“I’m delighted to be playing in my new hometown. I want you all to know I moved here two years ago and I love it here, and you can’t get me to leave. I won’t leave.__George Barnes

“Barnes was really a horn player who used an electric guitar instead of a clarinet or saxophone. Reed players were his big inspiration. Barnes had a way with amps and he knew how to set the tone of his guitar to interact with horn players.” __Marty Grosz

Evelyn Barnes: “He was very big with the western crowd. He went to NBC when he was 17 years old and they put him right on the National Barn Dance. He played western style. He could play any style. A lot of jazz people don’t acknowledge him because he did play western. A lot of western pickers, as they call them, copied George’s style.”

EB: George was getting 300 - 400 fan letters a week. Usually, he was given a minute and a half and he really swung. I first heard George on that show”

EB: “He was the first out of 500,000 to get a perfect score when they gave him the test because of his ears - his musical sensitivity. They sent him and several others to the University of Georgia in Athens for eight weeks. Then he was stationed for three years at the Pentagon - the basement of the Pentagon. The Pentagon was brand new. He didn’t stay at the Pentagon, he just worked at the Pentagon every day and commuted to Warrington, Virginia. That’s where they slept. It was a secret place.

“Then, the last two months of the war, they were going to ship him out to the Aleutians (Aleutian Islands), but the 24-month law was passed. If you’d been in the service 24 months you didn’t have to go overseas. So, they sent him to Petaluma, California and he copied Japanese code. It was called Two Rock Ranch, outside of Petaluma. That was the station where the operation was. On the weekends he played piano in Petaluma.

“He played really great whorehouse piano, as they called it. He played good Honky Tonk, but he played his own style - played pretty lovely melodies too.”

“I was a would-be singer. I sang. We used to have great fun at home. He said, “You’ll either be married to me or you’ll be a singer.” ‘So I decided to be married to him.” ___Evelyn Barnes

EB: “My father’s family were all musicians - guitar players, piano players, singers. My mother’s family were musical, but never professional. George’s father and mother were lyric opera singers at the Chicago Lyric Theater. His father played guitar and taught him his first chords - you know, how to start. And then, he took it up from that. He was eight or ten when he started the guitar. He started the piano when he was six. When they lost their piano during the depression, there was an old guitar there and his father gave him the chords and that was it.”

EB: “I went to Chicago to visit a friend and met George when we went down to a radio station to catch a show. It was a Saturday version of The Breakfast Club on ABC. It was March of 1946. He was out of the Army in February. It was the first job he played since 1942. It was a Saint Patrick’s show. As a matter of fact, I sat by his soon to be, ex-wife, and she introduced me to him. Very, very interesting.

“When the network split, the B.C. went with the blue network’ which became ABC. He chose to return to ‘the blue’ if he didn’t have to play the B.C. and Rex Maupin, the head of the music department and conductor, accommodated his request. I think he didn’t want to have to get up at 5:00 a.m. as he had to do in the army for 3 1/2 years.”

“I had complete freedom on the network to play whatever I wanted and we were very well received because the sound contrasted so much with the “vanilla sound” of staff bands in those days. We were considered very “far out” and at the station my group was an exclusive club. The musician who played with me was excused from playing the early morning Breakfast Club Show. He got out of other rehearsals, was given preferential treatment and made extra money from our activities. __George Barnes - from an Irv Thompson interview.

“The only thing I didn’t do was sweep the floors.”___ George Barnes

EB: On the recording dates, they didn’t know about George. They just put him in the rhythm section. He just sat there and played rhythm. Once in a while they’d throw him a bone. He played The Hit Parade for almost nine years, between 1953 and 1959. I think he had one solo in all those years.”

EB: “Raymond Scott lived way out on Long Island and was married to Dorothy Collins. She was a singer on The Hit Parade. Raymond admired George. He had George do multiple tracks and Dorothy would sing multiple voices. They had put like, oh God, it seemed like a thousand hours on it. It took them from 1953 to 1955. They were almost through and Raymond was disgusted with one of the tracks so he just destroyed it all and they had to start all over again. They made two sides with that. It never sold because he never did anything with it. You couldn’t copy Les Paul and Mary Ford at the time. They were so hot. To cover a record or cover the sound, it doesn’t quite make it. You gotta go with the original.”

