Harry Reser

When pre-bop banjo playing is recalled, the image that usually arises involves strictly rhythmic chord work that hardly departs from ensemble passages. Harry Reser stood apart from that pattern as an exceptional virtuoso widely regarded as the era’s preeminent banjoist. More technician than spontaneous improviser, he executed novelty ragtime at speeds comparable to those of a pianist and became one of the decade’s most frequently documented musicians. Reser began with guitar at age five, soon adding violin, cello, and piano before later mastering marimba, trumpet, and saxophone; only at sixteen, prompted by Vess Ossman and Fred Van Eps, did he turn to banjo. After local dance-band work he relocated to New York in 1921 and found immediate opportunities, performing at various points with Ben Selvin, Sam Lanin, Bennie Kruger, and Paul Whiteman—once even substituting on trumpet for the latter.

Reser began cutting discs with numerous little-known ensembles almost at once, and in 1922 he issued his initial solo sides, among them a striking reading of Zez Confrey’s “Kitten On The Keys.” Alongside an extensive catalog of technically demanding banjo pieces—he composed more than twenty novelty rags whose brilliance remains audible today—he directed a vast array of interlocking dance orchestras, many of whose charts he also supplied, all issued under a profusion of aliases that included the Blue Kittens, the Bostonians, the Campus Boys, the Four Minstrels, the High Hatters, Phil Hughes’ Orchestra, the Jazz Pilots, Jimmy Johnston’s Rebels, the Night Club Orchestra, the Okeh Syncopators, Earl Oliver’s Jazz Babies, the Parlophone Syncopators, the Plantation Players, the Rounders, the Seven Rag Pickers, the Seven Wild Men, the Six Hayseeds, the Six Jumping Jacks, Tom Stacks and his Minute Men, the Victorian Syncopators, Bill Wirges’ Orchestra, and the Seven Little Polar Bears. The most familiar of these units, the Cliquot Club Eskimos, broadcast for a decade beginning in 1925 to promote soft drinks, with the musicians appearing in eskimo attire; their numerous recordings, distinguished by Tom Stacks’s novelty vocals, maintained an energetic, lightly swinging character and incorporated brief solos.

Once that radio engagement concluded, Reser worked as a freelancer across many contexts and continents while producing ten method books for banjo, guitar, and ukulele. His final engagement found him on guitar in the pit orchestra of the 1965 Broadway production Fiddler On The Roof, where he suffered a fatal heart attack while warming up before a performance.