Jimmy Bruno Reflects Upon His Early Years
As we honor Jimmy Bruno at his “retirement,” JGT contributor Joe Barth sits down with Jimmy and asks about his early years as a musician.
JBa: Your dad was a professional guitarist. Did he get you started on it?
JBr: Inadvertently, yes. My mother was a professional singer, and they had a band together. Yes, initially, I was trying to imitate my father. They always had music going on in the house.
JBa: What style of music?
JBr: They both loved jazz, but to make a living, they played whatever style was called for.
JBa: Were they full-time musicians?
JBr: Yes. In 1959, my father had a hit record called “Guitar Boogie Shuffle” with the band the Virtues. Dad wrote the tune and played the guitar solo, which is now considered a classic guitar solo.
So, playing guitar was something in which I could imitate my dad, and I got pretty good at it. Being an Italian family, people were always bringing their instruments over on Sunday afternoons and playing music. My brother played drums, and we were always playing our instruments around the house. My dad even built us a little stage to perform on, and my folks were always thrilled with us playing music until I was sixteen.
JBa: What happened?
JBr: I decided not to go to college. My parents wanted me to study Law or Medicine but I wanted to be a full-time musician. Dad was not happy about it for many years. It wasn’t until just before he died that he saw me perform with Doc Severinsen at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where I had a featured spot. He kind of accepted it because I had done better than he did. But it took almost his whole life to accept it.
JBa: Wow . . .Were there any other local players that inspired you?
JBr: A lot of them were Dad’s friends. They were jazz musicians. There was a bass player, Al Stavffer, whom I studied with when I was sixteen and he taught me jazz, not guitar. Also, Dad was friends with a lot of the violinists in the Philadelphia Orchestra who came over to the house. I learned how to play the guitar and read music by playing through violin books that these guys turned me on to.
JBa: Classical methodology books?
JBr: Yeah! They weren’t formal lessons, but they would listen to me play these violin pieces and correct my musicianship. One of the guys got pretty serious about it and if my 1/8th notes were uneven, he’d hit my knuckles with his pencil (laughter)! If I was afraid of playing for him when he came over, he would insist that I go get my guitar and play for him to see how I was doing on those etudes. He’d open the book and say, “I want to hear Exercise 32, now (laughter)! So, it turned into that, and my parents would sit there and laugh. Soon it turned into him bringing books over and expecting me to work through them.
So, that was a big influence upon me in terms of learning to play the guitar and learning technique. You can’t play the violin and have bad technique. All professional classical musicians have good technique. They have to.
As far as jazz players, the first jazz guitarist I heard was Johnny Smith. My father loved Johnny Smith. We had the Moonlight in Vermont album and played it all the time. My father would comment on how clean he played, the sophisticated harmonic approach, and the chord voicings Johnny used. I just never heard anyone play the guitar that good. Everything on his records is just perfect.
The next record would be Hank Garland’s Jazz Winds from a New Direction.
JBa: That’s the one with Gary Burton on it when he was just a kid.
JBr: Yeah. That record made me want to play jazz. I was about fourteen when it came out, and I had just never heard guitar playing like that. I love the excitement of that record. Here was this country player from Nashville who turned the jazz world upside down. In my opinion, he played better jazz than most of the jazz guitarists of that era. It’s not to put down the other jazz players. To this day, that is a pretty impressive recording.
Another record would be Fourmost Guitars with Joe Puma and Jimmy Raney, Chuck Wayne, and Dick Garcia. It was a laid-back approach to playing. The guitar sound they got was very different from the Johnny Smith sound.
Tal Farlow was a huge influence, who to this day is one of my favorite guitarists. When I was sixteen, I went to hear Pat Martino play and I was just blown away.
JBa: Did you dabble in rock music as a teen?
