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Jack Cecchini can thank two stumbles, one metaphorical and one literal, for making him one of the rare musicians who is world class in both jazz and classical.
The first was in 1950 in Chicago, when he was thirteen and stumbled across a guitar resting on his landlord’s couch. He ran his fingers over the strings as he walked by. The landlord picked it up, demonstrated two chords, and immediately asked Cecchini to play accompaniment with them. Of course, he couldn’t. “He’d shake his head when it was time for me to change the chord, and if I didn’t he’d start swearing,” Cecchini recalled with a chuckle. Cecchini’s interest was ignited, and he started trying to imitate songs he heard on the radio. By sixteen, he was playing jazz in the background of Chicago clubs he was too young to patronize. “It was like a factory,” he told me. “If you had to go to the bathroom, you had to get one of the other guys to pick it up. But you’re experimenting every night.” He took the only free music lessons he could find, in clarinet, and tried to transfer what he learned to the guitar. “There are eight million places on the guitar to play the same notes,” he said. “I was just trying to find solutions to problems, and you start to learn the fingerboard.” Pretty soon he was performing with Frank Sinatra at the Villa Venice, Miriam Makeba at the Apollo, and touring with Harry Belafonte from Carnegie Hall to packed baseball stadiums. That’s where the second stumble came in.
During a show when Cecchini was twenty-three, one of Belafonte’s stage dancers stepped on the cable that connected his guitar to an amplifier. His instrument was reduced to a whisper. “Harry freaked out,” Cecchini recalled. “He said, ‘Get rid of that thing and get yourself a classical guitar!’” Getting one was easy, but he had been using a pick, and for acoustic he had to learn fingering, so the trouble was learning to play it on tour.
He fell in love with the instrument, and by thirty-one was so adept that he was chosen as the soloist to play a concerto by none other than Vivaldi accompanied by an orchestra for a crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park. The next day, the Chicago Tribune’s music critic began his review: “Despite the ever-increasing number of enthusiasts who untiringly promote the resurrection of the guitar as a classical instrument, there are but few men who possess the talent and patience to master what remains one of the most beautiful but obstinately difficult of all instruments.” Cecchini, he continued, “proved to be one of those few.”
Despite his late and haphazard start, Cecchini also became a renowned teacher of both jazz and classical guitar. Students traveled from out of state to pick his brain, and by the early 1980s lines formed down the stairs of his Chicago school in the evenings. His own formal training, of course, had been those free clarinet lessons. “I’d say I’m 98 percent self-taught,” he told me. He switched between instruments and found his way through trial and error. It might sound unusual, but when Cecchini reeled off legends he played with or admired, there was not a Tiger among them.
Duke Ellington was one of the few who ever actually took formal lessons, when he was seven, from the exuberantly named teacher Marietta Clinkscales. He lost interest immediately, before he learned to read notes, and quit music entirely to focus on baseball. In school, his interests were drawing and painting. (He later turned down a college art scholarship.) When he was fourteen, Ellington heard ragtime, and for the first time in seven years sat down at a piano and tried to copy what he had heard. “There was no connection between me and music, until I started fiddling with it myself,” he remembered. “As far as anyone teaching me, there was too many rules and regulations. . . . As long as I could sit down and figure it out for myself, then that was all right.” Even once he became arguably America’s preeminent composer, he relied on copyists to decode his personal musical shorthand into traditional musical notation.
Johnny Smith was Cecchini’s absolute favorite. Smith grew up in a shotgun house in Alabama. Neighbors gathered to play music, and young Johnny goofed around with whatever they left in a corner overnight. “John played anything,” his brother Ben recalled. It allowed him to enter local competitions for any instrument, and the prizes were groceries. He once fiddled his way to a five-pound bag of sugar. He didn’t particularly like violin, though. Smith said he would have walked fifty miles for a guitar lesson, but there were no teachers around, so he just had to experiment.
When the United States entered World War II, Smith enlisted in the Army hoping to be a pilot, but a left-eye problem disqualified him. He was sent to the marching band, which had absolutely no use for a guitar player. He could not yet read music, but was assigned to teach himself a variety of instruments so he could play at recruiting events. Wide-ranging experience set him up for his postwar work as NBC’s musical arranger. He had learned to learn, and his multi-instrument and poly-genre skill became so renowned that it got him into a tricky spot.
He was leaving NBC one Friday evening when he was stopped at the elevator and asked to learn a new guitar part. The classical player hired for the job couldn’t hack it. It was for a live celebration of composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seventy-fifth birthday, and would feature one of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions, which had not been performed in twenty-five years. Smith had four days. He continued with his Friday night, got home at 5 a.m., and then joined an emergency rehearsal at 7 a.m. On Wednesday, he performed so beautifully that the audience demanded an encore of all seven movements. In 1998, alongside Sir Edmund Hillary, who with Tenzing Norgay was the first to summit Mount Everest, Smith was awarded Smithsonian’s Bicentennial Medal for outstanding cultural contributions.
Pianist Dave Brubeck earned the medal as well. His song “Take Five” was chosen by NPR listeners as the quintessential jazz tune of all time. Brubeck’s mother tried to teach him piano, but he refused to follow instructions. He was born cross-eyed, and his childhood reluctance was related to his inability to see the musical notation. His mother gave up, but he listened when she taught others and tried to imitate. Brubeck still could not read music when he dropped out of veterinary premed at the College of the Pacific and walked across the lawn to the music department, but he was a masterful faker. He put off studying piano for instruments that would more easily allow him to improvise his way through exercises. Senior year, he could hide no longer. “I got a wonderful piano teacher,” he recalled, “who figured out I couldn’t read in about five minutes.” The dean informed Brubeck that he could not graduate and furthermore was a disgrace to the conservatory. Another teacher who had noticed his creativity stuck up for him, and the dean cut a deal. Brubeck was allowed to graduate on the condition that he promise never to embarrass the institution by teaching. Twenty years later, the college apparently felt it had sufficiently escaped embarrassment, and awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Perhaps the greatest improv master of all could not read, period—words or music. Django Reinhardt was born in Belgium in 1910, in a Romani caravan. His early childhood talents were chicken stealing and trout tickling—feeling along a riverbank for fish and rubbing their bellies until they relaxed and could be tossed ashore. Django grew up outside Paris in an area called la Zone, where the city’s cesspool cleaners unloaded waste each night. His mother, Négros, was too busy supporting the family making bracelets out of spent artillery shell casings she gathered from a World War I battlefield to lord over anyone’s music practice. Django went to school if he felt like it, but he mostly didn’t. He crashed movie theaters and shot billiards, and was surrounded by music. Wherever Romani gathered, there were banjos, harps, pianos, and especially violins.