Thursday, June 18, 1998

For the Record: Joe Negri
By Peter B. King
Post-Gazette Staff Writer

A fleeting glimpse of Joe Negri I’ll always remember: six or seven years ago, long past being young but looking exceptionally trim, carrying his guitar case on his way to a gig, darting around the corner of a Shadyside street one night with the speed of a man half his age. With his small stature and the lilt in his step and just a flicker of his wonderful grin, there was something elfin about him, something magical.

While the world has long known him as a regular on Mister Rogers’Neighborhood,” Negri’s recording career as a jazz guitarist has been almost as ephemeral as he seemed to me on the street that evening. His crystal-clear, swinging bebop lines and gorgeous chords, played in clubs and at concerts, have gone almost entirely undocumented.

Until now. Negri will release a CD, “Afternoon in Rio,” in mid-July, that finally does justice to his formidable talents. Saturday at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild as part of the Mellon Jazz Festival, he’ll perform tunes from the new disc with the stellar band that helped him record it. That same night he’ll engage in one of his favorite pastimes — spontaneous guitar duetting — with the astounding Scottish fingerstyle jazz guitarist Martin Taylor, who shares the bill. The proceeds, by the way, will benefit Children’s Hospital.

Negri has recorded only one other album as a leader, “Guitar With Love.” That was about 25 years ago. It faded quickly, and maybe it deserved to, Negri admits.

“I have a bad habit. I always seem to try to split the oak. And sometimes it doesn’t work. It wasn’t a straight-ahead jazz album. It was kind of an album meant for the easy-listening stations. But anyway, it didn’t get any play. The comment at the time was, ‘You should have just stretched out and played. You kind of made it a little bit too commercial.’So it never really had much of a life.”

For the next quarter of a century — in the margins of a busy life playing on radio and TV, teaching guitar at Duquesne University and raising his family — Negri would record demos and pitch them to record labels. But no one picked him up.

“And I was kind of resigned to that,” he adds.

Last August, some music-minded angel intervened, in the shape of a tribute to the late, preeminent Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim at the annual “Jazz in the Mountains” festival at Seven Springs. Negri was invited to perform with an assemblage that included the sizzling Brazilian drummer Duduka da Fonseca, New York Voices singer Kim Nazarian, New York bassist Leo Traversa and Pittsburgh’s Dwayne Dolphin and Marty and Jay Ashby.

Like many jazz musicians, Negri has loved Jobim’s tunes since the bossa-nova craze of the early ‘60s, and he often plays them at gigs.

“So I did ‘O Grande Amor’and ‘Once I Loved.’It really went well. It was well-received. Jay Ashby [recording manager at the Guild] said, ‘You really should do something with this.’And that was the start of it.”

The aforementioned musicians all ended up on the CD. Da Fonseca came in last December for weekend rehearsal gigs at James St. Tavern and Foster’s with Negri, Dolphin and the Ashby brothers. The next Monday they went into the recording studio at the Guild to begin work.

Produced by the Ashbys, the CD includes “O Grande Amor” and another Jobim tune, “Modinha,” a Jay Ashby original, and Brazilian composer Ivan Lins’ “Leva e Traz,” with backing vocals by Lins himself. There’s also a Brazilian-style “Lush Life,” by Pittsburgh’s Billy Strayhorn, among other tunes.

Back in the ‘40s, when Negri was still developing his style, his biggest influences were Charlie Christian and the Belgian gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, whose “virtuoso plectrum guitar flash” and “gypsy romance” Negri admired. Negri’s duet partner Saturday, Martin Taylor, has also been somewhat influenced by Reinhardt. Taylor played for years with the late Stephane Grappelli, the French violinist who was Reinhardt’s partner in the original Quintette du Hot Club de France. Who knows? Negri says. Maybe they’ll get some of that Hot Club sound going again.

On Mister Rogers’Neighborhood” and “The Jack Bogut Show,” at Guild concerts and Duquesne workshops, Negri has a history of pairing up with musicians of diverse styles. He’s jammed with Wynton Marsalis and the rest of the Marsalis clan, Joe Pass and Jim Hall, to name a few.

Often, he recalls, the other musician was someone with a national reputation who had never heard him play and was a little, well, reluctant. Guitarist Emily Remler, for instance. She encountered Negri early one morning on the old Bogut show on WTAE-TV when the producer suggested they duet.

“She got a real skeptical look, like ‘Well I don’t know. On the air?’And the producer said, ‘Well why don’t you just try something?’ Within about 30 seconds, she got a smile on her face.

“I’m a swingin’player,” he adds. “I rely on just kind of a groove. And I think that’s what a lot of guys like about me, because it becomes kind of happy right away.”

That relaxed but insistent swing is evident on the new recording — a recording Negri hopes is the first of a string.

“One day during the sessions, Marty said, ‘I can’t understand why somebody didn’t do this with you 25 years ago.’ Hopefully, God willing, I’ll do a straight-ahead jazz album next.”

Joe Negri and Martin Taylor will perform in a Mellon Jazz Festival concert at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild. Tickets: $ 20; 412-322-0800.