AGELESS MUSIC
Joe Negri’s jazz guitar is his legacy
Let’s get one thing straight: Joe Negri is no handyman.
“Fred said, ‘Joe, how would you like to be Handyman Negri?’”
“I said, ‘You gotta be kidding. I can’t hammer a nail straight!’” “He said, ‘That’s OK. It’s all pretend.’” For 35 years, Mr. Negri appeared on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” as Handyman Negri. Just as Fred Rogers had said, his lack of repair skills never hampered him in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. But his jazzy guitar licks certainly came in handy when he played with guests Wynton Marsalis, Mabel Mercer, Tony Bennett and YoYo Ma and with the rest of the TV show’s quartet — musical director Johnny Costa on piano, Carl McVicker Jr. on bass and Bobby Rawsthorne on drums.
Mr. Rogers, a music composition major at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., wrote many of the songs he sang on the show. He loved that his jazz quartet tucked swinging riffs into every episode. Thanks to them, generations of children unconsciously absorbed a little soul with their public television.
“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” is now just a fond memory, but its guitarist continues to perform and inspire. On Friday, he will be honored in a tribute concert beginning at 7 p.m. at St. Barnabas Health System’s Kean Theatre in Richland. And let’s get one more thing straight: Joe Negri is a world-class jazz man.
Rhythm boy
He says his father, Michael, was the real handyman. The union bricklayer emigrated from the Calabria region of Italy at age 16 to escape induction into the Italian army.
“He wanted to escape war, but he ended up in the U.S. Army,” says his eldest son.
When Michael Negri returned to the family home on Mount Washington, he took up his mason’s trowel and his fascination with Dixieland music.
“They called him Banjo Mike,” Mr. Negri recalls in an interview at his home in Scott.
Yet the instrument Banjo Mike handed his 3-year-old son was a ukulele. “I was a singer. Dad gave me the uke so I wouldn’t need anyone else to rehearse.”
At age 4, he performed on KDKA-AM’s “Uncle Henry's Radio Rascals” radio program. At 5, he drew the attention of local dancers Fred and Gene Kelly — yes, that Gene Kelly. They asked little Joe to perform at several shows.
Never shy onstage, the boy took his cues from Jackie Cooper, Shirley Temple and other child stars he saw on the silver screen. Only they weren’t entertaining at Sons of Italy lodges and other ethnic clubs.
His mother and his aunt — the former Rose and Rene Viggiano of Italy’s Basilicata region — taught him the words of “Pardon Me Pretty Baby,” “My Ideal” and other songs they heard on the radio. His father helped with the music and gave him a small Epiphone guitar when he was 6.
“It was a jazz box, not a folk singer’s guitar,” he says proudly.
He and his 4-year-old brother, Bobby,
took dance classes Downtown at the Lou Bolton Studio. Their father bartered labor for dance lessons, then drove his sons, then known as the Rhythm Boys, to compete in talent contests at the Enright and other Pittsburgh theaters. With their cousin Harold “Mutsy” Amato, they sometimes won first prize: $25. Afterward, Banjo Mike treated them to hamburgers at The Brass Rail restaurant.
As a teenager, Mr. Negri took guitar lessons for five years with Vic Lawrence at Volkwein’s on Liberty Avenue, Downtown. A family friend gave him records by Charlie Christian, Les Paul and George Barnes. Mr. Christian’s electric guitar was a major influence, Mr. Negri says. “He gave guitar a voice.”
At Volkwein’s, Mr. Lawrence challenged the teenager with “fancy stuff.” “At 14, 15 years old, I’m playing ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee.’ It blew people’s heads off!” he says, laughing.
At Prospect Junior High, the guitar prodigy performed for his fellow students in the 250-seat auditorium. Several years ago, after the old school had been turned into the Lofts of Mt. Washington, it was renamed the Joe Negri Auditorium.
He was entering his junior year at South Hills High School when a famous bandleader came to dinner. “Shep Fields came over to our house to eat spaghetti.”
He persuaded Joe’s parents to let him take the 16year-old guitarist on the road with his 15-piece swing orchestra in 1943. They performed in Chicago and at The Strand in New York City, returning to Pittsburgh to play the Stanley Theater in March 1944. The Pittsburgh Press called him a “virtuoso on the steel guitar,” and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said: “Young Joe Negri, a Pittsburgh lad, easily demonstrates why he is right up there with the wizards of the electric guitar.”
Strumming soldier
Mr. Negri turned 18 in the summer of 1944 and was drafted into the Army. He did 18 weeks of basic training in Macon, Ga., where a 20-mile hike changed his life.
“Something bit me. My foot swelled up, and I got a 10-day furlough while my unit went to Europe,” he says. “I never did catch up with them. I missed the Battle of the Bulge.”
He ended up in Dusseldorf, Germany, whose rivers, mills and smokestacks reminded him of Pittsburgh. He and another soldier were given a three-day pass to Eupen, Belgium, and went to a nightclub one night.
“Everyone there was a Django Reinhardt fan. A guy was playing acoustic guitar and I sat in.”
An American lieutenant heard him play and approached him afterward. “He said, ‘How would you like to join the Special Services?’ I said, ‘Would I!’”
Mr. Negri joined the 13th Special Services in January 1945. A few months later, he learned his unit was heading stateside; most of the musicians had already served two years in Europe.
“By May I’m coming home,” Mr. Negri says. “I think someone is praying for Joe.”
