SEVEN STRINGS TO SWING

As he drops Stage & Screen, John Pizzarelli celebrates his 40th year of recording and reflects on the lessons he learned from his father, Bucky.

- BILL MILKOWSKI

GROWING UP THE son of Bucky Pizzarelli, John Pizzarelli had quite an advantage over the other kids in his Paterson, New Jersey, neighborhood who wanted to pick up the instrument in the wake of the Beatles and the British Invasion. After all, Bucky was house guitarist in the Tonight Show band during the Johnny Carson years, and a ubiquitous session player through the '50s, '60s and '70s, recording with everyone from Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney to Benny Goodman, Zoot Sims, Lionel Hampton, Stephane Grappelli, Gerry Mulligan and Buddy Rich. He even appeared on classic pop recordings by Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Anita Baker, Carly Simon, Judy Collins, the Drifters, and Dion and the Belmonts.

"John had a rock and roll band as a teenager," the late Bucky recalled in an interview I did with him for New Jersey Monthly in 2015. "I heard them play, and I said to John, 'Look, you're copying rock and roll solos. You can copy a jazz solo. Here's a record of Django Reinhardt. Copy this.' And he did it very well. And that's when he started to play jazz."

John Pizzarelli, now 63, remembers his father giving him records to learn songs from before they played together in public. "I would learn them and we would practice maybe once or twice," he recalls. "And then we'd go to a gig, and at the end of the set he'd say, 'My son's gonna play 'Honeysuckle Rose' with me now.' And I'd go up and do it. He always threw me in the fire that way, but I loved it. And I realized that the more things I learned, the longer I could be on the stage with him. So I just started to learn songs."