David O’Rourke writes: The first time I ever heard Russell was also the same place many people around the world first heard him – on Harry Connick’s video, in concert and the song was “It’s Alright With Me” at a brisk tempo. Russell’s solo was fast, melodic, grooving and exciting in a way that only the masters could produce. I met him in person for the first time at New York City’s Zinno’s at a Bucky Pizzarelli/John Bunch/Jay Leonhart gig. Russell was meeting Bucky for the first time and showed SO much respect for Bucky who in turn introduced me to Russell. Soon after, he called wanting to come visit (my tiny Manhattan, East Village studio apartment). He played my L5 and I played him a cassette of Ted Greene’s now legendary solo album. He asked to borrow it and began absorbing the solo guitar style of yet another master as he formed his own very distinctive sound and approach.

I would run across him a lot, in Bradley’s, in the Zinc Bar with George Benson and Seleno Clarke, with Mark Whitfield. You always got a warm greeting. George got us both on stage together, for Jack McDuff’s tribute in Birdland – also onstage that night was Vinny Valentino and Dave Gilmore. I had two calls from in recent months and it was him just checking in with the jazz guitar family or as I now realize, the wider family of jazz musicians. In my last conversation with him, when I forced the topic in the direction of how moving it was to me that he contacted everyone and made sure to keep in touch. I mean EVERYONE! He reached out to young players who were somewhat star struck by him, knowing he would inspire them. Hr reached out to a fellow guitarist who was unable to play temporarily, due to a hand injury. Again with Vinny, we hung out a few years back with George when he came to town for a visit, wanting to catch up with that family I mentioned earlier – the guitar brotherhood. We had talked a few times about collaborating on a project where I would write the orchestral/strings and he would play. That day he said, with typical upbeat spirit and enthusiasm “Can you imagine the fun we’ll have looking back on whatever we end up doing, years later”. While we never got to do that project I should mention that he had called to write strings for a recording he was producing for a Japanese vocalist. The album was largely Beatles songs though one of the songs I had to arrange was a BeeGees selection called the First Of May. 

I met with Russell to try to get out of him what he wanted from me, in the arranger’s chair and he basically gave me basic roadmap and left it up to me. He trusted me. The second song was “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and I noticed he was not planning on playing a solo. This merited a phone call to double check and I talked him into it. I told him we’d be answering the question  for years “Why didn’t you take a solo?” I arrived into the studio with the wonderful band Russel had assembled and we heard the first rundown of the charts he said to “O’Rourke! That’s beautiful” That album never came out but we had the memory of working together on it. His solo, by the way, was off the charts – especially the long outro where he wound it up like an any great story teller does.

I remember chatting with him about his time with Jimmy Smith and told me about how Jimmy told him to learn Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk Pts 1 & 2” and the famous Billy Butler solo on it – told him that people expect to hear that solo. That explained to me how he was able to go right into it one night in Harlem when we were all paying tribute to a lost jazz musician.

Some memories that many people share with me about Russell:

• He came out to hear all his friend’s play (very few musicians do that, believe it or not).
• He paid very close attention to the elders, showed them the kind of respect they deserved and THAT seemed effortless for him. 
• He encouraged young talent.
• When I mentioned how wonderful I thought it was that he always seemed to build people up he shared a quote with me “A candle loses nothing when it lights another candle!”
• Russell was also famous for his irreverent sense of humor and indeed his joke telling – at the Pat Martino celebration, when I arrived for the soundcheck Russel said, with that delivery of his “David O’Rourke! Come over here so I can rub you up the wrong way!”

I am 64, at time of writing, and sadly we become accustomed to losing people we know but the suddenness of this loss and the feeling of emptiness being felt is deeper than so many of us have experienced for a long time. In the USA they have an organization called AARP, a card that gets you discounts etc when you pass a certain age. I remember a funny conversation with Russell when he asked me if I had it and told me that he applied for it in advance so he would have when he hit the age. He was embracing the next chapter with an infectious joie the vivre. Please forgive all of us for being in shock at his passing, as I believe, if so blessed – we would have had many decades left to enjoy what life and music would throw our way. I cannot help feeling that he was very aware of the joy he brought people when he called them and hope that THAT joy was reflected back so HE knew how much he is and was loved.