JBr: I never heard much rock or pop music until I was in high school and then I still never learned how to play it. I didn’t have much appreciation for it. When you are young you take on your parent’s values. Well, my parents didn’t like that music, at all! It wasn’t heard in our house. It wasn’t like they forbid me to listen to it. I remember when the Beatles sang “She loves you, yeah, yeah,” out of tune, on the Ed Sullivan Show, my father turned the TV off and said, “What’s the world coming to?” (laughter) So, I didn’t know about Jimi Hendrix and all that until much, much later and I was out of high school, maybe not until my late 20’s.
JBa: What are the three most important jazz albums by instrumentalists other than guitarist and why?
JBr: Anything that Charlie Parker played on. You see, I had all this technique, but all I could play were violin etudes, but here was Charlie Parker, with all that and more technique and he was playing jazz with it. That really got to me. Another would be John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. To use a mathematical term, he was like Charlie Parker – squared. His harmonies were much more complex. I was drawn to his “free” way of playing. Listening to both those guys made me practice a lot to improve my technique. I couldn’t play those lines so I had to practice them forever. The third would be what is called now Oscar Peterson et Joe Pass a la Sulle Pleye where Oscar and Joe do a chop busting rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” I had never heard someone swing that hard before.
JBa: What did you want to do with the guitar? Where did you want to go with it?
JBr: I wanted to be a jazz musician. I was drawn early to the avant-garde, free jazz rather than bebop. Which is kind of backwards. I studied jazz with this bass player, and we had a trio with a recorder player who has gone on to be a significant entomologist. This guy could play the recorder with the harmonic language of a John Coltrane. We’d play standard tunes and stretch them out to where you couldn’t recognize the tune anymore. I did this for a long, long time. I had this vision of being the starving artist. I also read The Fountainhead about the same time. So, Howard Rourke was my hero. It was great, we’d play this weird stuff and maybe get one gig a month that paid maybe $300 and I loved it. I was the artist whom no one understood and I felt so good at the time that I was just that. My girlfriend, who later became my wife, was also anti-establishment, and she encouraged me to follow my dream. So, I gigged around for a while. I had finally become the starving jazz artist, which is the picture I had projected in my mind.
Then the Buddy Rich thing came around . . .
JBa: Reflect upon your time with the Buddy Rich band.
JBr: Buddy was playing on the Mike Douglas Show, which was being filmed in Philly here. A couple of my mentors were playing in the band on the show. The day that Buddy was on the show, he mentioned to the guys who played for the show that he needed a guitar player, and could they recommend anyone? Vince Trubetta, one of my mentors, gave Buddy my name. The manager of Buddy’s band called my home and told my parents to have me go to this hotel for an audition. When I got there, I went into a conference room and there were all these guitar players lined up around two or three of the walls.
JBa: All Philly players?
JBr: I don’t know. I had the feeling they came from all over. We were all young. I watched these guys go up on the stage and maybe play only four bars and Buddy would holler, “OK, Next!” (laughter) One of the guys after Buddy said “Next,” said, “Hey, wait a minute!” To which Buddy said, “G– D— it, get off my f—— bandstand you a—hole” and threw a drumstick at him. I watched this for an hour as I waited in line. It was horrible, and I thought to myself “I am not going up there to go through this.” So I started to leave and the road manager of the band said to me “Where are you going?” I said to him that I wasn’t going to go through that. He looks over to Buddy and says, “Hey Buddy, here’s that Bruno guy that so and so mentioned to you,” and Buddy said, “OK, come up now!” (laughter) He asked me to play “Channel One Suite” because it had a hard guitar part. I played it perfectly! What he didn’t know was that I had been listening to the record and could play the part backwards and forwards. So, he said to me. “Be on the bus tonight at nine o’clock.” (laughter) I did Buddy’s band for a year.
JBa: Talk about what you learned in Buddy’s band.
JBr: How to be a guitar player in a big band. You don’t get to play much. I had to fight to get solos. I said to Buddy once, “All I do in your band is play rhythm for a bunch of “Doot Da Doot Guys” (horn players). I want some solos. Plus. I want to quit because there are too many clicks in this band. What Buddy said was “Hey kid, there are clicks in trios” (laughter).