Wayne Wright: “I came across Kenny one night at an after hours rib joint on the West-side of Detroit after the bars closed. I wasn’t yet old enough to go into bars at the time but hung out at a bowling alley that featured a jazz club in the bar. The owner would let me hold the door open from time to time to listen to the music coming out to the bowling alley, until he would get nervous about breaking the law for doing that. A bartender kindly took me to the above mentioned rib joint where there was a pianist playing in the style of Oscar Peterson and sang in the style of Nat King Cole. I had my unamplified guitar and played with the pianist. Kenny heard me and invited me to come to a new venue he had just started for people just like me.

“Kenny started a jazz club in an off night Off-Broadway type of theater to encourage beginners like myself to come in a play. He had guys in his band come in to play as a basic rhythm section and everyone else had a chance to sit in and get some real experience. That was where I got my feet wet with the likes of Elvin Jones, Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams and Barry Harris. It was an awesome experience for me and I will never forget Kenny’s kind encouragement through it all. Kenny also later helped me in NYC by getting me into sub for him in “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

WW: “I used to hear the Breakfast Club - Don McNiell’s Breakfast Club out of Chicago, and this cat was playing like there was nothing else to do - a fantastic player. When I got to New York, around 1960-61, people kept telling me, “You gotta meet this guy!” ‘I met George after I’d been there a little while.”

EB: “For 10 years he was on that early rock stuff. He didn’t even know that he had done it. He came home and he just didn’t talk about it. That’s why he stopped at Jim & Andys after recording dates, cause he wanted to just drink and forget about it. That is what people were doing in the ‘50s. Once in awhile you’d get a good date, a good musical date.”

Wayne Wright: “A great hangout and favorite watering hole was a bar on 48th street called Jim & Andy’s. A fabulous place. All the musicians came in there. That’s where I met Gerry Mulligan.”

WW: “They had a place upstairs from Jim & Andy’s - A&R Studios. Phil Ramone had a studio up there. They had a loudspeaker hooked up from Ramone’s studio on the 4th floor to the bar downstairs. At any time, you could hear the speaker say something like; “Hey, any horn players down there? Any guitar players?” That kind of thing.

“My first NYC record date took place as the result of going into Jim & Andy’s and just being available when the loudspeaker called down for a guitar player. It was with a big band led by Quincy Jones. The album was Quincy Jones Biggest Hits! My name is mentioned somewhere along with everyone else’s in the credits listing, but damned if I can tell who is playing what. Jim Hall and Kenny Burrell are also on the album.

“It was at Jim and Andy’s that I met up with George Barnes. We got to talking and hanging out. We hit it off right away. He was a nice cat. He was really good to me. I never studied with him. He used to call me his student which, I think is true, but I learned more with him just talking and hanging with him than I did in a teaching/student setting. We got to hanging out and playing. He got to taking me on dates. That was fascinating because he could sight-read anything. He was an incredible arranger, but he really was an orchestrator, a first-class orchestrator.

“George told me he considered himself an orchestrator first, then guitarist. If you’ve ever heard the album he played on and wrote for in 1946; The Uncollected George Barnes & His Octet, you’ll know what I mean. His playing and writing are sizzling throughout. He takes full advantage of woodwinds such as bass clarinet, oboe and bassoon, which are rarely used under such circumstances.”

EB: “Phil (Ramone) engineered practically all the stuff that George did, except the Fred Astaire album, Ruby Braff/George Barnes - To Fred Astaire With Love, 1975, they did at RCA Victor. The other stuff was done at A&R at 112 West 48th Street, upstairs from Jim and Andy’s.”

“They had good food. It was a favorite place for the guys to hang out between sessions. It was close to Paramount so if you worked a double session there, when you broke for lunch, chances are you went to Nick’s. We would find a booth in the back, talk and relax.” __Bob Bain

EB: “He was all over the place, all over town. In his calendars ‘week-at-a-glance’ he’d write down dates and he’d have a calendar full all the time. A date from 9 to 12 and from 2 to 5 and 7 to 10. And they were paying, in those days, forty one and a quarter for a three hour session. Now they pay three hundred dollars for the same thing. And the guys are getting rich.”

