By Don Williamson
ALL ABOUT JAZZ: It seems that little has been written about you in comparison to other performers.
JOHN PIZZARELLI: You're right. Little has been written about me because, I think, there's not a lot to write about.
AAJ: Well, I disagree with you there. But writers seem to focus on your father instead.
JP: Most of the articles about me seem to be from the eighties. Everyone writes, "He played with Tony Monte's trio at WNEW." Then they stop there. They usually write, "Oh, he made a bunch of records for RCA," and that's about it.
AAJ: Maybe we can correct those oversights.
JP: I'm ready to do that.
AAJ: What would you like to add to your biography after you stopped playing with Tony Monte? It seems that you've slowly built a discography that many people aren't aware of.
JP: Oh yes. I recorded three solo records for Stash. "I'm Hip: Please Don't Tell My Father" was the first one on which I sang with my dad's trio in 1983. In 1984, we made "Hit That Jive Jack." Then we made "Sing Sing Sing." Then they made the "Best Of John Pizzarelli" CD by combining the first three records. Strange. The CD is sort of not available; it becomes available now and then. Then in 1989, we made a record for Chesky called "Live From Studio A" with Johnny Frigo, my dad and me. That one just involved my playing on guitar. Then Chesky was looking for a male vocalist, and I said, "I've done some records." At the moment, I was playing at a place called J's at Broadway and 97th Street. I played Thursday nights there for two or three years. David Chesky heard me there and signed me. He was, like, really excited. He said, "We should make a record with Milt Hinton, Clark Terry, Dave McKenna, Connie Kay and your dad." So I made "My Blue Heaven" about six months after I made "Live From Studio A." "My Blue Heaven" was my first singing record in about five years, and it was really terrific. After that, I went to RCA when Steve Backer heard us, and I made a whole slew of records there.
AAJ: Getting back to "My Blue Heaven," though, why didn't you sing on recordings before that?
JP: The three records for Stash involved singing. Until that point, the most money I made was from working in duo with my dad. We usually did an hour-long set in clubs, and I would sing three songs in the middle of the show. Also, we played some concerts with Zoot Sims or Kenny Davern. But mostly from 1980 to 1990, just the two of us worked together. I did some of my own club work with different groups I put togetherÃÂ
nothing too exciting. So, after the Stash records, I never had an opportunity to record singing again. I didn't know what would happen. I just got lucky that David Chesky was at the right place at the right time. At that time, Norman Chesky said, "You should get a booking agent and a manager to try to tour and promote this record." That's when I put together my own trio and sort of abandoned my father.
AAJ: He should be able to take care of himself.
JP: Yeah, he's doing OK! [Laughs] I was thirty years old, and it was time to try to establish myself.
AAJ: Then you brought in Ray Kennedy and your brother, Martin in '93.
JP: Yes. We've gone about our business for seven years now-eight years in May. It's been just terrific. We've done everything we wanted to do, and more.
AAJ: What would that be?
JP: I think we made great records. We've played everywhere. I think the key is how long we've played together. I don't think you can name a group in jazz at the moment that has been together for eight years. I think that's a positive thing, even though it's so hard to do.
AAJ: How have you been able to keep the group together that long?
JP: I think I'm lucky that my brother's a bass player. At least two-thirds of the group will stay intact. There's a lot of freedom within the style that we play. So basically, we're just playing songs and blowing and having a good time. We work fairly constantly, and everybody makes a good living. I don't think there's a lot to complain about. It's not like we have eight pieces and we have to worry about each person. The group just consists of three guys, and it's an easy haul, economically. We don't bring a road crew. Sometimes we even pick up the bass on the road. It's just a matter of me bringing the guitar. Musically, it just works.
Martin has to play with me anyway because he so understands the music. He grew up listening to Milt Hinton and Slam Stewart coming to our house. Martin so "gets it." The first time, I had Ken Levinsky in the group. Walt Levinsky is the great clarinet and alto player in New York. I had worked a lot with his son, Kenny, who played on "Naturally" and "All Of Me." Just before "Naturally" came out, we were traveling a lot, and then we had a long stretch when we weren't working. Kenny wanted to stay home, and I was thinking about changing the idea of the group. I wanted another piano player. I had met Ray Kennedy through my dad, and he was a perfect fit for my group. He understood what we wanted to hear.
