In the select pantheon of white musicians for whom playing the blues seemed to come naturally, Barney Kessel holds a prominent place. Born in 1923 in Muskogee, Oklahoma, his interest in guitar was supported by intensive lessons (four-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week) provided by the WPA federal music project in the summer of 1935. Two years later, at age 14, Kessel became the sole white player in a local swing band. (In an odd parallel, Kessel was later the only white member of the ensemble featured in the landmark 1944 documentary, Jammin’ the Blues, but bowing to Jim Crow custom, the filmmakers showed only his hands, which were dyed with beet juice.)
Kessel told the CBC in 1979 that his first playing experience was enormously formative. “We played mostly for black dances. But it really wasn’t any problem…[The other bandmembers] had all played with Charlie Christian. They all knew him because he was born a 150 miles away [in Oklahoma City] and they kept telling me as I was playing, you know…they invited me to play solos all the time. I didn’t know anything about solos, but they invited me, ‘Take one, take a solo.’ And I would try to tremelo, like a mandolin or play it in some awful way…and they would say, ”Play it like a horn. Play ideas. Play like a horn player.’ I didn’t know what they meant, and then I finally heard Charlie Christian and I knew what they meant.”
Kessel’s encounter with his fellow Oklahoman took place in 1939 when the pioneering electric guitarist played Muskogee with Benny Goodman. As recounted in Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz, the essence of Christian’s advice to Kessel was, “Concentrate on swing first. Then if you can make some interesting harmony after you know how to swing, that’s fine. But to begin with, swing alone is enough to get you by.” Kessel’s commitment to Charlie’s first principle only added irony to the title of his 1955 masterpiece, To Swing or Not to Swing. When it came to that most compelling of jazz basics, Barney never suffered Hamlet-like ambivalence.
With Christian’s premature death in 1942, Kessel became one of the first guitarists to carry his emphatic, single string conception forward. Combining an unfailing sense of swing with a deep knowledge of chords, he joined the front rank of guitarists in the 40’s. Kessel played with Chico Marx when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1942, followed by work with Goodman, Charlie Barnet, and Artie Shaw’s Gramercy Five, a dynamic combo featuring Roy Eldridge and piano legend Dodo Marmarosa. This small-group setting brought early attention to Kessel’s brilliance, and he soon began placing first in the polls of Downbeat and Esquire, a string that ran from 1947 to 1960.
At first confused and turned off by Charlie Parker, Kessel nonetheless bought his records and suddenly heard the future. “I remember buying those records, even though I did not like them, and one day it was just like a mist lifted and I could see what it was. From the minute I began to like it and began to understand what he was doing, I did not like my playing because I wanted to articulate that way and didn’t know how.” A quick study, he was in the group that played on Parker’s celebrated “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” session for Dial in 1947.
(Reunited with Oscar Peterson in 1974 at Ronnie Scott’s in London)
Kessel’s fabled studio career began in the late ’40’s and encompassed hundreds of sessions ranging from Bing, Ella, and Sinatra to movie soundtracks to jingles to instructional tapes. His guitar was the virtual co-equal of Julie London’s voice on her classic, “Cry Me a River.” All the while, he toured with Jazz at the Philharmonic, succeeded Irving Ashby in the Oscar Peterson Trio in 1952, and the following year left Oscar and Ray Brown to begin a four-year stint as music director for Bob Crosby’s television variety show. By the early 60’s, now counted among the players in The Wrecking Crew, he played on Top 40 hits produced by Phil Spector, Sonny & Cher, the Beach Boys, and many more. He also made celebrated jazz dates with Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, Benny Carter, and Hampton Hawes, and recorded prolifically under his own name for Contemporary. (See my Best of Barney list below.)
(Kessel reputedly said Django Reinhardt didn’t play jazz, but he admired him nonetheless and composed “I Remember Django” in his memory. This photo was taken during Django’s U.S. tour in 1946.)