EB: “He would be so happy with computers. He would be so fantastically happy and good on the computers. He loved hat kind of stuff. That’s the kind of mind he had. And he’d tell me or anybody when they’d say, “Well, that’s not right. They ought to do this or that.” ‘He’d say, “Don’t knock it. Tell them how to improve it, how to make it better. Don’t say, that’s wrong, until you have a better way of doing it.” ‘He was quite outspoken.

“So many people seemed to want to pick on George for knowing what he wanted and doing it right and so forth. It really bugged him if somebody wasn’t doing it right.

“He got very impatient with people who pretended to swing and couldn’t. He’d say, “Damnit, swing.” ‘I heard him say that one time. He’d just gotten together with the octet - they were rehearsing and they just weren’t swingin’ because they hadn’t had George around. He’d just say, “God damnit, swing!”

“One day, Bob Morton - he played clarinet and flute said, when George was raising his voice, Bob said to me, “Evelyn, leave the room.” (lol) ‘You had to be there. It was funny.”

“George was amazing. In all the time we were together, I never once heard him make a mistake, even a muffed note. I did a lot of studio dates with him - watched him in action, and I’ll tell you he was in disfavor with a lot of conductors.

He’d just get up and walk over to the sax section and mark the dynamics and accents with a pencil. Before the arranger could even stop him, he’d say, “This is the way this is gonna pay off. Do it like this.” ___Bucky Pizzarelli

Wayne Wright: “George sorta talked Carl Kress into getting out of retirement because Carl hadn’t been doing too much. George was beginning to get tired of the recording biz. About that time he and Carl Kress started rehearsing together on a regular basis, with an eye toward bookings for the duo. I met Carl around the same time. I often drove Carl home when he’d miss the last LIRR train to Manhasset out on Long Island, beyond any public transportation. At that time we lived in an area called Whitestone, which was not too far from where Carl Kress lived.

“He would often invite me into the house and play some of the tunes he had written and recorded in the 1930’s with Dick McDonough. Carl Kress was a wonderful rhythm player. He had that deep, Marty Grosz’s tuning. It’s kind of banjoistic. Marty and I were to record these same tunes¹ in later years. Although Carl and I played together at jam sessions, he wasn’t in a position to give me any work, but George Barnes was, and did, as often as he could. I saw a concert they did at Town Hall. That’s a remarkable album. I was gonna try to replace Carl but I didn’t have that deep thing.”

Wayne Wright: “Danny Armstrong was a buddy of mine and he came up with a funny tuning. I tried it for a minute on one guitar I had. He had the whole thing tuned down to A and then the two inside strings were up an octave. And it works, but boy, you get some pretty strange minor seconds coming out of things, but it works, it works. It’s just that they’re all surprises. You do not know what’s gonna happen.

“George and I went out to Les Paul’s house. He and Les were pissed at each other for some reason at the time. These guys are two polecats, both of them. I didn’t let it bother me and I said, “Come on man - cut the shit out, just play.” ‘Anyway, I just plowed through it all. It settled down and got to be fun. George and Les said, “Lets’ record.” ‘So we recorded about three tunes with this funny tuning.

“George could pick up from wherever it was. Keys don’t mean nothing to him. He was like a mountain goat. If this guy made a mistake it was funny - literally funny, you had to laugh. He didn’t make mistakes. The tunes never came out commercially, but I have the tape. It’s pretty hip for what it is. This one thing and it was gone. It was very interesting stuff. We just played a couple of standards, but it never worked out because I’m not gonna be happy there just sitting there, playing second fiddle for one thing and that tuning is limited. You can’t carry enough coloration with it. You’re there, surviving your ass off. That’s about all you’re doing. You’re fighting the instrument all the time. I never knew where I was. If I couldn’t hear it, it was over. It was quite an interesting experience, but I didn’t want to make a living like that. So that took care of that.”

“It took about five years to get Les Paul out of retirement. And it took Bucky (Pizzarelli) another six years before that.” __Wayne Wright

WW: “The first time I met Les Paul was with George Barnes. George was living up on 58th Street off of 7th Avenue. I think it was 200 West 58th Street. He invited me over and Les Paul over and he takes my guitar. Les didn’t know I was left-handed. We hadn’t met before. George takes my guitar and he tunes it up. He says, “Here Les, try this guitar.” ‘So Les takes my guitar. He’s farting around trying to play it and he says, “This God damn thing is left handed!”

