have been upwardly mobile! Dad was the oldest of three boys who, with brothers Don and Rex, were raised in a multi-generational home in which music was an important though not dominant part of family life.
His grandmother played a guitar, his grandfather a fiddle, and his mother was a competent pianist. Maybe his hillbilly beginning was preordained! I remember him telling me confessing? Guy Lombardo! I also found a picture of him at two years of age holding some sort of unidentifiable stringed instrument.
I would guess his grandmother got him started but nobody in the family remembers either how or when he began to play. Although he had no formal training in guitar, he did take the train into Pittsburgh for trombone lessons and he played trombone in the high school band. His brother tells of their home being the center for jam sessions with high school friends, including Tay Voye, who went on to play the vibraphone professionally, and Joe Kennedy, the talented jazz violinist, arranger, and Richmond educator.
Not bad company! As a teenager he played around the Pittsburgh area. One of his acquaintances at this time was guitarist, Joe Negri, who remained in Pittsburgh to become THE guitar player in the area. In , Dad hit the road with Red Norvo, the legendary xylophonist. His travels with the Norvo group ultimately landed him in New York where he would spend most of his professional life.
Later that same year he joined the Claude Thornhill band until it broke up in when Claude went into the navy. I remember an episode around this time. He had come home to McDonald to visit when, just as he arrived, a long-distance call came to do a gig with the Woody Herman band.
He was back on the train in a flash. He played with the Jerry Wald and Hal McIntyre bands and made a nationwide tour with the Raymond Paige band before he was drafted into the army in While in the army he played for a short time with a special services band and then he was transferred to the Corps of Engineers.
As usual, the army got it wrong. I remember a kitchen shelf he once installed; anything round rolled right off of it! And my uncle Don tells of a record date he attended in which the score called for a crescendo climaxed by a cymbal crash.
Having only a single percussionist, they called on Dad to play the part. Simple enough, right? However, when the moment arrived, instead of the resounding crash of cymbals there was sort of a thup, clank. I recall that Margaret Whiting was the female vocalist with this band but forget who the male vocalist was. Herb Shriner was the comedian on the show. In Dad rejoined the Thornhill band until it became a victim of the mass extinction of big bands, which occurred in the post-war years.
I had been spending parts of summers with him since when he and my mother were divorced, and thought musicians were the greatest people on earth and that there was no better life than being on the road! When I arrived on the scene that summer, Peggy and Dave were settled in for several weeks at the Paramount sharing the billing with the Jimmy Dorsey band and a young comic team by the name of Martin and Lewis.
The bass player, Joe Shulman arranged a jam session with some saxophone player and all the musicians seemed to be pretty excited at the prospect of playing with this guy. Immediately after one of the afternoon shows, they set up in a basketball court on an upper floor of the Paramount building. Finally, after they had given up on his arrival, this big to me guy wearing a pork-pie hat sort of shuffles in, sits down, takes out his horn, and provides an unforgettable experience.
Joe Shulman later joined Lester in what was probably one of his last groups. Few people probably know that when George Shearing arrived in this country he organized a quintet in which Dad was the guitarist. However, instead of the guitar — vibes combination done so well by Chuck Wayne and Marjorie Hymes, the original quintet featured guitar and clarinet. This group never recorded and thus exists only as a memory. Although some musicians lived to be on the road, most eventually became worn down by the grind.
Dad used to like to tell about the time the Thornhill band was nearing the end of a long string of one-night stands and everybody was really beat. The band had just finished a tune but Billy Exiner, the drummer, kept right on playing.
There he sat, relaxed, eyes closed, sound asleep! And keeping perfect time! Well, by the time Peggy and Dave decided to come in off the road for awhile, Dad had grown tired of the grueling road trips so he got his cabaret card and settled in New York City. During the Kate Smith years, and for several years afterward, he studied piano but the instrument never felt natural to him, probably because it was too mechanical see above! Those who remember Kovacs know what a comic genius he was and how creative and even diabolical his humor could be.