Like Parker, Kessel’s playing was infused with the blues, both in tone and in the coherent, narrative quality of his solos. Guitarist Tal Farlow noted this in the liner notes for Barney’s 1957 date with Ray Brown and Shelley Manne, The Poll Winners: “He has a definiteness in his playing. When he hits a note, it’s really hit. Charlie Christian gave me that same feeling…The blues are a basic part of most of what Barney does. The blues especially always seemed to be his vehicle. And he’s certainly funky. He was funky long before it became a conscious thing to strive for. For some musicians, there came a time when we were suddenly earthy, or supposed to be. But that’s old stuff for Barney.”
(Here’s Barney with Kenny Burrell and the rarely-seen Grant Green.)
Kessel maintained that the blues is an intensely personal matter. In an interview with W. Royal Stokes that was published in The Jazz Scene, he said, “I think your experiences in life lead you to develop within yourself a feeling that is highly empathetic toward the blues.”
With tongue firmly in cheek, he continued, “I think one can learn to play the blues in the same way that one can learn…to become a bullfighter by taking a correspondence course {see Kessel’s recording of Bizet’s Carmen], or one can adopt the culture of the Gypsy reading books on it. I don’t think it’s an impossibility, but I think to do it that way would result only in an intellectual attainment.”
Echoing Louis Armstrong’s down-home dictum, “You can’t learn that in school.” Kessel homed in on one of the intangibles that pedagogy can’t provide, “[Blues is] a feeling that comes to you that mixes with the music and if you haven’t had that kind of experience, it’s not going to be there. I don’t think you’re going to learn it from Berklee College of Music. All you learn there is how other people do it, but it’s without the emotional content, which we never talk about in any scholastic training. You don’t go to any school and enroll in a course with a teacher and get a grade on emotion. This has to come from you and your life experiences.
“Will the blues continue? I think it will continue as long as human beings retain their feelings and have feelings of despair and desolation and even the feeling of the joyous part of the blues, like “Going to Kansas City,’ or something like that where it’s on a positive upbeat. I think as long as people don’t turn into computers and have emotions there will be blues.”
Kessel was showcased on Jazz Scene USA in 1962. Oscar Brown, Jr. was the series host. Bassist Buddy Woodson and drummer Stan Levey appeared with Barney on a set that includes “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “Gypsy in My Soul,” “In Other Words,” “April in Paris,” and “One Mint Julep.” Kessel spends a few minutes discussing the array of guitars and banjos he used as a studio musician, then underscores his versatility with the show’s biggest surprise, a solo rendition of “Danny Boy.”
Here’s a Best of Barney list:
The Oscar Peterson Trio Plays Duke Ellington 1952
Lester Young: The President Plays with the Oscar Peterson Trio 1952
The Oscar Peterson Trio Plays Harold Arlen 1954
Barney Kessel: To Swing or Not to Swing 1955 (w Sweets Edison, Georgie Auld, Jimmy Rowles)
Julie London: My Name Is Julie 1956
Barney Kessel: Music to Listen to Barney Kessel By 1956
Billie Holiday: All or Nothing at All 1956
Benny Carter: Jazz Giant 1957
Barney Kessel/Ray Brown/Shelley Manne: The Poll Winners 1957
Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders 1957
Hampton Hawes: Four! 1958
Barney Kessel’s Swingin’ Party 1960
Anita O’Day: Trav’lin’ Light 1961
Sarah Vaughan: Sarah + 2 1962
Barney Kessel: Feeling Free 1968 (w Bobby Hutcherson, Elvin Jones)
Barney Kessel/Charlie Byrd/Herb Ellis: Great Guitars Live at the Concord Summer Festival 1974
Barney Kessel and the Monty Alexander Trio: Spontaneous Combustion 1987
Barney Kessel: Red, Hot and Blues 1988 (w Bobby Hutcherson, Kenny Barron)