The post Russell Malone (1963-2024)   first appeared on UK Jazz News.

“Be Yourself…”

“Be Yourself” they told me, “Because everyone else has been taken…” and of course, the adult me fully agrees with these sentiments and would never argue against them, but the version of me in my late teens, when I first heard Pat Martino…THAT is who I wanted to be. I would buy every album I could find, get a cassette copy of the ones I couldn’t, and try to play his solos, learning them off by using my Dad’s old reel to reel recorder. Slow them to half-speed except, it wasn’t calibrated accurately and it would come out a half step higher, but an octave lower. I would have the mixture of frustration that I couldn’t execute them at full speed right away, but I also found myself marveling at his note choices, even slowed down. The opening notes of “Days Of Wine and Roses” into the break to the solo. All the ballads on his “We’ll Be Together Again” album, and the timelessness of “Joyous Lake” ! Phew, and I wondered would I ever hear him live or meet him…

“Never Meet Your Heroes” (?)

“Never Meet Your Heroes” – how many times was I told that, and how many times were they proven wrong! I remember, in winter 1983, in Vic Juris’s apartment telling him that I envied him having studied with Pat Martino “You want to study with Pat? I’ll give you his number and tell him I told you call!” I was floored, what a generous thing of Vic to do and when I did call Pat, my life was changed, forever! Back to that ‘Be Yourself’ idea, some people had the Beatles haircuts in the 60s, bell bottoms etc, but for me, it was that cover of Guitar Player magazine (image right) – Pat in a denim shirt. I tried getting one and they had gone out of vogue in Ireland but I eventually did, couldn’t get a Gibson L5 solid though and all because I wanted to be that guy on the cover of Guitar Player whose playing mesmerized me.

First Meeting

Soon after that phone call, my cousin Paul McEvoy, drove me to Philly to get my lesson with Pat – a 5 hour lesson, for an insanely low charge! – he had a booklet ready for me and I sat there in awe for about 5-10 minutes. He snapped me out of it to a point where I mostly saw him as a generous, humble, easy going man but…a genius!!! I would slip briefly into an ‘OMG, that’s Pat Martino’ mode and would immediately fall back in to the warmth of his sharing. That began a friendship that I know I was blessed to have.

The Comeback…

His comeback from clean slate memory loss to relearning what many thought was gone forever (John Mulhern, your support and friendship of Pat here, gave us all so much more of his extraordinary gift to cherish). When I took my lesson with him he was on his way back from the seizures and memory loss and had regained a lot of his trademark sound, but his confidence or desire to perform had not yet returned – but I’ll never forget looking in wonder as he produced amazing sounds with his twin neck Adamus nylon string only feet away from me. Even with the inevitable loss that comes with an aneurysm and the seizures he had, I got a full understanding of what that throwaway line “brains to burn” meant – students of neurology often point out how other parts of the brain try to compensate for ones that are compromised, for some reason or another, and a kind of remapping takes place. His profound command of such a wide variety of subjects was staggering, as was his constant quest for more knowledge.

“How to approach this? I’d never collaborated with an icon like that before…”

Years later, while Seth Abramson and I are having a chat with Pat, just off from the stage at Jazz Standard and both of us telling Pat how much we loved his ballad playing Pat said how sometimes, that was all he wanted to do – play only ballads. I can’t remember how we got there but Seth was asking him about an orchestral album and Pat’s face lit up as he said he wanted to do one and looked at me and said “I want to do it with him” and laughed. I remember saying to him that if he was serious about that then so was I, and asked what was the next move? He told me when to call him, allowing for some recoup time after being away from home for more than a week. I called, we set a date for me to go to Philly, to the house where I had taken the lesson almost 30 years earlier. I didn’t know how to approach this, I’d never collaborated with an icon like that before. Do I wait to be told what he wanted to do? Do I suggest to him? or will he feel like I’m pushing him in a direction. If I wait and arrive with nothing then what has he to go on with me? If I arrive with complete arrangements then it seems like I am being controlling.