AAJ: How did your father find out about Ray?
JP: He met him through a bass player on a club date. My father is the king of doing these nutty little gigs where someone will say, "We need a little trio to play for whatever." So Dad will call his friend, Jerry Bruno, the bass player he works with. Jerry said, "I know this kid piano player who just came to town. You gotta hear him play." Then the three of them played on a gig. My father came home and said, "You're not going to believe this guy. You better snap him up." Ray came out of St. Louis, and his father played all of the jazz records for him. Having played with Sonny Stitt, Freddie Hubbard and James Moody, and Ray being a big fan of Oscar Peterson's, he has that understanding of what we do.
AAJ: Who is Ray's brother?
JP: Ray's brother is Tom Kennedy, a bass player who's playing now with Dave Weckl. Also, he has played with Steps Ahead. He's as good a bass player as Ray is a piano player.
But it's just great to be able to go anywhere and look at each other and say, "What are we going to play?" We have, like, two hundred arrangements. It's never like a jam session where you meet the guys the day of the gig and hope that it works out. It's great to be in that setting with the same guys all of the time.
We have several dates coming up, where we'll do three nights at Yoshi's in San Francisco and a week at The Jazz Alley in Seattle. Then we'll do four nights at The Bistro in St. Louis. When you play six nights and two sets a night, you basically can't repeat songs at all. We have so much freedom in the amount of material we play. Plus, when we're on the road for a length of time, we try to add some new things to the book. The music we play on the road isn't just about the record that we're currently promoting.
AAJ: You say that one-third of the group will always be with you because of Martin, but often families don't get along. It sounds as if you have a close family.
JP: My brother and I spent a lot of time together. We always had a good time playing in sports. We went to high school together. The thing that I like--and I think it's the thing that Martin likes too, although you would have to ask him--is that the style of music is one he enjoys. The Pizzarellis have always been together. I just know that Martin is always going to be there. We just love playing together. I think a lot of it was not considering what we did to be work. The rapport between the two of us is instinctive. I love playing with the group so much that it's almost a let-down when I play with other people. We know the tricks of the road. I think that's important too. There's a lot more involved than just our music. We travel together. We don't have to worry about the other getting to the airport in time. We all understand the "unspoken rules of the road."
AAJ: Is Martin older or younger than you?
JP: He's three-and-a-half years younger.
AAJ: You were born on April 6, 1960?
JP: Yes.
AAJ: What high school did you go to?
JP: We both went to Don Bosco High School-a Catholic boys' high school in Ramsey, New Jersey.
AAJ: Did you go to high school with Harry Allen?
JP: I met Harry in 1985 or 1986. He was going to Rutgers, and I was playing a gig in a bar in New Brunswick. I had sort of a pop rock band on weekends, and Harry walked in one night. I'll never forget. He said, "I play tenor, and Warren Vaché sent me down here. I'd like to play with you guys. I sort of play like Coleman Hawkins' style." I said, "Sure. That's good. We're not doing any of that today. Why don't you come back on Wednesday, and you can play?" So he brought his horn in on Wednesday. I told him, "Go ahead and play." So he played "Body And Soul." I just about dropped my guitar. I said, "Next Wednesday, I'll be at The Cornerstone in Metuchen with my dad. Come in, and I'll let you play." The same thing happened. I told my dad, "You're not going to believe this guy when you hear him." My father looked at me and sort of rolled his eyes and said, "All right. Get him up here." I said, "Play a tune, Harry." He played, "Don't Blame Me," and my father gave him a look like "Who the hell is THIS guy?" The funny thing was that my father called Benny Goodman and said, "You're not going to believe this kid." Benny said, "We're going to have a rehearsal. Bring him along." So Harry went to the rehearsal, and the little sextet played for a while. Benny sort of nodded his head to Harry, and Harry got out his horn and started to play. Benny was, like, "Gee, this kid is pretty good."
AAJ: He didn't use the "Benny Goodman glare?"
