Guitars Pure And Honest - George Barnes and Bucky Pizzarelli

Blue Skies

Guitars
Pure And Honest
George Barnes & Bucky Pizzarelli
A Manny Kellem Production
Art Direction: Sid Maurer
Album Design: Michael Mendel
Cover Photographs: Don Hunstein
A&R Records 7100/007
1971

From the back cover: I've (John S. Wilson) followed George and Bucky step by step since I first heard them together at an outdoor concert in Central Park in the summer of 1970 when Chris Conner generously gave them a spot on her show. I was delighted by them that night but a few weeks later, when they played between sets by the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band on a Monday night at the Village Vanguard, they were even better. By the time they began their first regular engagement in October – appropriately, in a room called The Guitar – the interplay had become so dazzling that those earlier appearances began to seem like what they actually were – warm ups. And then they moved to the Upstairs at the Downstairs where they played all through the winter of 1970-71, polishing, refining and heightening the amazingly close rapport that they had already established.

By the time they made this record, after several months at the Upstairs, their collaborative talents bad reached a peak. You don't develop the kind of joyous, jostling exchanges they get into on "Blue Skies" or "Honeysuckle Rose" overnight. And, by contrasting the sot, dark sound of extra bass string (seven strings instead of six) against George's high, tight, darting phrases (and then exchanging roles), they find things in recent tunes such as "Spinning Wheel" that are a very special result of their kind of musicianship.

Oddly enough, the chronological development of jazz guitar duos, though very limited, is very direct. Before George and Bucky teamed up, such duos came together in casual jam sessions or in recording studios. The first jazz guitar duo of record (but not on record) was Lonnie Johnson and Lazy Harris. On Saturday, April 30, 1927, in St. Louis they played an unaccompanied guitar duet called "Four Hands Are Better Than One" for Okeh records but it has never been issued. A year and a half later, on Nov. 17, 1928, Johnson, a black blue singer and guitarist who was still performing regularly when he died in 1970 at the age of 70, recorded the first jazz guitar duet that were released. His team-mate was "Blind Willie Dunn." "Blind Willie" was actually Eddie Lang, the pioneer jazz guitar virtuoso of the Twenties, who was white, a fact that was recognized in the title of one of the two tunes they cut, "Two Tone Stomp."

Johnson and Lang (still billed as "Blind Willie Dunn") recorded several more duets in 1929. Then Lang, using his own name, teamed with Carl Dress for some sides in January 1932. After Lang's death in 1933 at the age of 29, Kress carried on the tradition by recording two duets with Dick McDonough in 1934 and three more in 1937. McDonough died shortly after this last session and that seemed to be the end of the two-guitar tradition. From that time until the early 1960s, a period of 25 years the unaccompanied guitar duet disappeared completely except for a single side made in 1945 by Kress with Tony Mottla, "Jazz In G."

Then Kiss got together with George Barnes to form the first guitar duo that used electric guitars. For five years Barnes and Kress played from time to time as a team on club dates, at a couple of concerts at Town Hall in New York and, fortunately, on a memorable LP. Again a death, this time Kress', seemed to put a stop to the line of guitar duos. But after a few years Barnes once again picked up the tradition that went directly back to Lonnie Johnson in 1927, a tradition handed down from Johnson to Lang to Dress to Barnes. Unlike all those other teams, however, the pairing of Barnes and Pizzarelli has had the time and the opportunity to develop to an extent that none of the other duos reached. – John S. Wilson

Honey Suckle Rose
Theme From "Love Story"
Bobby's Tune
Spinning Wheel
Love Theme From Romeo & Juliet
Guitar Boogie
We've Only Just Begun
Blue Skies
Romantic Melody
Rose Room
Slow Street