# Barry Finnerty: All kinds of players would come and sit in, including Mike and Randy Brecker, Joe Farrell, Dave Liebman, Steve Grossman … Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2017/12/03/barry-finnerty-all-kinds-of-players-would-come-and-sit-in-including-mike-and-randy-brecker-joe-farrell-dave-liebman-steve-grossman-video/
- Published: 2017-12-03T00:04:54+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**03.12. – Happy Birthday !!! Barry Finnerty, was born in San Francisco on 1951.
My father, Warren, was an award-winning actor (he received the Village Voice Obie
for Best Actor of 1960 for “The Connection”) and my mother, Ruth, was an excellent
classical pianist who later got her PhD and taught English at UC Berkeley.**

I began playing piano and reading music at age 5, then got my first guitar (a classical)
for my 13th birthday. I got my first electric guitar, a Fender Jaguar, for my 14th
birthday while living in Hong Kong (my mom had gotten a Fulbright grant to teach
there for a year), and that same year my first band, The New Breed, opened the show
for Herman’s Hermits! I seemed to get some attention for my ability to play the 
guitar solos from the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the Rolling Stones’ “Heart Of
Stone” note for note! The band also played songs by the Who, the Kinks, and the 
Yardbirds. Jeff Beck was my first real guitar hero.

I returned to San Francisco in 1966 and played in high school bands while absorbing
the new hippie rock scene at the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms. Here I heard Jerry
Garcia with the Grateful Dead, Mike Bloomfield with the Butterfield Blues Band, 
and later, Eric Clapton with the Cream, and Jimi Hendrix, along with virtually all
the top bands of the time. Hearing Jerry Garcia’s smooth melodic playing influenced
me to trade in my Jaguar for a red single cutaway Guild Starfire. But I really identified
more with Jeff Beck, so I traded that one in for a ’57 cherry sunburst Les Paul…
with a Bigsby tremolo! (I had it removed..I had worked hard on my finger vibrato
and I didn’t want anyone to think I was cheating!) The price of that guitar..500
bucks. Now it would be worth at least $25,000!

Around that time, I began to be interested in jazz, and studied jazz guitar and 
theory with Dave Smith at Sherman Clay music store in downtown SF. I listened to
records by guitarists such as Howard Roberts (my first real jazz influence), Kenny
Burrell, and George Benson, as well as Dave Brubeck (with Paul Desmond), Miles Davis(”
Kind Of Blue”) and John Coltrane. I traded in the Les Paul for a 1960 blond Gibson
Johnny Smith. I played and sang in a band, Beefy Red, that opened shows at the Fillmore
and Avalon and featured some of the Bay Area’s top young musicians. In 1969 I entered
UC Berkeley and studied philosophy, astronomy, ear training and sight singing, which
considerably advanced my musicianship and conceptual abilities. In 1971 I attended
the Berklee School of Music in Boston for one semester, during which time I went
to New York and heard some real heavyweight artists, live, including George Benson(
who I still consider the greatest jazz guitarist in the world, bar none!), Joe Henderson,
Chick Corea, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. I could see that I wasn’t quite
ready yet, so I returned to San Francisco for two more years of “seasoning.” I played
some gigs around the area and bought another Les Paul from my old high school band
mate Adam Silver…a beautiful ’59 sunburst…for $500 again!

In April, 1973, I moved to New York City, determined to break into the world of 
big time professional jazz. A good friend from the Bay Area, saxophonist Alex Foster,
had been there already for a few months and had just started to play with Chico 
Hamilton, and after auditioning, I got the gig! Three months later, in June, 21-
year-old Barry was performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland on the
same bill as Miles Davis! A live recording of that concert, featuring one of my 
first compositions, “In View”, was released on Stax Records, for which I never received
one cent of royalties…welcome to the music business!

The early ’70s were good years for jazz in New York. There used to be jam sessions
almost nightly at various downtown lofts, where guys would come to hone their chops.
All kinds of players would come and sit in, including Mike and Randy Brecker, Joe
Farrell, Dave Liebman, Steve Grossman, Tom Harrell, Woody Shaw, all good people 
for a young player to brush elbows with. In fact, they were all pretty young then,
too!

