Word: banjoist
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Died. Harry Reser, 69, oldtime banjoist, whose fur-trimmed Clicquot Club Eskimos kept the NBC airways jingling to the tune of Ain't She Sweet? and Barney Google every week between 1925 and 1933, later strummed for Sammy Kaye; of a heart attack, while tuning up for his nightly performance in the orchestra of Broadway's Fiddler on the Roof; in Manhattan...
...college and move to the city. The three young Greenbriar Boys are lively, technically superb, sometimes jazzy and even in tune as they range from the old-timey Take a Whiff on Me, otherwise known as the Cocaine Blues, to A Minor Breakdown, an original by the Greenbriar banjoist...
...warned that the professionals would kill the goose because they banged out nothing but noisy chords," he says. "Today, the professionals do more than that -they do filigree work, background and single-string playing that bring out the undeveloped qualities of the instrument." Concert Banjoist José Silva, whose educated banjo can romp through complicated pieces like the Hungarian Rhapsody and Poet and Peasant, loves his instrument for its warm humanity-about as far from the denatured ickiness of an electric guitar as he can get. "The banjo is a wild thing," he says. "You stroke it wildly, and that...
Starting Seed. In 1930 he went into commercial radio as "Red Godfrey, the Warbling Banjoist," advertising bird seed. Next year, while "one of NBC's dullest announcers, and that's saying plenty," he was hit by a truck, spent four months in a hospital, listening hour after hour to the radio...
Trombonist Turk Murphy, who uses an empty gallon paint can for a mute, used to sit in with Bunk Johnson. Banjoist Henry Mordecai once played guitar, caught the jazz fever and bought three riverboat banjos so he could switch from one to another when his ferocious strumming broke the strings. Drummer Bill Dart has fingers like crowbars, drums almost exclusively on wood blocks and a washboard. Pianist Wally Rose, a man with a solid beat, also plays Bach and Chopin...