Charlie Byrd

Charlie Byrd approached jazz and popular music with a refined restraint and an ear for graceful melody, establishing himself through two key innovations: adapting the techniques of the acoustic classical guitar to these idioms and bringing Brazilian sounds to wide audiences across North America. Growing up in a household filled with music, he encountered one of his heroes, Django Reinhardt, while performing as a teenager in wartime France. Following the war he worked with Sol Yaged, Joe Marsala and Freddie Slack, yet he set jazz aside for a time to pursue formal study of the classical guitar, first with Sophocles Papas in 1950 and later with Andrés Segovia in 1954. By the later 1950s he had returned to jazz performance in the Washington, D.C. region, frequently dividing his programs between separate jazz and classical portions. He began leading sessions for Savoy in 1957 and appeared with the Woody Herman Band during 1958–59. A State Department–sponsored tour of South America in 1961 proved decisive; it was there that he first encountered the nascent bossa nova style then emerging in Brazil. Back in Washington he shared recordings of the new music with Stan Getz, who persuaded Creed Taylor at Verve to produce an album pairing the two guitarists. Released as Jazz Samba, the 1962 LP achieved broad pop success on the strength of the single “Desafinado” and ignited the bossa nova craze throughout North America. The success of that project led to a series of Riverside albums, among them the landmark Bossa Nova Pelos Passaros, and secured Byrd a contract with Columbia, although many of those later releases leaned toward diluted easy-listening material. In 1973 he joined Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel to form the cooperative group Great Guitars, and that same year he completed a widely adopted guitar instruction manual. Beginning in 1974 he recorded extensively for Concord Jazz in varied contexts, including collaborations with Laurindo Almeida and Bud Shank. Byrd died on December 2, 1999 after a prolonged struggle with cancer.