In 1974, on a recommendation from Billy Cobham, who had heard me at a club, I got
the gig with Airto and Flora Purim. They were quite hot at that time having just
done Chick Corea’s “Light As A Feather” album. We played the Monterey Jazz Festival
that year with bassist Charles Fambrough and pianist Mike Wolff. Also that year,
Claude Nobs, the promoter of the Montreux festival, who had liked my playing, arranged
for me to cut a demo for Atlantic Records with Alex Foster and trumpeter Tom Harrell…
it sounded great…they didn’t buy it.

In 1975, I played with Joe Farrell in a band which included Victor Lewis on drums
and Jeff Berlin on electric bass, and also worked for the first time with Hubert
Laws (still the world’s greatest jazz flute player and, I’m proud to say, a good
friend of mine), with Mark Gray (one of my favorite piano players, unfortunately
now deceased) and Mike Richmond on bass.

In 1976, I switched back from the very clean jazzy sound I had been using and started
to use distortion again. Since I had been weaned on Beck, Clapton, and Hendrix, 
this transition came more easily to me than to a lot of pure jazz guitar players
who couldn’t bend a note if their lives depended on it. I played with Ray Barretto
at the Bottom Line club in N.Y. and Randy Brecker heard me there. I had been pestering
Mike and Randy to try using me sometime for their new Brecker Brothers band, but
they had only heard me playing jazz, and I figured they didn’t think I could rock
out enough. But that night changed Randy’s mind, I guess, because he called me to
be in the new 1977 edition of the band, with Terry Bozzio on drums (who I had known
from the Bay Area…he had even played with Beefy Red for a few gigs…and had become
a star with Frank Zappa and a true monster on his instrument), and Neil Jason on
bass. I had made a little extra money dealing weed that year, so I plowed all of
it into having a new axe put together, the “Guitorganizer”. It was a combination
of a Black Beauty Les Paul (reissue), a B3 organ-like tone generator that was triggered
by wired frets and went through a Leslie speaker, interfaced with an Arp Odyssey
monophonic synthesizer, which went through its own separate amplifier. It made one
ungodly racket, I can assure you! We did the first Heavy Metal Bebop tour just as
a five-piece…with Mike and Randy both playing their horns through every new-fangled
electronic effect then available and two massive Sunn amps! That was one high-energy
aggravation of musicians!

Also in 1977, I met the Crusaders, who had been called in to produce Ray Barretto
for Atlantic. We recorded my tune,”Salsa Con Fusion” in L.A.(Bozzio played drums
on that session as well), and later that year they called me to play on Joe Sample’s
first solo record, “Rainbow Seeker”. I had a pretty nice solo on Joe’s “Fly With
Wings Of Love” that got quite a bit of airplay. After that, I decided I wanted that
gig. I called their office and pestered them often for the next year and a half 
before they finally broke down and called me to play on their “Street Life” record,
which became the biggest selling jazz record of 1979…over a million.

But then, in 1979, I got my first experience at shooting myself in the foot, career-
wise. I had started to feel that I would never make any real money in jazz. That
the career prospects of a sideman were limited at best. I wanted to take a shot 
a the big bucks, and I started trying to write what I thought was more commercial
material. Pop/rock/r&b stuff. I started singing again (I had always been the lead
singer in my early groups). I made some fairly good demos, and then Carl Palmer 
came into the club I was working. He told me he was trying to put a new band together.
He heard my demos and liked them. He offered me a full share of the new project,
so, like an idiot, I told the Crusaders I couldn’t do their (VERY well paying) big
European tour, and off I went to L.A. to rehearse with this new thing, which we 
called “P.M.” There were some talented people in the band, such as Todd Cochran 
and John Nitzinger, but it was just the wrong combination, never mind the fact that
Carl Palmer himself regarded a “groove” as some kind of ethnic African nonsense 
that has no place on a set of drums! He really was the antithesis of funkiness! 
To make a long story short, I wasted a year (at $250 a week!) in an ill-advised 
attempt to make my square peg fit into that band’s round hole…or maybe it was the
other way around! We did release one record, “1 P.M.”, in Europe. If anyone ever
hears it…my condolences.