WW: “Years later Les and I got together. I kept calling him up. We’d get together and rehearse and try to do things. I’d go up and play with him and say, “Jesus Christ man, you should be out playin.” ‘So one night he finally says to me, “Why do I have to be doing this?” ‘I said, “Well, you need the therapy, I need the gig.

“I came up with the idea of moving the whole thing from his kitchen to any club in Manhattan. We kept tossing the idea around and began searching for a place that would work. A guy I knew, Bob Golden, a now defunct jazz club, Village West manager, called me. He had heard I was rehearsing with Les and asked if Les would be interested in coming to Fat Tuesdays to play with the trio. So Les and I went there and the rest is history. Now, Fat Tuesdays is history too. Les was there for eleven years. I was with Les for about three years. When I left my replacement was Lou Pallo, who spent the rest of the time until the clubs closing.

“I did my part. I got him out of retirement and I felt real good about that cause he’s still out there. He just did a celebration of his ninetieth birthday (June 19, 2005), at Carnegie Hall. And he’s still playing every Monday night at Iridium in New York City.”

Evelyn Barnes: “In 1966 he went with the Paul Anka group. He did all the early Paul Anka stuff. They went to Europe for six weeks and I still have the schedule. Oh God, it’s funny.”

“We lived at Les Paul’s house in 1967 for eight months. George and he were working on Les Paul Now. Everything that Les and Mary (Pauls’ wife Mary Ford) did, they recorded instrumentally and George played all the parts. The bass and the lead was laid down by Les and his bass player. George played the other parts.” __Evelyn Barnes

EB: “We went to Orchestra Hall just to catch the rehearsal and they asked George to check the balance - the sound and all that, so he did that. He adored Segovia but George didn’t play that way. Of course he was a fantastic guitarist but George said, “So many of the guitar players that play like that, if you put them on an amplifier, they wouldn’t sound so good.” ‘You’d pick up the string noise and if you’d notice, you can very rarely hear George make a string noise. I don’t know how he did it. He had short, fat fingers.”

EB: “The Jazz Renaissance Quintet album was released in 1960 - 61, but there was never any distribution - nobody pushed it, or anything like that. They play five originals and five standards, and it’s wonderful. It’s a really unique sound. Phil Ramone was the engineer. It’s been sold and resold, but I think it was on the United Artists label.”

EB: “The Jazz renaissance Quintet did Bach’s Fugue in G minor. They rehearsed in our basement for weeks and weeks and weeks. That was a secret of George’s playing too. He could read and he could concentrate. They rehearsed their butts off. They made a lot of takes. At the end they put the best pieces together - like 36 bars in the front, and a few pieces in the middle and the end. It goes for 4 minutes and 10 seconds. It’s wonderful.”

EB: “George kept one instrument. He would say, “You can only play one at a time.” ‘He was pleased with his guitar.”

“I realized a long time ago that f-holes cause feedback. Both George Van Eps and I discovered that about the same time. We did a concert together in Aspen, Colorado and we both started laughing when we saw each other’s guitars. He had put foam rubber in his f-holes to cut out the feedback, and I had taped mine over.” __George Barnes

EB: “Carl Kress was one of his partners and he was with Guild and Guild wanted George to leave Gibson and come to them. So they let George design a guitar and he watched the guys over in Hoboken (New Jersey) build the guitar. I think they made maybe a dozen of his guitar. After he designed it and Guild made it, that was his only guitar. It’s called the George Barnes Acousti-Lectric.”