He spent several months stationed near Newark, N.J., playing for homecoming soldiers during the day and dancers in the canteen at night. He returned to Pittsburgh in 1946 and formed the Joe Negri Trio with his brother on piano and John Vance on bass. Guitarists and pianists often compete in bands,but not the Negri boys.
“Bobby was a good backup rhythm guy. I got the solos,” he says.
The trio became the de facto house band at two clubs: the Carnival Lounge on Penn Avenue and the Midway on Liberty Avenue. They also backed up national headliners who came through town, including saxophonist Ben Webster and trumpeters Charlie Shavers and Roy Eldridge, a North Side native.
In 1950, Mr. Negri met Johnny Costa, who suggested the high school dropout join him studying music composition at Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University. He got his diploma at Allderdice High School and enrolled under the GI Bill. His composition teacher was Nikolai Lopatnikoff, a Russia-born composer.
“He told me to write something for piano and violin. I did, and he said, ‘You have a wonderful way with melody,’” Mr. Negri recalls.
Majoring in composition and minoring in bass, he studied harmony, counterpoint, music history, even solfeggio, the sight reading method his father taught him as a child.
TV jazz man
In the summer of 1953, while playing with his brother in a trio at Conneaut Lake, Mr. Negri tripped over a pretty girl on the beach, Joni Serafini of Squirrel Hill. “He literally fell on me,” she says.
They were married in 1954, and he began to search for a steady gig. He found one in a new medium — television. He became the leader of a jazz trio that played live five days a week on KDKA’s “Buzz ’n’ Bill Show” with song and dance men Buzz Aston and Bill Hinds.
The Negris moved to Brookline and had three daughters: Lisa, Laurie and later, Gia. In 1959, guitarist Tony Mottola persuaded him to move his young family to New York City.
“He said, ‘You can sub with some bands.’ It was all very iffy,” Mr. Negri says. “After a few months, Joni and I said, ‘Let’s go back to Pittsburgh.’”
In addition to writing commercial jingles, he teamed up with writer Sy Bloom on the song “Beat ’Em Bucs,” which played the Pirates all the way to a 1960 World Series victory over the New York Yankees.
He worked on another KDKA-TV program, “The John Reed King Show,” and moved over to WTAE-TV in 1968. His 20-year stint as the station’s music director included the “Hank Stohl Show” with Nick Perry and two children’s shows, “Ricki and Copper” and “Adventure Time” with Paul Shannon. In the mid-’60s, Mr. Negri worked on a shortlived children’s show with Fred Rogers. When the Latrobe native created “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” for WQED years later, he remembered Mr. Negri.
While doing the show, Mr. Negri continued to play local clubs and accompany headliners who came through town. Bob Hope, Peggy Lee and Michael Feinstein all became Joe Negri fans.
“Joe's fluid and spontaneous ability to perfectly accompany and enhance every song I was singing made me feel as happy as I've ever been on a concert stage,” Mr. Feinstein said after performing with Mr. Negri and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Singer and guitarist later made an album together.
Mr. Negri, who turned 91 this summer, becomes sad when he talks about friends and musicians he has lost. On “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” the deaths of three neighbors — Don Brockett in 1995 at age 65, Johnny Costa, 74, in 1996, and Bob Trow, 72, in 1998 — hit the cast hard. “Fred said, ‘Before we lose anyone else, I’m going to end the show.’”
The show’s last episode aired in August 2001. Mr. Rogers died of stomach cancer in February 2003, at age 74. Seven years later, Bobby Negri died at age 81.
Joe’s lessons, legacy
“At 14, 15 years old, I’m playing ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee.’ It blew people’s heads off!” — Joe Negri, describing his early lessons at Volkwein Music.
In the 1970s, Mr. Negri began teaching jazz guitar at Duquesne University, then expanded to the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. In 1999, Matt Hudson came from his hometown in Erie to study guitar at Pitt. He found a mentor in Mr. Negri.
“Joe can play something flashy, but it always takes a back seat to melody and phrasing. There’s not a wasted note,” he says.
Mr. Hudson, who now teaches music at Lane Technical High School in Chicago, turns on his students to Mr. Negri’s arrangements of jazz standards. Noah Todd, 18, of Chicago was one of them. Mr. Hudson encouraged the young guitarist to email a video of him playing a Negri solo to the master.
“The morning after, he responded with the most encouraging words and ideas,” Mr. Todd says.
He has had only one actual lesson with his virtual mentor, when he auditioned for Duquesne’s School of Music. Now he’s looking forward to many more; he starts at Duquesne this fall.
“He is literally worldclass, even if nobody knows him outside of Pittsburgh. He did not have to go out of his way for some random kid from Chicago …. The world doesn’t need more musicians. It needs more good people.”
Mr. Negri has cut back on his teaching and performing, but he still practices every day. His custom-made Benedetto guitar stands in the corner of his dining room near photos of his granddaughters — Ali, Nina and Natalie.
On Oct. 7, he and his band — Max Leake, Tony DePaolis and Tom Wendt — will perform his “Mass of Hope” at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall in Carnegie (www.carnegiecarnegie.org).
“He has not lost any of his chops,” says Brooks Bartlett, a longtime admirer and friend.
Mr. Bartlett and his wife, Helen, organize quarterly jazz concerts to benefit St. Barnabas’ Free Care Fund. Friday’s concert to honor Mr. Negri is special.
“I thought he deserved something like this. He is such a nice guy — no pretense at all. Pittsburgh is lucky to have him.”