The show would frequently close with a skit featuring the Nairobi trio, three guys in monkey suits, top hat and tails, ape masks and hairy hands. As the band played mechanical little tunes, the trio would move about like wind-up toys while building a tension that would erupt in some wild sight gag bringing the show to an abrupt close. So we all gathered around to see Dad live on national TV but began to get a little antsy when the show was almost over and still no band.
Finally, the Nairobi trio appeared. The show was over. Obviously, my grandmother had not remembered the correct date. And there was Dad and the rest of the band all decked out in top hat and tails, ape faces and hairy hands!
When I was a teenager I played alto sax I put it away and went to college when I discovered that Jackie McLean was only a year or two older than I and would play with Dad when I saw him in the summer. I struggled through them but had a great time anyway.
He had secretly recorded our duets and had waited well over ten years to give me the tape! He emphasized how difficult it was to make a living as a musician, a theme he reiterated when he taught at the New England Conservatory and saw first hand the unfavorable ratio of excellent student musicians to available jobs.
In , Dad joined the Stan Kenton band for its European tour. He enjoyed playing with the Kenton band and really dug the appreciative European audiences. But the trip was to have a lasting negative effect on him. Travel was by an antiquated two-engine aircraft into which the entire band, their wives, and all the equipment were crammed. The guys felt as if they were collectively willing the plane into the air! They flew through many thunderstorms and the plane leaked water through every seam as they pitched and bounced through the air.
There was more than one terrifying moment and the memory of that terror never left Dad. He happily returned to New York and stayed there, safe on the ground, driving his Volkswagen beetle like a maniac, for most of his remaining years. The more subtle the revenge, the sweeter it is. He told me that he learned an enormous amount by playing the guitar parts in the Thornhill band.
He said they were often written as if for a horn section and, initially, he had to simplify them so that he could play them. This embarrassed him, but, with an enormous amount of work, he finally got his chops around the music. As a consequence, however, he possessed a dimension in his playing that most guitarists lacked. Young guitar players, take heart! Over a period of several years the condition worsened to the point that he could no longer feel the strings.
He went to physician after physician, chiropractors, acupuncturists—you name it—in an attempt to find out what was wrong but to no avail. Nobody seemed to be able to figure out what was going on and, though he tried not to reveal it, he was becoming very alarmed. Finally, in , a neurosurgeon at Columbia University discovered, in a set of x-rays taken two years previously by another physician, that several of the cervical vertebrae had bone growths that were pressing on, and destroying, the sensory nerves entering the spinal cord.
This condition very likely resulted from the many years of pressure placed on that area by the posture he assumed while playing.
He was told that in six months more time the nerves would have been permanently destroyed. He immediately had surgery to remove the excess bone. Although the nerves were saved, the operation not only failed to improve the use of his left hand, it impaired his use of the right hand as well! As one might imagine, the following months were very difficult. He had to teach himself to play again and it was a very discouraging business. It was also difficult to listen to him struggling so hard to regain his lost skills.
He would comp for hours with Count Basie records and attempt to play lines he had transcribed from other guitarists, Tal Farlow in particular.
Much to my surprise, and perhaps to his as well, within less than a year he was back in harness, mostly doing jingles, and then he joined the Billy Taylor band on the David Frost TV show. He must have felt that this was the ultimate test because some years later one of his friends told me it was the hardest job in town. He told me that it was just too hard. He continued to do jingles and a little studio work but for the most part earned his living by teaching.
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Close X Music Lists. Description optional. To create a music list, please sign in. Close X Saved to Music List. There is also a companion CD recorded by John Purse. Jim Hall, in his review of the first volume Just Jazz Guitar. Arrangements of jazz vocals, musical excerpts, and big band music by Barry Galbraith. This is a collection of 48 original jazz tunes in different styles, with fun melodies ideal for jamming. The pieces are in a variety of keys and are presented in standard notation and tablature.
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