The next night the band opened with a “Blues in G” to allow some of the guys to solo. I heard Buddy say during it, “OK, kid!” I started to solo and while I was still seated all I could hear was Buddy yelling, “Stand up, stand up!” (laughter) I was too shy to stand up, so Buddy threw a drumstick at me and I stood up! (laughter) This, of course, was not one of my better solos with all this going on. Within just a few measures, Buddy was saying, “Sit down! You suck!” (laughter) but I couldn’t hear him and kept soloing, and he kept screaming to me “Sit down! You suck!” After the set, he called me into his dressing room and said to me, “Berklee scales, all you were playing were Berklee scales. I don’t want any Berklee scales in my band!” I said, “But Buddy, I didn’t go to Berklee.” He said, “Then you must have read the same books. It will be a long time before you get another solo.” At this point, I’m thinking “How close to Philly is the next gig?” (laughter)
After that hazing period, I began to get more solos, and I learned so much from playing with the band. First, I learned how to play with guys who were world-class musicians. I learned how to build a solo. I learned how to play with internal time from one of the guys named Joe Romano. He had just come back to the band after I joined. I’ve never seen a guy sightread like this guy could. This was hard music, and when he soloed, it was like John Coltrane was playing. In fact, I learned a lot about John Coltrane from him.
It is not easy for a guitar player to solo in a big band. It’s never easy because of the volume. Then you have Buddy Rich back there, one of the great drummers, and I asked Joe how do you stand up and play a solo in that kind of setting? He said, “You’ve got to have internal time to play.” Well, it took me ten years to figure out what he was talking about.
There were these other guys in the band who could write these wonderful arrangements on the bus, with no piano and they sounded just great. I had never seen musicians at that level before. Before I got into Buddy’s band I thought I was a hot guitar player. A big fish in a small pond. With Buddy I realized I was wrong. I could play the guitar, but as far as being a musician? I wasn’t a musician at that level..
JBa: So, why did you leave his band?
JBr: I got tired of living on a bus on the road.
Listen to Jimmy with the Buddy Rich Band (Jimmy plays a long solo about 12 minutes into the video)…
JBa: Did you have another gig?
JBr: No, I just came back to Philly for a while. When I got back, the jazz scene in Philly had changed so much; It had just dried up . . . nothing! So, I got a job with Al Martino. I liked Al personally, and he had a nice voice. Well, he had this conductor who thought he was conducting the London Philharmonic or something. He talked to me like I was an idiot. He thought he knew more about the guitar than I did and was always talking down to me. So, I punched him on stage once and got fired (laughter)!
JBa: Not good for job security (laughter).
JBr: It wasn’t one thing that caused me to do this, it was a bunch of things. Too much to tell now. But this happened on a July 4th weekend. We had a rehearsal that afternoon. This conductor, Alberto, had a “God” complex, and that he was God’s gift to the musical world. In reality, he was a terrible conductor. Well, during this rehearsal, he conducted himself into a hole that caused the music to stop. Now, this is not hard music. The band could of played it perfectly without a conductor. We all hated this guy’s attitude, so we just followed him into his hole and let things fall apart. This happened in rehearsal, and it happened again later at the show.
When this hole happened in the show, during the applause this conductor grabbed me and started shaking me saying, “Why did you do this?” and I hit the guy, not hard, but it laid him on the floor (laughter). Al Martino steps right over this conductor, not even acknowledging the situation (laughter). I just packed up my gear to go back to home to Philly.
When I came into the house, my father is sitting on the couch and asked “OK, why are you home?” I said, “I had a fight with Alberto.” He said, “That’s all!” What I didn’t know was that about twenty musicians had called to say that I had punched out the conductor. You see, my dad and Alberto were good friends, and that is how I got the job. He shook his head and said, “You’ll never work again.”
That story, it still haunts me. If I could do it over again, I’d still hit the guy! (laughter)
JBa: Did you just gig around Philly?
JBr: There were no gigs, I starved.
JBa: You went to L.A. about then?
