Barney Kessel, the innovative and influential jazz guitarist known for his lyrical voice and harmonic improvisation, has died. He was 80.
A pioneer of the electric guitar, Kessel died Thursday night in San Diego, where he had lived since 1989. The cause of death was a malignant brain tumor. He had been in poor health since 1992, when he had a stroke that curtailed his nearly six-decade musical career.
"Barney was a wonderfully lyrical and melodic player and could also swing very hard," jazz critic Nat Hentoff told The Times on Friday. "He was a guy who could sit in and play with everybody. He had what jazz players call 'big ears,' meaning he had a great capacity to listen and to respond musically to what he was hearing."
Between 1947 and 1960, Kessel was rated the No. 1 guitarist in many of the music polls in Esquire, Down Beat and Playboy magazines.
In the 1950s, he recorded several albums and performed with drummer Shelly Manne and bassist Ray Brown in a groundbreaking piano-less trio.Kessel also appeared and recorded with Charlie Byrd and Herb Ellis as the "Great Guitars."
A Times reviewer catching a 1982 concert by Kessel and Byrd -- Ellis had the flu -- wrote that it was "such a near-perfect performance of melodic, swinging jazz that a more appropriate appellation might be the 'Heavenly Guitars.' "
Kessel left jazz for many years for more lucrative work as a studio musician but returned to the road full time in 1972, saying, "I wanted to be able to take my guitar out of the case and always be me, not a guy doing a dog food commercial."
The broad, precise demands of film, television and the recording studio, however, only enhanced his self-taught technique modeled on the work of fellow Oklahoman Charlie Christian.
Kessel played not only with the Oscar Peterson Trio (in a 1952 tour of 14 countries), Charlie Parker, Charlie Barnet, Art Tatum and Artie Shaw, but also with such diverse musicians as Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys and Liberace. He was musical director of Bob Crosby's television variety show; signed, wrote songs for and produced records for Ricky Nelson as a Verve executive; and played on the soundtracks of such motion pictures as "Cool Hand Luke."
Over the years, as either a leader or sideman, Kessel recorded more than 50 albums, primarily with the Verve or Contemporary labels, ranging from "Barney Kessel Vols. I and II" in the early 1950s through "Red Hot and Blues" and "Kessel Plays Standards" in the late 1980s.
