Hi, my name is Joe Negri and let's see, what do exactly do I do?

I would say that my number one thing is being a guitar player.

I grew up in the downside of Mount Washington in the back.

They called it.

I grew up Italian and I had a very Catholic upbringing, and there was a time when I thought maybe, maybe I wanted to be a priest.

You know?

Who put the guitar in your hand for the first time?

Mike Negri, my dad.

Yeah.

My dad was a bit of an amateur.

He was a banjo player.

It's funny, though, coming from Italy like he does an immigrant.

He was playing with a Dixieland banjo.

He was one of those old Italian guys could do carpentry, brick, everything.

He gets me a ukulele.

My dad would teach me the melody to a song.

Pardon me, pretty baby, with the ukulele.

Very, very simple.

Basic changes in temporary music, but more in the classical style.

Swing and jazz.

What makes it different?

It's the accent.

It kicks it, it gets.

I see it as like boxing, boom.

Uh.

Boom.

Uh.

If you pick it normally.

Now, if we want to swing it, Tom, maybe you can help me with just a little brush stroke.

About 121234.

You hear the accent?

Music grows you know?

We grew from the early blues.

We eventually went into swing.

I was a bit of a performer then.

I was pretty good for a kid, you know?

I didnt want to do standers all the time.

Id write my own thing.

The guitar came along at eight years old.

Charlie Christian.

on guitar playing Chonk Charlie Chonk.

Charlie Christian was really my first hero.

They say he electrified the guitar and he truly did.

He took it out of the rhythm section, and he put it up there with the trumpets and the trombones and the tenor saxophone, and he became one of the outstanding voices.

He was the guy that gave me my single note jazz inspiration.

After hearing Charlie, I was just hooked.

It was just it just built from there.

But you started with radio at age three.

Oh, little Joe Negri.

Yeah.

That's right.

I remember my dad telling me about KQVE.

WJAS I guess there was a KDKA back then.

There were all kids talent shows, you know.

So we'd go there and I'd have to rehearse with the piano player.

My mother and my aunt would teach me the words, and I just thought that was a bit strange.

One day, someone knocked on the door who became one of the most famous dancers in motion picture history, Gene Kelly.

I was a little baby then, but he comes to knocking on the door and he goes, that's the act I want.

I want to take his act just like that.

My dad said, you cant thats no act.

So Kelly took me and I went on a couple of shows with Kelly.

I knew a lot about music.

I was really, like what you'd call an ear musician.

You know, a homemade musician.

I was a real single note jazzy guitar player.

You know, they called it bebop in those days.

And I liked Charlie Parker, and I liked, Dizzy Gillespie.

And I liked all that stuff.

At that time, there were a lot of songs that the bebop guys were doing that they were taking from standard tunes.

That's what I wanted to do.

It's just blossomed into something gigantic.

The guitar was like this different voice in the band, you know?

When I was in second grade, I went to the music teacher and I said, could I play the cello?

And she said, Gee Joe, they're all gone.

You know, you missed it.

So I never got my chance to play the cello.

And I didn't try again because I became so interested in the guitar.

We had this fellow.

His name was Dom Tremarkey.

My dad and Dom knew each other.

Dom was responsible for taking me around town, introducing me to different musicians, getting me gigs.

Being the guitar player, I was like the color in the band.

So I got to be featured quite a bit.

It was kind of a nice job.

My life was learning songs, going on the radio and playing, and my dad said, busted.

That means enough.

No more of this.

He said, Joe, what's going to be your career?

I said, well, that's my career.

And he said, well, then go.

So by the time I was 15 years old, I was playing.

I had joined the union and I was working, playing gigs.

16 I went on the road with a band.

Johnny Costa.

Johnny came from a little town called Arnold.

He grew up there as an accordion player.

It was an Italian family there.

They kind of ran the town and they loved Johnny.

In fact, they wanted they wanted to just own him and do everything.

And he used to play at their club.

I got to know Johnny when he started working around town here in Pittsburgh.

They had a little jazz together, some jazz clubs.

Johnny was amazing piano player.

Not not easy to play with.

I could probably play anything improvised, but I didnt do... I didnt know the whys and the wherefores.

I needed a theory.

Johnny could do all that kind of stuff.

And Ken Griffin, I think some people may not know who Ken Griffin was.

- You remember that?

Well, it's a wonderful clip of you playing on the program 67 Melody Lane with Ken Griffin.