Meanwhile, the Crusaders were riding high, flying to Europe on the Concorde, living
it up big time. After P.M. went post mortem, I ran into Joe Sample at Seventh Avenue
South, the infamous N.Y. musicians’ hangout owned by the Breckers. I told him that
I had fucked up, I was sorry, and I wanted the gig back. He said no way. But…they
called me back anyway, and I worked with them again from late 1980 ’til 1984. It
was great at first. They were flying everyone first class. Once we even had our 
own private bedrooms on the upper deck of a 747 on a JAL flight to Tokyo. We were
drinking champagne and eating caviar, a couple of us were even smoking joints up
there! I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have, because in retrospect, it
doesn’t get much better than that! And sure enough, it didn’t. After the first year,
the main 3 guys (Joe, Stix Hooper and Wilton Felder) flew first class and the sidemen
were downgraded to business class. Still, you couldn’t complain…much. Then, they
flew first while we went economy on a separate flight. By 1984 I figured it was 
time to leave or the sidemen might have to get there by rowboat! Still, I learned
a lot from playing with those guys. They were very picky and demanding about their
grooves, and I became a much better rhythm player as a result.

I should say a few words here about my association with Miles Davis. I had met Miles
in ’79. Julie Coryell (Larry’s wife) was a friend, and she brought me over to his
house, which was right in my West Side neighborhood, and introduced me to him. Miles
was in bad shape at that time; he had recently broken both his legs in a car accident
and was taking a lot of drugs, both the legal and illegal varieties. But he liked
me. One night Julie called me and told me that Miles was staying at her house in
Connecticut for a weekend of recuperation, and he needed his Percodan prescription.
I went to the drugstore for him, threw my Guitorganizer in the car, and drove up,
and we hung out for a couple of days. Miles hadn’t been playing much during his “
retirement” period, but he had his horn there. I set up my stuff and we made a groove
based on a sample-and-hold pattern from the Arp Odyssey (it was a little like the
intro to the Who’s tune “Who Are You”, but funkier), I added some chords and a little
melody, and Miles played over it, and we made a cassette of it. I drove Miles back
into the city later, and we went over to the studio of a friend of his on the West
Side, and listened to our tape over and over again, as we snorted lines long into
the night. That was when he said to me, “Let’s get a band.” I was in heaven, since
Miles was the man I had always dreamed of playing with when I first came to New 
York! I used to call him and say hello occasionally in the following months, and
ask if anything was happening. But he was still not well enough. It wasn’t until
almost two years later, in early 1981, that I got a call from Bill Evans, the sax
player, who was making Miles’ calls, that Miles wanted me to record. He had done
some tracks with his nephew from Chicago, Vincent Wilburn, and he wanted me, Bill
Evans, and Sammy Figueroa on percussion to overdub on them and spice them up. Bill
Evans also had a few of his tunes in the can. We tried to overdub on them, but only
two were “dubbed” good enough to be on the record: “The Man With The Horn”, which
we left untouched and became the album’s title track, and “Shout”. On that one, 
Miles had told me, in that trademark whisper of his, “Barry, just play dadaladaladalada!”…
but he wouldn’t tell me WHERE to play it. It took me about 20 tries before I figured
out that he wanted it at the end of the bar, on the first sixteenth note after the
fourth beat!

However, since it appeared that we needed more (and better) material to finish a
record worthy of Miles, we started talking about cutting some more tracks, with 
a new rhythm section. I suggested that we get either of the two top bass/drum combos
in New York at that time, Marcus Miller and Buddy Williams, or Anthony Jackson and
Steve Gadd. But Miles loved Al Foster (with good reason!), who had been his main
man on drums for a long time, so he came in and Marcus was the choice on bass. The
tracks were mostly improvised in the studio. I always thought I should have gotten
composer credit for “Back Street Betty”, because I spontaneously came up with the
opening power chords (which are the closest the tune has to a melody) after Miles
just said to me, “Play something!” I should have made sure I got at least co-writer’s
credit. Especially in light of what happened later…

Miles had mentioned that he remembered the little tape that we had made at Julie
Coryell’s place a couple of years back, and that it would be cool to record it. 
So I wrote out the melody, and we rented an Arp Odyssey (mine had been lost the 
year before by the P.M, road crew!), and I set up the groove and we started to play
along with it, using headphones to sync the bass and drums with the repeating sample-
and-hold beat. It was a little tricky, but we were just starting to get the feel
of it when Mr. Bill Evans abruptly stopped and said, “This sounds like shit, I don’t
want to play it.” I was dumbfounded. “What do you mean?” I said. “Miles wants to
play it.” “Well, I don’t like it,” he replied. That moment has haunted me for years.
Instead of saying, “OK, Bill, why don’t you sit out on this one” or “Hey, Miles,
I know another sax player who sounds a lot better than this cat” or even “You want
to step outside, motherfucker?”, I just stood there, unable to believe that a sideman
would try to stop another man’s tune from being recorded…at a Miles Davis session!
Anyway, I just looked at Miles, hoping that he would put the guy in his place. Instead,
probably punishing me for my lack of testicular fortitude, he just said, “Well, 
let’s play something else then.”