JP: Oh, yeah, he definitely used that once in a while. My father has his share of nutty stories, but he had a good time with Benny. My father's uncles were guitar players also, and they always said there were three groups you always wanted to play with: Ellington, Count Basie or Benny Goodman. Two of those three were out. Ellington didn't have a guitar player, and Count Basie had one for life, Freddie Green. So, playing with Benny Goodman was the goal. I think he started playing with Benny Goodman in 1965 and played with Benny almost all the way through. I think the key was that my father was into the music. After that, I think there was a personality clash with Benny from many of his other musicians. Benny just wanted the music to sound right, and he was a little crazy. But he had to lead a band. You know, when you have to drag around seventeen guys, it's a big task.
AAJ: I see that you've played with some of the people from the Goodman band, like John Frosk and Phil Bodner.
JP: The band on my first record was basically Sinatra's band. Bob Alexander put that band together for the "All Of Me" CD. It also had Jimmy Pugh, Walt Levinsky and Sol Schlinger Frank Wess was on "Naturally." It was pretty wild working with those guys. On my last two CD's, the group was mostly the Vanguard Big Band guys with Don Sebesky as the arranger. I've been lucky. When I traveled with the duo in the early years, I worked with Les Paul and Slam Stewart.
AAJ: Some of your style sounds as if it comes from Les Paul.
JP: I think some of my style comes from him, but I think a lot of it comes from George Barnes too, who played with my dad. I think George and Les had a lot in common. I think the key for their styles was that those guys would take one or two notes and swing like crazy. I think "How High The Moon" and records of that type are as swinging as anything. That kind of playing has such a heartbeat to it. I think that's what you hear in Lester Young and the Goodman quartets and the Nat King Cole group. The swing is what my group tries to achieve when we play. I think the fact that we aren't copying that style authenticates our playing, even though we are coming through from that direction.
AAJ: Interest in Nat Cole seems to be going through a resurgence. Diana Krall, Benny Green and Mark Murphy have done tributes to him.
JP: I think that, for a lot of people, Nat King Cole is a good place to start. For me, my discovery of his music started in 1980 when I first heard Nat Cole's records that had just been re-released: "The Best Of The Trio, Parts 1 & 2". They were hard to find until then. That was the first time I heard a vocalist who had a style I could really latch onto.
AAJ: And before that, you were interested in popular music.
JP: Yes-Kenny Rankin and Michael Franks. Of course, I had heard Sinatra, but his style wasn't what I wanted to do. I thought Nat Cole would be the foundation for what I wanted to achieve. Then I heard Chet Baker years later. I was a very slow learner. Their music was wonderful discoveries for me, but people may think, "Those records have been around forever."
AAJ: You mentioned Michael Franks. Your voice sounds similar to his once in a while when you sing Latin songs.
JP: Yes, on the "Naturally" CD, there's a song called "Your Song Is With Me", and there's a song called "Give Me Your Heart" on "New Standards" that have a Latin basis. Both of us are in the same timbre. I was a huge fan of Michael's, and I also got to work with him in 1980 or 1981. We did a duo gig one night. I went to his house in Woodstock a day early and rehearsed with him. It was really thrilling for me. He's very smart. He's like a pop Frishberg.
AAJ: Getting back to your family, everyone talks about you, your father and your brother. What's your mother like?
JP: She's the glue and equally a fan of music.
AAJ: What's her name?
JP: Ruth. She and my father have been married for forty-five years.
AAJ: Was it a situation where your father traveled a lot and she stayed home?
JP: In the era where he worked, there was a lot of studio work in the sixties. His day began by leaving New Jersey at eight o'clock. He went into the city and did a couple of jingle dates. Around four o'clock, he did The Tonight Show in New York. He came home, and then he went back into the city to work from ten until two in clubs, either with George Barnes or by himself. In those days, he played at The Downstairs, the King Cole Room at the St. Regis Hotel, and The Guitar. In the late seventies, he worked at The Pierre Hotel with his own trio. He was home a lot more by that time; I was in college then.
AAJ: Did your mother ever work?
JP: A little bit, but not much. She was a nurse, but mostly she stayed home. My father worked his ass off, but he always did the type of work he wanted. I have two older sisters, myself and my brother--four kids. My father put two of his kids all the way through college. All of us were schooled well.