“You get a better sound from the guitar by using only down strokes. Your leverage just isn’t as good when you up-pick. Therefore, I use as many down strokes as possible. I developed a technique of quick picking, using only down-strokes. But sometimes, for very rapid phrasing, I have to use alternating up and down strokes. I also hold the pick in an unusual manner-with my thumb, index, and middle finger. By picking this way, all I do to change the dynamics and volume is tighten or loosen my grip on the pick. I don't have to pick harder and my wrist remains loose.” __George Barnes

“George told me that trumpeter Bobby Hackett, who was also a damn good guitar player, showed George how to play vibrato as a trumpet player understood it. As he explained to me, it ain’t just wiggling a string on the fingerboard with your finger. It’s a matter of treating the vibrato in the same way you play dynamics in a phrase by beginning with a slow vibrato and increasing the speed of it as the note gets longer. Half-way through the length of the note, you decrease the speed so that by the time you end the note you finish up with a slow vibrato as you started out with. It ain¹t easy, but sure does wild things to the intensity of a note and is very effective when played right. He taught himself to play trumpet when he was ten years old, sitting on a rock in a field and blowing until he figured it out.”__Wayne Wright

“The left hand’s where the hard work is. They shouldn’t be playing it with the right.”__George Barnes

EB: “He played like a left-hander should play. That was his contention. If you’re left handed, you play that way because that’s where the strength is required.”

EB: “When we lived in Long Island (New York), he and a couple of friends were working on smaller, hand carry amplifiers. But they couldn’t get the transistors in the late 50’s because they were owned by RCA in New Jersey where the big factory was. They had to stop because they couldn’t get the transistors.”

EB: “People would ask him, “When do you practice?” He would tell them, “I’m too busy working. I never practice.”

‘He only practiced when he was writing an arrangement. He’d get it down so he could present it to the group.”

EB: “He loved to get in the car and drive - liked to travel, just go. We would just get in the car and head out. When we were living in Chicago, he said, “Pack a little bag - tooth brush, change of clothes. Let’s just go someplace.” ‘We drove to Niagra Falls, stayed overnight and came back.”

EB: “One day he came home and he had strained his ankle and his foot was swelling. We had a beat up old car, it was just after the war. We sold it after we’d had it for a year and took the money and George and I packed suitcases and went down to Penn Station in Chicago. George asked the man at the ticket window, “When is your next train and where is it going?” ‘He said, “The Panama Limited to New Orleans.” ‘So he bought round trip tickets - first-class, drawing room A. We stayed almost a week in New Orleans. It was the week before Mardi Gras.

“When we came home we were poor. We had to buy Poor Boy (Po-boy) sandwiches and orange soda and drink it in our drawing room going back to Chicago. We spent all of our money. That’s the way we lived. It was just great fun.

“We had fun with Alexandra too. She never got to travel with us. She was in school and George didn’t feel it was right to take her out.”

“George had a healthy appetite. He was only five six and a half, so, when he put on weight, he was like an egg.”__Evelyn Barnes

EB: “One day when we were living in New York and he didn’t come home that night and I was really worried about him cause he always came home. I get a call the next afternoon and he said, “Hi dear, guess where I am? I’m in Chicago at Ribs by Roberts!” ‘And he didn’t bring me any home.

“George had a healthy appetite. He was only five six and a half so when he put on weight he was like an egg. He liked good wine, V.O. and soda. He liked good food. He liked steaks - whatever, hearty meat and potatoes man. He like escargot. He liked fine French food. He just liked to eat.”

EB: “He liked to cook, but he didn’t like to clean-up. He loved to cook pork chops - the nice thick ones, and he could cook them on the top of the stove like you can’t imagine, like barbecuing them. I was working at CBS. We were just a few blocks from there. We lived at 7th Avenue and 58th - 200 West 58th Street. We had a lovely little penthouse there.

“It was so wonderful to come home when he didn’t have an afternoon gig or a night gig. I would smell coming down the hall. I would smell something nice. I’d knock on the door and he’d let me in. He had a dish towel around his waist and a cigar in his hand, and handed me a glass of wine. I’d sit down and enjoy and he would just serve up.

“After we came back from our 10 months on the road from Colorodo, California and Texas, we moved to 888, 8th Avenue. He was always cooking and I’d come to the door.”

Wayne Wright: They both used to hang out at “The Jim” as it was called, and each knew who the other was and respected that persons musicianship, but neither of them had ever met or spoken to the other. As I got to know them, I asked each had they ever met. They both said something to the effect; “Oh yeah, I’d like to meet him sometime.” ‘Then, George Wein, father of the New York Jazz Festivals as well as elsewhere in the world, had asked Ruby would he like to play at the 1974 Festival at Carnegie Hall with his own little group, back-to-back, with Benny Goodman. George Wein also asked George Barnes the same question regarding the same circumstances. Neither Ruby nor George knew of the other’s involvement in the performance on the same night and accepted the offer.”