After that, I didn’t hear anything about any more sessions until I got a call from
Bill Evans, saying, “Hey, I got the mix of the record, you sound great on it!” I
went over to his apartment, and Mike Stern was also there. That’s when I found out
that he had been brought in for the last session…and that he got the only guitar
solo on the record! I had also made the mistake of telling Bill Evans that I didn’t
know what I was going to do about the gigs I had already committed to with the Crusaders
that year, and I found out later that he had told Miles that I was going with them…
effectively insuring that I would be off the gig.

I don’t like to dwell on the past in a negative way. Miles is dead and gone now,
and I’m fortunate to have known him and played with him at all. But I have always
tried to treat my fellow musicians with friendship and respect, and that situation
still stands out…it’s the only time I can remember that another musician went that
far out of his way to hurt me. But hey, as my dad used to say, “Time wounds all 
heels.” Karma will balance it all out eventually. Hopefully when Bill Evans comes
back as a bug.

OK, back to 1984. The Crusaders and I had parted company, and I was back in New 
York. I had just ended a truly disastrous three-and-a-half-year relationship with
a woman who can only be described as secretly certifiably psychotic! Somehow, the
living hell I had been through with her became my inspiration. I began to write 
songs for a new band, the concept of which was forming in my mind: The Negatives!
I wrote the first few tunes, “Stay Away From Me”, “Take A Cab”, “You’ve Got A Problem”,
and “Not A Chance”, and recorded them on 8-track with money loaned by my friend,
organist Jon Hammond. Then Jon’s former roommate, Lazy Larry, offered to pay to 
have them manufactured, and so in ’85, the first Negatives cassette, “In The No”,
featuring Crazy Barry on Everything, and Lazy Larry on Nothing, was released. Later
the band grew to include drummer Graham Hawthorne and bass players Paul Nowinski
and later Frank Gravis. The songs were a humorous mix of negative concepts…expressed
in a very positive way. I mean, we felt that negativity is not always a bad thing:
we were negative about HYPOCRISY! and BULLSHIT! and POLITICS! And let’s face it,
if you were tested for HIV, what would YOU rather be?? We really felt we were on
to something…we played at Kenny’s Castaways, a Greenwich Village club, every Tuesday
for six months, and used to pack the place every night. Everyone loved our stuff.
Our level of musicianship was high…much higher than most rock bands…and we covered
a LOT of musical territory…but our show was nevertheless highly entertaining. And
the songs still sound good and fresh to me…but not surprisingly, the record companies
didn’t buy it.

It takes a lot more to make it in the music business (or in any art form) than exceptional
talent, a highly developed aesthetic, great material, a trio of foxy back-up singers,
or even a johnson of superhuman proportions! (Although you’re getting closer with
the last two.) It takes a whole lot of luck, plus the total determination and persistence
to keep going, keep pushing, against incredible odds, against a sea of motherfuckers
less talented than you, but infinitely more persistent and determined, and absolutely
convinced that their personal pile of excrement smells like roses! Real creative
artists, usually sensitive, neurotic, vulnerable types, would need an endless reservoir
of sheer bull-like stubborn stupidity to pit themselves against the corrupt politics
of the record companies, hoping against hope to penetrate their monolithic structure
that holds all the power, that has a vested interest in letting mediocrity reign
supreme, that seems designed to keep out any real artistry, any real individuality,
only admitting that which conforms to the McDonald’s and Coca-Cola tastes of the
unthinking consumer masses. I think it was Frank Zappa that once said, “If you don’t
sound like the five bands that sound the same, you don’t have much of a chance in
the music business.”

It’s not a new observation, but one that has sent many a talented artist into bitterness,
depression and a sense of futility. And can provide an excuse for some to seek solace
in self-stimulation.

I wasted a LOT of years getting high. That’s all I want to say about it. I’m sure
I would have been ten times more productive (and successful) in those years if I
had not been so desperate to anesthetize myself from my various frustrations, career
and personal, but the fact is, when cocaine is involved, after a while, any excuse
will do. “What time is it? 4:37? Time to do a line!”…”Not getting along with your
girlfriend? Aah, the hell with her! Let’s do a line!”…”Space shuttle exploded? Man,
what a drag! Let’s do a line!”