Gaining an insight into how Pat Martino kept building repertoire

I arrive at his house in Philly and in what would be become the routine when we met once a month, he would play for me whatever he was working on currently…a composition, some stuff that sound like his octave dispersal ideas, you name it. Then he turned to me and said “What did you have in mind?” and I froze inwardly and then decided to say exactly what I was thinking. I had recently seen Paul McCartney play at CitiField where he did nearly three hours where he did everything from earliest Beatles, through Wings through later up to solo projects. I thought it was interesting the way he had gone from only doing 2 or 3 Beatles songs to now viewing his entire body of work as something he and his audience would enjoy. I told Pat that I felt if we only did standards, only originals etc it wouldn’t tell the whole story but what about drawing from his career up to the present, that we would include songs he wanted to play currently. “What do you have for me?’ – I had an intro and the first chorus of the head of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” scored along with “The Great Stream” – I figured that would represent two sides of him for starters. He played the ballad first and looked up at me while the orchestral part was being played by Sibelius software and said “Yeah man!” – then The Great Stream where he corrected a harmony I had gotten wrong, in a most gentle manner. I had the absolute honor and excitement of being given carte blanche as we teased repertoire.

Memories of writing sessions (and ice cream) in Philly

John Mulhern – who helped save Pat when he had his biggest seizure in L A in the 80s – was his assistant, student and engineer. Once he asked me to make sure we did a version of the Michel Legrand tune “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” The project never got to performance stage but I got to spend one day a month with the man I considered a master, one of my all time heroes – I would bring what I had written, the only slight changes he would make were minor playback tempo adjustments.

We would work solidly for 2-3 hours then me, Pat and Aya would go to dinner in one of the many places Philly has to offer. I knew I was privileged to share that time – the car ride to the restaurant with Pat driving “There used to be a barbershop there right next to a small music store where the owner taught me the C chord (I imagined little Pat learning the same C chord we had all learned) – and yes, the barber shop, where his Dad would have him play “Moonlight In Vermont”, the Johnny Smith version for the clientele – WOW! We went to a pizzeria he had been going to since he was a child. It was there Pat and Aya took delight when this Irishman got to have his first Spumoni – an Italian three-layer ice cream, with candied fruits and nuts. Where he went to school and met Charles Earland, told me about going for hot chocolate with John Coltrane after a lesson with Dennis Sandole.

So, we didn’t get to the finish line with such a huge project with so many moving parts but…I did get to know what it feels like when a master like Pat sets you free to create and you are on the same page. Pat and Aya playing duets in their living room for me and me playing Irish music for them.

There was a time when a couple of people asked if they could sit in on our writing sessions. When I mentioned this to Pat, he said “I’d rather keep it to you and I until we get the repertoire locked in before we consider letting anyone else into the room. “ I remember how great it felt to hear him say that. I felt so honored that he trusted me in that way. 

With a little help from friends…

The loyal love and support of his manager Joe Donofrio and his student and then friend John Mulhern cannot be overlooked. Then there’s Aya who stopped surgery from happening, surgery that would most likely have ended with him lucky to make it past the surgeons table. She is as gentle as he is in disposition. I must mention Seth again as it was he who told me I had to get into the club to hear Pat play this ballad he had never heard him play before, the Mingus song “Duke Ellington’s Sound Of Love”. He arranged to meet me there to make sure I didn’t miss this beautiful tune and Pat playing it! Thank You Seth!

YES!! DO meet your heroes!

About that “Never Meet Your Heroes” advice, that has been proven wrong for me so many times with, obviously Pat, Louis Stewart & George Benson who all provided mentorship and friendship, second to none. Jazz used to consist of primarily a mentor-based environment and thankfully, in my case I came in on the tail end of much of it – add to the mix the late Bucky Pizzarelli, his manager Dick Ables, Larry Willis and too numerous for me to list here, so NO!!! I say DO meet your heroes! I hope the above shared memories will show you what an amazingly generous spirit this genius was to all of us!

(*) This is an edited version of a Facebook post.

The post Pat Martino (1944-2021) first appeared on UK Jazz News.