That's me and Johnny Costa.

It's almost like we're auditioning for Ken.

And it really turned out to be kind of an amazing cut.

You toured quite a bit, didn't you?

Oh yeah.

Widely across the country?

Across the country, all the theaters.

You got time for a quick story?

Sure.

Eddie Sophranski, he was a bass player and a producer.

He produced the recording that we did in New York of the Pittsburgh Pops.

I was to do The Flight of the Bumblebee, what I called Bumble Boogie.

At about three minutes to closing the stream, he looks at me and said, what do you think?

Can you do it in one take?

So we did it in one take.

What was it like being a musician?

Like?

Did you like being on the road?

I did like it for a while.

I'm not a road guy.

I'm not good.

I've never had a good stomach.

And I. You know, I'm always a little bit.

So I didn't stay and I didn't really love it.

I always had a different bent on the music business.

My goal was to get in the studios like CBS or NBC, where a lot of my friends worked.

After Elvis Presley hit the scene, things changed.

The music changed, the studios changed.

There is very little call for guitar players like me in the studio.

I come back from the Army and I said, Johnny, I don't know what to do.

I don't know whether to keep playing these dumb gigs.

Johnny said, why don't you go to school?

I'm going to Carnegie Mellon.

So I said, no kidding.

Well, what am I going to do?

Jazz guitar was not recognized in the upper education.

There was no guitar.

You could get a little bit of classical in certain schools.

Classical guitar, but absolutely no pick style.

No jazz style.

Go talk to Nikolai Lopatnikoff and maybe maybe he'll accept you as a composition student.

Mr.

Lopatnikoff says, would you write me something?

So I wrote a little piano piece and he he looked at it.

He said, you have a phenomenal gift for melody, so I'll take you on as a composition major.

That's it.

I got into Carnegie Mellon and then I started working with Nikolai.

And the first thing we did was I wrote two sonatas for violin and piano.

I did a contrapuntal piece for for two pianos.

I knew the chords.

I knew the songs, learned it by ear.

I could play them for you.

I could play D minor seven G7 to C, but I couldn't tell you the theory about it.

So that's what I learned at Carnegie Mellon.

I was off from that point on.

In my second year, I get a call from KDKA, did I want to come down there and start on this television show?

I said to Nikolai, I, Gee, I don't know what to do, whether to come back to school or start on the television.

And he actually gave me the permission.

I was very pleased that he gave me the support to go there, and that started my career.

I stayed here in Pittsburgh and I had my own little studio situation.

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor.

Would you be mine?

Could you be mine?

I was working at TAE as the music director.

Course they put me on with Fred.

Would you be mine?

Could you be mine?

The station says to me, Just go on the show and whatever he needs, you just help him.

So I kinda became his musician.

So we knew each other pretty well.

Let's make the most of this beautiful day.

Since we're together, you might as well say.

Would you be mine?

Could you be mine?

Won't you be my neighbor?

Fred one day says to me, Hey Joe, why don't you just walk around the neighborhood?

And I said, okay, so I walk around.

I say hi King Friday.

High corny.

Hi X the Owl.

Talk to them a little bit.

Oh, and my favorite was Lady Elaine.

Oh, she and I hit it off pretty good.

She called me tuts all the time.

Okay tuts.

She'd say, yeah, she was like a boozy old broad.

All she needed was a drink and a cigarette.

That's right.

Joe, how would you like to be the handyman on my new show?

I said, you know you're kidding, right?

I'm really not very handy.

My dad, Mike, was the handyman.

You know, he could do everything, but not me.

I said to Fred, I can't even screw in a screw or nail a nail straight.

He said, don't worry.

It's going to be all pretend and you'll be great.

I said, okay, if you say so.

So I became Handyman Negri.

I'm glad you like to listen because I sure like to play.

You know what this is?

Maybe if I press this button, you can see.

This is a cassette player with a little cassette in here, and there's nothing written on it, so we'll just have to play it to see what it is.

I know what it is, but I want you to hear it.

Music was what Fred was all about.

He and Joanne met doing music at Rollins College in Florida.

He really was, you know.

I don't know if you remember much about Fred in the real early days when he did The Children's Corner.

He worked with a girl named Josie Carey, who was a wonderful lyricist.

- Why hi, Im sure.

I do.