I finally went through rehab in the fall of 2001, and I’m now clean for over a year.
And you know what? I have a great relationship with my lovely girlfriend Clarita(
soon to be my wife!), my music and creativity feel rejuvenated, and I’m happier 
than I ever was during those dark years when my happiness was of the artificially
induced, powdered variety.

I did manage to put out a few records during the last 15 years. My old friend Teruo
Nakamura allowed me to make a very nice album, “2B Named Later”, for his Cheetah
Records in ’89, with the wonderful rhythm section of Steve Ferrone on drums and 
Darryl Jones on bass, and with Hubert Laws as guest soloist. I did my “Straight 
Ahead” jazz album for Arabesque in ’95 with Dave Kikoski (who is now my favorite
piano player), Victor Lewis (drums), Mike Richmond (bass), and Chuggy Carter (percussion).
Then in ’96, I made the “Bargain Hunters” for the German HotWire label with a very
talented young rhythm section from Hamburg, Jost Nickel on drums and Arnd Geise 
on bass. HotWire also released a compilation of my first two Japanese recordings,“
New York City” (’81) and “Lights On Broadway” (’85), packaged with some other stuff
I had done with Billy Cobham, Jon Hammond and the Late Rent Session Men, and Victor
Jones, under the title “Space Age Blues” (’98).

Other interesting highlights of those years: touring Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania,and
Czechoslovakia in ’88 with Randy Brecker on a State Department-sponsored cultural
exchange tour (before the fall of Communism!); many tours of Europe with my old 
high school comrade, organist Jon Hammond, including one live broadcast on Radio
France in Paris where I MC’ed the whole show en francais; touring Japan with my 
friend,Tom Reyes, the painter who is making a name for himself with his “Visible
Sound”, a live performance of spontaneously created music and his abstract expressionist
art (we did two weeks with just guitar and paint!); shows with my own live band 
at the Blue Note and the South Street Seaport in New York; doing the Blue Note clubs
in Japan with the Brecker Bros. reunion band; and being the lead singer from ’87-’
98 for Bob Hardwick’s Society Orchestra (doing everything from Gershwin and Cole
Porter to ’60s and ’70s rock and roll at every place from the Plaza Hotel to President
George Bush’s Inaugural Ball in ’89).

In 1998, I finally decided to leave New York and return to the Bay Area. I had gotten
tired of wearing a tuxedo to work most of the time, and after 25 years I figured
if it had come to that it was time for a change. It turned out to be a very good
move. I almost immediately started getting called for shows…I did the San Francisco
company of “RENT” for six months (on guitar AND keyboards) and later, “Mamma Mia”.
The shows paid really well, and left me time to pursue my other musical interests.
Plus, in 2000, I was doing a short two-weekend production of “Tommy” when I met 
Clarita, who was singing in the show, and she has turned out to be, in my estimation,
the most wonderful woman in the world. She is an amazing artist as well as a gifted
songwriter and singer in both English and Spanish; she’s gorgeous, funny, sexy, 
and she’s made me a happy guy!

At the NAMM show in January ’01, I heard an instrument that interested me greatly:
the Yamaha RS-7000 sequencer/sampler. I realized that although it was designed for
Master MC hip-hop type guys, in the hands of a musician such as myself it could 
be something really different, at least in the jazz world. I had been looking for
a way to play “jazz” in such a way that people who don’t really know or even like
jazz (let’s face it…most of the world!) could relate to it. So I began to design
a type of style that is groove-based, that has a modern sound and a natural flow,
within which I could freely create my own improvised melodies and rhythms…go in 
any direction at any time, but never losing that basic groove and flow. I decided
to call this new thing TRAZZ…trance jazz.

I premiered TRAZZ in Germany, at the Aalen Jazzfest, in November ’02. It went really
well. We got a live CD off the board, and some clips can be heard in the Music section
of this site. The first complete TRAZZ CD will be coming out in early ’03. And I
will be producing several other projects in the coming year, including “Deep Down&
Out”, a really cool live jam project with John Whitelaw and Jim Preston, the old
rhythm section of Beefy Red (what kind of grooves can three guys who have known 
each other for 35 years come up with??); a classical orchestra piece featuring electric
guitar; and other gems from my incredible catalog of unrecorded fusion and straight
ahead stuff.

So, as someone once said, yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery, but the future
is looking good!

![Image result for Barry Finnerty](https://i0.wp.com/i.ytimg.com/vi/tjN4_JUQ7NU/
maxresdefault.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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