WW: “George suggested me to play acoustic rhythm guitar and Ruby suggested John Guiffreda on bass. The four of us began rehearsing at Hank O’Neil’s studio downtown in the West Village on Christopher Street. Ruby Braff plays cornet, piano and is a genius. We used to hang out a lot then and I learned a lot from him and will never forget it. An easy guy to know he is not, but as a musician, he absolutely overflows with brilliance. We did 7 albums in a one 1-1/2 year period including a double album set of Rodgers and Hart tunes with Tony Bennett. That was a good group. Ruby wanted to rehearse just enough so we could turn corners together. After that you were on your own, as long as you kept your ears and eyes open.”

WW: “After our first record was finished we started rehearsing with Tony Bennett for his album sessions. With Tony, we recorded what turned out to be a double album set of Rodgers & Hart tunes. At some point I remember asking him why he chose those tunes. He told me that he had wanted to record this stuff for over twenty years and the quartet gave him the courage of his convictions to go ahead and try it. Anyway, when Tony couldn’t be there, we’d rehearse anyway, with George Barnes daughter, Alexandra, singing Tony’s part. It was a damn good idea and kept us on the right track. Her role was to keep the words and phrasing in the forefront for the quartet to form around. As I recall, she sang with a good time feel and far more in tune than many professional singers do. Tony sang all the tunes in the original keys regardless of the range. He knows how to change octaves at the right place in a tune to keep the flow going. He taught Alexandra the same technique. She was a real value to us and she was of course delighted to help the cause. Tony Bennett is not only a great singer, but a special guy as well. I learned a lot watching and listening to him. Tony Bennett is all music, period!

“I left the group after 1-1/2 years and was replaced by Vinnie Currao, a fine jazz guitarist from New Jersey. The quartet never recorded again and disbanded about 6 months after that time, but it was one hellova group while it lasted.”

EB: “George decided to stay there. So he stayed and I came back to New York, packed up, sold and gave away stuff, and flew back to Concord, California.”

EB: “He had stopped drinking. He was teaching and enjoying his freedom from New York. He died just a month after we’d been there two years.”

EB: “He had a little bottle of them (nitro glycerin) that he carried in his pocket for four years - never took one. He had these attacks but he never would take them - little sweats, out of breath and so fourth. He was in denial, that’s what he was.”

EB: “On Sunday morning he said, “I’m not gonna carry these (heart medication) around any more.” ‘The label on the little bottle was all worn off. He put it in his top, left dresser drawer, and that night he died. That was the 4th. of September, 1977 in Concord, California. He was officially dead on the fifth.

“When he had the heart attack that Sunday night, it was just before midnight. I had just gone to bed. Alexandra had come in from New York, thank goodness, and she and I were sleeping. George came in and said, “I think I’ll just stay up and watch Jerry Lewis.” ‘Lewis was still in New York and Jack Lesberg and some of his mates were in the band. He said, “I think I’ll just stay up and watch old Les.”

EB: “She said “Mom, mom, wake up. Something’s happening to dad!” ‘We went into the living room. George was sitting on a chair. His eyes were just kind of closed and he was just turning gray. You could hear the death rattle, the last breathing. He was turning cool. He died right there.

The paramedics came in about seven minutes and they worked on him for a good half hour. Nothing happened so they took him to the hospital and an hour and a half later they came out and told Alexandra and me that he’d died, but he was dead already.”

EB: “For about a year I made copies of the songs on tape and sent the sheet music along - how he played them note-for-note, and the music is written out. I think I had about 50 people that I sent it out to. It’s wonderful stuff.”

“You didn’t have to know Dad to love his music. But if you did know him, you also knew that his music was a direct reflection of the man. You can hear each nuance of his complex character in every note he played. And if you never met him, trust me, this recording is a fine introduction” __Alexandra Barnes Leh

“This stuff ain’t easy. It took a lot of wood-shedding and rehearsals before we got it together.”__Wayne Wright

“My thanks to Evelyn Barnes and Wayne Wright for their wonderful memories of George.” __Jim LaDiana January, 2006