AAJ: Doesn't your sister play guitar too?
JP: Mary played guitar on a couple of records. Altogether, I think she played three or four sides with my father when she was fifteen.
AAJ: What does she do now?
JP: She's working for "Business Week" magazine. My older sister is a housewife and mother of two in Orlando. Her husband works for The Golf Channel. So, all of us are happy, amazingly.
AAJ: You said that legends like Les Paul and Slam Stewart used to come to your house.
JP: My father worked at The Soerabaja in the seventies at 72nd and Lex. It was a Greek restaurant with an upstairs cabaret jazz room. Zoot Sims lived around the corner from us, and he came to sit in with my father. My dad never knew why. Then they went out on the road to Europe with Benny Goodman, and they forged a friendship then and started doing a lot of duo gigs. They produced a duo record in the early eighties called "Elegy." Zoot and his wife, Louise, used to come by in the summer to visit. The day after Christmas was always "Zoot Sims Day" for four or five years. He would hang out with us, and we would play a little. When Slam Stewart and my dad worked in New York, Slam would spend the week at our house because he lived in Rochester. I got to talk to him, and sometimes after dinner he would play bass a little bit. Also, I remember the time that my dad, Zoot Sims and Freddie Coleman played in New Orleans. I had arrived from Tampa, where I was going to school, and I stayed the week on spring break. They went to Freddie Coleman's house, where he made all of this great Cajun food. Zoot was telling stories and drinking Scotch, and it was really cool. I thought, "If I could ever play an instrument as well as these guys, I could hang out with them."
I did two years of Dick Gibson Jazz Parties in Denver over Labor Day weekends. That was in '84 and '85, I think. I met everybody. That's where I first met Ray Brown and Joe Pass and Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis and Charlie Byrd. I played one set with Marshall Royal and Buddy Tate. Johnny Mandel and Frishberg were there. That was one of the last times that "Lockjaw" Davis ever played there. I met Trummy Young there. I got to hang out with all of these guys. They all wanted to sit together and tell stories. I had to be on my best behavior, musically and professionally. At Gibson's parties, they had six of everything-six trombones and six trumpets, for example. Frankie Capp's band played, and it consisted basically of all-stars. The trombone section consisted of Urbie Green, Bill Watrous and Slide Hampton. Joe Newman, Snooky Young and Bill Berry played trumpet. Nat Pierce was on piano, and Marshall Royal was lead also. That was as close to heaven as I could ever get.
AAJ: Didn't you play banjo before guitar?
JP: Yes, I played tenor banjo first because my uncles were tenor banjo players. They taught me how to play it.
AAJ: Are they your father's brothers?
JP: My father's mother's brothers. The oldest uncle, Peter Domenick, was a great musician, but he had a day job. He took care of the family, and his younger brother, Bobby, went out on the road with Bob Chester, Buddy Rogers and Clyde McCoy. When Bobby came home off the road, he showed my father something new he learned. It was always a big deal when he came home because we would ask him, "Who'd you meet?"
AAJ: Did your great uncles buy you your first banjo?
JP: My father had one. His father had a Paramount banjo, and I learned to play that. I learned all of the songs: "Bye Bye Blues" and "Bye Bye Blackbird." I played that banjo for two or three years, starting when I was around six. Both of my uncles died about three years later in the same year. So I didn't play banjo for a couple of years. Then I just picked the guitar up off the couch one day and started looked at the tablature of Elton John songs. I started playing along with the records, and I figured out, "Oh, the guitar plays the same way on the banjo. It just has more strings." A buddy of mine at school said, "We can start a rock band because you have a bass, an amp and a guitar." The band got me interested in playing guitar seriously.
AAJ: So your father didn't really influence you to take up the guitar.
JP: No. He had all of the equipment, but I didn't know anything about it. I liked plugging in all of the stuff. "Oh, gee. I'll plug in the wah-wah pedal and see how it works." I think my dad just casually watched. He showed me a couple of things, but he let me do what I wanted. I learned a lot of stuff off solos on records. One day, when I was sixteen, my father said, "Well, that's really great. You learned all of those 'Frampton Comes Alive' licks. Why don't you try to learn 'Rose Room' off this Django Reinhardt record?" So I tried that, and it was a little bit harder. I thought that was an interesting way to learn jazz. So I learned some of George Barnes' parts on a record he had made with my father. When my father had solo concerts, I went with him. Then he would say, "Bring up your guitar, John. My son's going to play 'Honeysuckle Rose'." That was the song I knew then. That's how I started working with him. I was pretty horrible then.