JBr: I went to Las Vegas. I thought I could go out to Vegas for a year or so, have a steady gig, save some money, and go back to Philly and be the “upstairs artist.” Meanwhile, eight years later, I am in Vegas playing these shows with a house and three cars.
JBa: Was it there that you met Donnie and Marie?
JBr: Yes, it was through the Hilton where I was working. They were doing their TV show and I saw this as my ticket out of Vegas. I played 2nd guitar.
JBa: Who played first guitar?
JBr: A guy named Rick Dixon, a great player. Because of that job, I was able to move to Los Angeles.
JBa: In L.A. you did studio work.
JBr: Well, you can’t be on the road and do studio stuff as well. So, I was with them for about a year and a half, and then I had to leave.
JBa: In L.A. did you meet Tommy Tedesco right away?
JBr: The only number I could get for Tommy was his answering service. The lady asked what this was regarding, and I said simply, “Work.” So, Tommy calls and I wasn’t home, so my wife takes the call and the first thing Tommy asks is “Who is Jimmy Bruno?” Then “What job does he want me to play for him?” My wife says, “No, he wants you to refer him to some gigs (laughter)! Well, Tommy thought this was a riot.
Tommy was straight up with me about there being a lot of guys and not a lot of work to go around in the studios. But he did help me. All the studio work I got was from him.
JBa: So, you didn’t do a lot of studio work then?
JBr: I did some. I did weddings and little gigs, and I played the theater. I played the shows at the Music Center and other theaters that came through town. I did do, I guess, a fair amount of studio work. Not like the other guys, Tim May, Mitch Holder, Tommy and others. At least there was a jazz scene in L.A. and I did a little jazz playing.
But, I started getting the same feeling I got in Las Vegas, unhappy, really unhappy. My wife didn’t like it out there and we went through a divorce, and she moved back to Philly. I was making good money, but I wanted to really play jazz. I thought to myself, “I am 35 years old, I don’t want to be 60 and regret never trying to be a jazz player. What would happen if I moved back to Philly and really tried to make it as a jazz musician? If I move now, L.A. will still be here to come back to.” So, I moved back to Philly.
When I got back there, there wasn’t much happening and there was this real negative attitude among the musicians. You see, Philadelphia is the home to some of the world’s finest jazz musicians. But many of them are frustrated because there is no work. There are weddings and other little gigs but no outlets for good jazz. So, I gave up playing the guitar.
JBa: You were a bartender for a while . . .
JBr: Yeah, and I got involved with the restaurant business and really poured myself into the business.
JBa: You didn’t play the guitar then . . .
JBr: I didn’t even have a guitar then. No, I think that I had one guitar that Dan Smith from Fender had sent me. It was a D’Aquisto. I also had my father’s ES 335. But when Dan sent me this D’Aquisto I had a guitar that I could play jazz on. So, when you are in the restaurant business, you meet people from the restaurant business. So, I started playing in some of their restaurants. I had tried playing in mine, but that didn’t work. It is too hard to be up playing and see a couple at this table that the waitress seems to be ignoring.
JBa: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, as a pastor of a church, I can’t play at my own church because I am too distracted by what the ushers or the sound guys are doing.
JBr: So, I ended up playing at this other restaurant owner’s place. He started taping me every night because he thought I should do a record. At this point, I am playing as a hobby, and it is so much fun.
JBa: After laying off the guitar, did things come back pretty quick?
JBr: To be honest, I never noticed what level I was or wasn’t because I was just playing for fun, and no one knew me, and I had nothing to prove to anyone. The club owner loved my playing and said he was going to find me a record deal, which he did. I had gone into a studio and recorded three cuts and he mailed them to Carl Jefferson of Concord Records. In fact, I am the only artist that Concord signed from a demo to this day.
Then I became a full-time musician and got out of the restaurant business. My first album Sleight of Handcame out. I think I only got five gigs that first year but I was doing OK because I had saved some money and my wife, who is a nurse, was working. The gigs came more and more, then came record two and three and I became this jazz musician.
