Music: Between Two Loves

Candlelight flickered against the low ceiling of Washington’s Showboat Lounge one night last week as a mild-mannered Virginian named Charlie Byrd started strumming the strings of his guitar. With bass and drum accompaniment, he played his own composition, Spanish Guitar Blues, went on to a hot-swinging number called Yoti Took Advantage of Me, and then pulled a 180° switch—two solo Bach gavottes, sedate Frescobaldi variations, Villa-Lobos’ rolling Prelude in E Minor. At 33, Byrd is that rarity, a musician so versatile that he qualifies as one of the world’s top classical and jazz guitarists.

A self-styled conservative. Byrd-refuses to follow the trend that is breaking down the barrier between classics and jazz, will not hop up a piece of serious music. “It’s a wedding that loses the best of both,” he says. “It destroys the fire of jazz—which should be hot-blooded and swing hard—and it makes inferior classical music.” Byrd keeps the forms divorced, plays one, then the other. “The arrangement,” says Showboat Manager Peter Lambros, “has been extremely profitable for both of us.” With room for only 80 customers, the small cellar club grosses $3.500 a week, and Byrd’s popularity is so great that next week he starts a new weekly half-hour TV program over Washington’s station WMAL-TV.

Stompin’ & Segovia. As a child in Chuckatuck, Va., Byrd thought at first that he wanted to be a baseball player, but there was too much music around. “My dad ran the community store, an informal meeting place for farm hands on Saturday afternoons,” Charlie recalls. “Some would bring their guitars, and there would be a lot of singin’, playin’ and spittin’ tobacco juice. It was a real stompin’ brand of music.” Charlie’s father taught his son the guitar, and at twelve Charlie was playing on a local radio show. World War II saw Charlie in Special Services, touring Europe as an Army showman. One day in Paris he met the legendary Belgian-born gypsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt, then and there decided to become a jazz musician.

The jazz kick kept Byrd occupied only for a few years after his discharge from the Army. He studied at Manhattan’s jazz-prone Hartnett National Music Studios, but was so enthralled by Spain’s great classical guitarist, Andres Segovia, that he realized jazz was not his real love after all. The classics were the thing; for it, Byrd studied with Sophocles Papas, a friend of Segovia’s, then in 1954 with Segovia himself in Siena, Italy.

More Satisfaction. Since then, Byrd has become a guitar adventurer. He has recorded guitar music of the 16th century for Washington Records, performed in concert halls including the National Gallery of Art. played his own flamenco guitar score for a production of Tennessee Williams’ The Purification. He made a bow to jazz by playing in England and Saudi Arabia with the Woody Herman band, has also composed music for modern dance groups, and for the past two years has been combining classics and jazz at the Showboat.

Byrd still loves jazz. “I just get more satisfaction out of the classics,” he says. As his fans can attest, he plays both equally well. Says the Voice of America’s Jazz Disk Jockey Willis Conover, who beams Byrd’s wide-ranging guitar to 80-odd countries: “Charlie Byrd’s versatility in the literature of the guitar surpasses that of anyone else. He is a masterful jack of all guitar trades.”

*No kin to Virginia’s apple-growing U.S. Senator Harry Byrd.