AAJ: You joined him permanently when you were twenty.
JP: Yeah. Then I learned a little bit about the seven-string guitar. One of the guys at the day camp where I was working had studied with Barry Galbraith. We played duets every day at lunch. We had sheets from Barry's lessons. Then I talked to my dad, and he said, "You should play the seven with him. That way, you can accompany him." So I started to learn a little bit about the seven-string. When I started to play with my dad, we both played seven-strings. I had a copy of a 175 guitar--the kind of six-string that Joe Pass played. My father liked the sound I got, and then one day my father said, "Why don't you play the seven-string on this gig? That way, we can accompany each other." We never looked back after that. It was a perfect fit. I was only about twenty.
AAJ: George Van Eps invented the seven-string. Did you ever meet him?
JP: I never got to. I tried to meet him last year, and then he passed away. I was in Vegas, and I was going to get a ticket to try to meet him. But it never worked out. My father met George and played with him once at Dick Gibson's party.
AAJ: So the seven-string gives you more depth.
JP: It helps you create your own duo because it contains the bass and the chord. It's great for playing solo guitar because it has all of those great bass notes.
AAJ: Do you play six-string when your brother plays bass?
JP: I never play six-string; I play seven-string on all of my records. You don't hear the bass when I'm playing rhythm. If I play verse on a record, you can hear the low notes-the low E flats or the low D flats. You can hear the bass notes on the song "It's Sunday" on the CD "Love Is Here To Stay" or "I Thought About You" on "Kisses In The Rain." The seven-string makes the guitar sound so much fuller.
AAJ: When did you start singing?
JP: When I started singing the Nat King Cole stuff, I never thought anything about singing much. I just thought I would sing the songs. As I got older and starting smoking cigarettes in my twenties, I realized I had to take care of my voice more. I took some vocal lessons for a year from a woman named Katie Agresta. She taught me how to warm up and warm down and keep my voice in shape. I should go back to see her for a tune-up every now and then. It's like the idea that everybody knows how to run. But if you're going to run around the reservoir, you have to stretch before you go out. You think you can make it, but you end up pulling muscles you didn't even know you had. The warm-up technique that Katie taught me is the equivalent of running. So I learned to spend forty minutes warming up in my room before I went downstairs to sing for one or two hours during a concert.
AAJ: Do you still smoke?
JP: No.
AAJ: I understand that smoking and humidity are problems for singers.
JP: I've started to figure that out too. During my first trip to Japan, I lost my voice on the airplane because of smokers. Also, I was dehydrated during the twelve-hour flight. It scares the living daylights out of me to be without a voice in a strange place. You don't realize whether an audience likes your singing until you don't have a voice. Also, in St. Louis, there's a really wacky pollen situation, and I have to hold that bottle of water close-by and keep singing and hope that all works out. In Europe especially, you forget that people are smoking in those small rooms. They'll sit right in front of you and blow smoke in your face. In the States now, nobody smokes in bars. What affects me the most is staying up late and getting on planes the next day and going to another place and singing and getting on another plane to go somewhere else.
AAJ: Your wife is a professional Broadway singer. Does she help you with your singing too?
JP: She keeps me in shape with exercises and stuff like that. Jessica and I first met in 1996 or 1997 when we did a Broadway show together: "Dream"?
AAJ: How did you get involved in "Dream"?
JP: A Johnny Mercer show was being produced to present a review of his music, and Margaret Whiting wanted me to be involved in it. The producers heard the trio and said, "We have to put the trio in the show." They thought we would be right for the music because at the heart of Johnny Mercer is, not just his songs, but his personality. He was an entrepreneur and a singer too. So, I was sort of "that voice" in a sense, although I wasn't really that character. Johnny Mercer had signed the Nat King Cole trio to Capitol Records, and so there were a lot of interesting little parallels.
