Guitarist Barry Finnerty

[Jazz+]

Guitarist Barry Finnerty knows how to groove alone to make music

Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/04/DDG08DHJH71.DTL

 

Monday, July 4, 2005

 

"You're playin' it too white,' Crusaders saxophonist Wilton Felder told Barry Finnerty when the gifted young guitarist joined the hit jazz-funk band in 1979. "Now play that groove by yourself.'

 

Finnerty laughs as he recalls his favorite Felder line: "You playin' it too wambly. I want it more wombly.' A San Francisco boy who made his name in New York playing in the majors with musicians like the Brecker Brothers and Miles Davis, Finnerty became a superior rhythm player after five years with the stomping Crusaders.

 

"They taught me if you can't groove by yourself, if you have to lean on somebody else, you can't groove,' said Finnerty, a big friendly guy with sandy brown hair and rosy cheeks, sitting on the sunny deck of his little Oakland house, overlooking the Coliseum, the bay and the foggy city to the west. "You gotta be able to set your watch by every guy in the band if the music is really going to be happening.'

 

It's been happening for Finnerty at Savanna Jazz on Mission Street, where Tuesdays belong to the grooving 53-year-old guitarist. Six years after moving back from the Apple, Finnerty has found a regular gig where he can stretch out and be himself.

 

A fluid improviser equally versed in the music of Jerry Garcia, John Coltrane, B.B. King, James Brown and Jim Hall, Finnerty is cooking with two alternating bands: a jazz trio with bassist Peter Barshay and drummer Andy Eberhard that digs into Coltrane, blues and ballads, and a funk-based free- improvising trio called Deep Down and Out, with drummer Ronnie Smith (subbing for Kevin Hayes, who's on the road with Robert Cray) and electric bassist John Whitelaw.

 

Those guys go off on a moment's notice into funkville, psychedelic rock, hard blues, pastoral Pat Metheny and African highlife. Whitelaw and Finnerty first worked together in the swinging Bay Area R&B band Beefy Red in the late '60s, playing clubs and opening at the Fillmore Auditorium for Bo Diddley and Lightnin' Hopkins. Finnerty wrote Beefy Red charts by transcribing records by Ray Charles and Lou Rawls. He was one of those music-crazy San Francisco kids who took naturally to jazz and rock.

 

The son of the late Warren Finnerty, a New York actor who won an Obie, the Off-Broadway theater award, for his role in "The Connection,' and Ruth Finnerty, a pianist who taught English at UC Berkeley Extension, Finnerty started on piano at 5 and guitar at 13. He got his first electric guitar, a Fender Jaguar, at 14, living in Hong Kong with his mother and playing in a rock band called the New Breed, which opened a show for Herman's Hermits.

 

"I got mobbed by Chinese girls who wanted my autograph,' recalls Finnerty, who was hooked. His frank and funny Web site bio touches on missteps and pitfalls in the cutthroat music business, his troubles with cocaine and the joy of life with his lady friend, Clarita Zarates, an artist and singer with whom he's been writing barbed, Bush-whacking pop songs.

 

Returning to San Francisco in '66, Finnerty studied jazz with Dave Smith at Sherman Clay and was blown away by the bands he heard one Sunday afternoon at the Fillmore: the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band with guitarist Mike Bloomfield. Wowed by Garcia's melodic playing, Finnerty swapped his Fender for a red single cutaway Guild Starfire like Garcia's, which he later traded for a '57 red sunburst Les Paul, with a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece, of the kind played by his guitar hero, the Yardbirds-period Jeff Beck.

 

"I would still love to get the gig with the Dead. I think I could be the ghost of Jerry Garcia, I think I could do him justice,' says Finnerty. He used to hang out with fellow guitarist Jim Checkley at Don Weir's Music City store on Columbus Avenue. "We'd go in there, and if anybody was playing guitar, we'd pick it up and say, 'Let me see that guitar,' and play better than him. The kids would walk away crying. We were terrible.'

 

Checkley hooked him up with Beefy Red in Marin, made up of other top teenage players -- at one time it featured trumpeter Mark Isham, now a Hollywood film composer who still sends Finnerty his annual Scientology Christmas card -- and older cats like tenor saxophonist Irwin Goldfield, a '50s New York hipster who was then 35, which seemed ancient to Finnerty.

 

After studying philosophy and music at UC Berkeley for a couple of years, he did a semester at Boston's Berklee College of Music. He moved to New York in '73 and landed a gig with drummer Chico Hamilton. He'd been introduced by saxophonist Alex Foster, a Bay Area lad who now plays in the "Saturday Night Live' band with two other guys bred here, trombonist Steve Turre and saxophonist Lenny Pickett.

 

Finnerty was 21 when he performed with Hamilton at Switzerland's Montreux Jazz Festival on the same bill with Miles, with whom Finnerty would hang out and record the 1981 album "The Man With the Horn.' Finnerty's tune "In View' was recorded that night at Montreux and included on a live concert recording on Stax. "I never received 1 cent of royalties,' Finnerty notes. "Welcome to the music business!'

 

He went on to play with everyone from Hubert Laws to Ray Barretto and was tapped by the Brecker Brothers for the 1977 edition of their blazing fusion band that also featured the Marin-bred drummer Terry Bozzio. Finnerty appeared on the Breckers' "Heavy Metal Bebop' and "Strap Hangin' " albums, and a few years later was featured on the Crusader's big-selling "Street Life' disc.

 

He toured the world with the Crusaders, at first flying first-class. But after a while, Finnerty writes on barryfinnerty.com, the three leaders went first class while the sidemen were downgraded to business class, and then finally economy. He opted to leave the band before "the sidemen might have to get there by rowboat.'

 

Finnerty spent the next decade and a half in the Big Apple performing and recording with various people, writing jingles for ad agencies, songs for the Children's Encyclopedia of Knowledge and singing with the Bob Hardwick's society orchestra. Along the way he developed a nose for the pricey white powder that got the better of him and precipitated his move home.

 

"I'm just glad I was able to get out of it because if I hadn't, we might not be sitting here today,' said Finnerty, who went through rehab and now lives with Clarita; her teenage son, Donald, who wears a padlocked chain necklace and hips Finnerty to punk bands like the Necromaniacs; two dachshunds; and a friendly mutt named Running Fur.

 

He's been patching together a living playing for theater shows such as "Rent' and "Mamma Mia,' gigging with guys like saxophonist Mel Martin, doing weddings and other casuals and writing a jazz improvisation method book to be published by Scher. Unlike many musicians, Finnerty has never had a day job.

 

"I'm lucky because I'm versatile,' says Finnerty, who throws himself into whatever bag he's exploring. "I try to make each thing authentic. I don't play a bunch of bebop licks on a funk tune. I try to get down and dirty and make it as funky and groovin' as I can. And when I'm playing bebop -- well, occasionally I throw in a power chord.'

 

He loves the gig at Savanna Jazz, which gives him "an outlet just to play my own stuff, where I feel like I'm doin' something. You have to play and improve for the love it. And if some people get into it, so much the better. I can't worry about the fact that my career isn't where (guitarists) Mike Stern or John Scofield's is.

 

"I got a beautiful woman, I got a nice house, I still have all my abilities and I'm working on some positive stuff. I'm making music.'

 

http://www.barryfinnerty.com/