But then after Josie decided to go to commercial television, Fred completely took over and did not only the music, but did all the lyrics and everything.

Why hi, I'm Josie.

Why hi!

How do you do?

Fred was a very good musician and a heck of a good songwriter.

You know?

He wrote harmonically in a rather traditional way, using the basic chords.

You know, it's you.

I like.

Well, Johnny and I would get him and we'd go, you and put a put like a jazzy chord in there, which would flavor it all together different.

And Fred never complained.

In fact, he loved it.

Was it good to come together with people who you knew, loved, and appreciated music as much as you did?

Did that give you a certain comfort level?

Yeah, it really did.

So much to choose in the world.

What really knocked me out about it was we all kind of spoke the same language.

Everybody was very musical, everybody.

And it was pretend, and it was wonderful.

And it lasted for 35 years.

Fred decided that he would give each one of us a character that was something like real life, you know, a reality.

So I became the music shop owner I had a rehearsal hall.

The guest for the day would be there.

Fred would come and say Oh, hi.

They'd greet each other.

Why don't you go on in?

I'd say, oh, I'll see you in a minute.

Very good.

It was cute, you know And then Fred would always go in the back.

And that's where I had so many wonderful memories.

The first, you know, the Yo-Yo Ma memory was just unbelievable.

I really wanted to be a cello player, and I never got the opportunity.

I was really in awe of him, you know?

And I thought, what's he going to do?

Is he going to play some Bach or is he going to play some, you know, a Chopin cello concerto or something?

He's going to want me to do that.

I'm okay, but I'm not.

I'm not a classical guitar player.

What am I going to do?

Oh.

Just beautiful.

We've been having a good visit.

Have you?

Yeah.

It's just just fabulous to have you here.

Well, I'm having a very, very nice time.

When did you start to play the guitar?

Well, I was about six years old with the guitar, but I was playing the ukulele about four.

Four.

That's pretty good.

Yo-Yo started when he was four.

Well, I started when I was four.

Had four strings.

And you had, you know, you have six strings.

That makes perfect sense, right?

That's right.

And sure does.

Do you think you could play something together?

Sure.

I have a guitar right here.

I'd love to.

It would be my pleasure.

You like to play with other people?

Oh, I'd love to.

What do you want to do?

I think we ought to do something that we do in the neighborhood.

Tree, tree, tree.

Good.

Tree.

Tree.

Tree.

And we played it beautifully.

And I played pretty chords behind him.

And it was one, and we became good friends.

I like to have television visit with you.

- Fred looked like he definitely has - I do.

a mission.

And his mission was to reach out to children and help them grow.

- ..together, then.

Bye.

Bye.

- And.

Teaching was not my first, my first goal.

I really wanted to be.

Always wanted to be a player.

I heard from Duquesne.

I can't even remember the acting dean then, but he said, we'd like you to, you know, start some jazz guitar here.

I actually was responsible for getting jazz guitar started in the higher education schools.

Whereas Joe Negri As a professor of guitar and founded the Jazz Guitar program at Duquesne University in 1973.

He served at Duquesne University for 45 years, making his one of the longest tenures of a private guitar instructor in the country.

And whereas, thanks to his leadership, But it must be really interesting with your career to have seen jazz go from like, oh, jazz, that's that music people play in nightclubs to this really respected taught in.

I mean, it's got a great history at Duquesne amongst one of them.

Exactly.

And Pittsburgh had a lot to do with that.

Pittsburgh has a unique vibe about it.

You know, I think Pittsburgh jazz scene equals New Orleans or California or New York.

I think we were one of the special cities because of the the immigrant population here.

The rest of its history.

Now, therefore, be it resolved that I, William Peduto, mayor of the City of Pittsburgh, do hereby declare July 21st, 2018, Guitar Day with Joe Negri here in our most livable city of Pittsburgh.

Thank you, my friend.

I love it.

Thank you.

I love you, it's a real.

Are we finished?

Yeah.

Well, because this is what I always play at the end of any studio day.

The history must continue.

I've got to let you go.

But are you shy about your age?

Not really no.

What's your birthday?

When is your birthday?

My birthday is June the 10th.

And what will it be next year?

I'm not going to say.

What is the secret?

You are so youthful.

It's unbelievable.

Music, I think, has a lot to do with it.

Jazz helped.

You have given so much to young people and to music lovers around the world.

I love you, and we love you dearly.

Thank you.