AAJ: What was your wife's role in the play?
JP: There were five other actors and actresses who presented the songs throughout the play. She just was another one of the singers.
[Jessica protests in background.]
[John to Jessica: Well, I'm sorry! If you want to leave a resume at the door, miss, we'll get back to you! We'll take anybody else!]
[Jessica laughs.]
AAJ: She heard the words "just another singer"?
JP: She was just another singer in the show; I was the star! I was above the title! No, actually, there were eight of us in the show. So we were all "just the other singers." There was no book. The play consisted of songs that were connected. Jessica actually came up with some of the best arrangements in the show. The accompaniment to "Skylark" sounded like the theme from "The Exorcist." I loved the way she sang it. So I said, "I'll accompany you. You just sing, and I'll work out the rest of it."
AAJ: What is she working on now?
JP: She just finished "Wise Guys," the workshop of Sondheim's new musical. She'll have a small role in a movie. Also, she was the "guest singer" with our trio at The Regency Hotel recently. My father was the "guest guitar player." We were called "The Von Trapps on martini."
AAJ: I see that Jessica wrote the lyrics for "I Wouldn't Trade You."
JP: That was the first full song she wrote lyrics for that I recorded. When we first started to hang out together, she said that there were some things that she liked in the songs from my earlier records. I always felt comfortable playing songs for her that were under construction. I'd say, "See this thing on 'Lifetime Or Two'? This section doesn't work for me." The songs were like puzzles. I was going to play the song "Old Black Magic" for the movie "The Out-Of-Towners." They wanted me to make a demo of it for the director so that he could see how it worked in the scene. At the same time, I said to my wife, "We have to write a song for 'The Out-Of-Towners'." In the Jack Lemmon version, he gets the job, and the song has to be positive about New York, but explaining why he wouldn't want to stay. So Jessica came up with the whole song: "I wouldn't trade you for all of this stuff." She finished this great lyric at five in the morning when the baby was teething. I put the melody to it, and it worked out terrifically. We put it on tape, but at the end of the movie, Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn stayed in New York. So it changed the whole ending from the first movie. We had this great song, and we started playing it on gigs. It sounded like a standard; that was the idea. In the "old days"--in the early nineties--the producers wanted pop songs on my records. They thought they could find that cross-over song. It really was impossible to take what I was doing and adapt it. What was the sense to putting brown shoes with a blue suit? Then I thought, "How come Tony Bennett and Harry Connick and Natalie Cole and Linda Ronstadt are making records of standards while I'm trying to make a cross-over hit?"
AAJ: You were in some other movies, like "Forget Paris."
JP: Yes, we did that. Also, I'm in some small independent movies. There's a new one called "30 Days" that used my songs over the beginning credits. Another one called "Two Family House" just won the audience award at the
Sundance Movie Festival, and it uses a lot of the trio's music.
AAJ: RCA originally promoted you as the answer to Harry Connick, Jr.
JP: The funny thing is that I was six albums ahead of him when I was "the answer to Harry Connick." I started recording in '83. The idea at RCA was that they were trying to find somebody like Harry Connick. I got good budgets, and we were able to make some nice big band records.
AAJ: So you think the comparison of you to Harry Connick, Jr. isn't valid.
JP: I don't think it is. He's a piano-playing song-writer, and I'm a guitar player singing standards. He was writing all of his songs, and I was trying to find the best people to do the job. I can't speak for Harry Connick, and I don't know what he wants to do. But then, I don't think he has to justify it to anyone because he's selling tons of records. I always wanted to be this one thing. After we had done some standards, we tried to move to the next level with our Beatles record. I thought that was one way to say, "Here's our sound, but here are songs you may be more familiar with." The style is what we do with "Avalon," but we did it with "Can't Buy Me Love." But over a twelve-year period, we've covered a lot of bases.
AAJ: What will you be working on next?
JP: That's a good question. I'm working in Cleveland soon, and that's the home base of Telarc Records. So I'll go a day early to meet and figure out what we should do for the next record. We'll keep it centered around the trio, but we may try to color it up. We may just make another trio record. They're fun to make, and they're most representative of what we do on the road, which everybody seems to like. If it ain't broke, why try to fix it?
