‘World On A String’: John Pizzarelli Jazzes It Up

Brothers John and Martin Pizzarelli were born into a family of musicians. Their father is the famed jazz guitarist, Bucky Pizzarelli, who, during the 1960s, performed in the Tonight Show Band and who worked as a session player for rock acts such as Dion and the Belmonts. Musical greats, too, were in and out of the Pizzarelli house in Paterson, New Jersey, as John and Martin were growing up. It makes perfect sense then that, eventually, Martin picked up the upright bass professionally and John found his calling with jazz guitar, singing and songwriting. John also has new a memoir out called World On A String, about his musician life among the legends.

Good Italian Jersey boys, John and Martin have played together in various bands since high school, bands with names like Omega — which John calls, “the last word in rock and roll”– and San Pacu and As Is. For a time in their twenties, the brothers played a club in Manhattan under the name “Johnny Pick and His Scabs,” because they were filling in on that gig for a friend. If the spirit so moved them, they’d occasionally switch up the band name for kicks, calling themselves Johnny Ride and the Waves one week, Johnny Shuck and the Clams another week.

It was only after this stint in their younger years as aspiring rock and rollers that both of them eventually found their way to jazz and the American songbook. “I heard ‘Straighten Up and Fly Right,’ and ‘Paper Moon’ and ‘Frim Fram Sauce’ and ‘Route 66’ and I went crazy,” John Pizzarelli tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross, “and I thought that was the foundation for what I was going to do, because it was great music. It was fun. It was swinging. The guitar had to play everything: rhythm guitar, lead guitar. … And it just evolved into me doing that more and more with my father, and probably making more of a living doing that as trying to be Billy Joel, so it worked out better to be Nat King Cole than Billy Joel, which,” he says after a pause, “should be a song title.”