Immensely talented jazz and blues violinist who played with vitality and invention throughout his long career.
Giuseppi Venuti, September 16, 1903 in Philadelphia, PA, d. August 14, 1978 in Seattle, WA, jazz and blues musician and pioneer jazz violinist. According to legend, Venuti took up violin when he and a friend, Eddie Lang, tossed a coin to see who would play which of two instruments they had bought from a Philadelphia pawn shop. Lang got the guitar. Similarly legendary are tales of Venuti's birth and early career. The former has been placed in both Italy and Philadelphia, with a favourite in-between location on board a ship filled with Italian immigrants as it sailed into New York harbour. The date varies too, with a range of anything up to five years either way. More prosaically, Venuti spent his early life working in bands in and around Philadelphia, often in company with Lang, before joining Bert Estlow's band in Atlantic City. By 1924 he had graduated to leading one of Jean Goldkette's bands. Later in the 20s, often still with Lang, he played in the bands of Roger Wolfe Kahn and Adrian Rollini and made many records, including the classic Venuti-Lang Blue Four sides. In 1929 he joined Paul Whiteman shortly before the making of the film The King Of Jazz (1930). During a rehearsal for the film he surreptitiously emptied a bag of flour into the bell of a tuba so that when the unfortunate musician eventually managed to puff out a note the entire band disappeared under a drifting white cloud. While with Whiteman he survived a serious car crash and also befriended Bix Beiderbecke, whom he once tipped, drunk and unconscious, into a bath of purple Jell-O.
During the early 30s Venuti appeared on numerous recording sessions with artists such as Red McKenzie, Jack Teagarden, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Frank Trumbauer, Bing Crosby, Lee Wiley and the Boswell Sisters. Depressed by the sudden death of his friend Lang in 1933, Venuti drifted for a while, visiting Europe and recording in the UK, alternating on violin and guitar. Back in the USA he formed a big band in 1935 but enjoyed only limited success, refusing to take seriously the duties of a band leader. He folded the big band in 1943 and for a while he played in film and radio studios, becoming a regular on Crosby's show.
Throughout the 50s Venuti appeared at clubs and made records, but by the 60s was struggling against alcoholism. In 1967 he was invited to attend a Dick Gibson Colorado Jazz Party; this sparked a revival of interest in his work. He began recording again as leader and in duo with jazzmen such as Earl 'Fatha' Hines; the following year he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival and the year after that was in England for the Jazz Expo. In 1970, he discovered he had cancer but fought back; during these traumatic years he made some superb recordings with George Barnes, Ross Tompkins, Dave McKenna, Zoot Sims, Marian McPartland, Scott Hamilton and others, defying age, ill health and a lifetime of hard-living.
Throughout his career Venuti played with sparkling invention and enormous vitality, bringing to his playing a sense of urgency and excitement which, on his chosen instrument, was only matched by Stuff Smith. Venuti's was a massive talent, and although his private life was often disastrous - he was often racist and had a propensity for cruel practical jokes - he was still an outstanding musician. Had he chosen to play a more popular instrument, he might have been judged a giant of jazz.
Joe Venuti Biography by Scott Yanow
Although renowned as one of the world's great practical jokers (he once called a couple dozen bass players with an alleged gig and asked them to show up with their instruments at a busy street corner just so he could view the resulting chaos), Joe Venuti's real importance to jazz is as improvised music's first great violinist. He was a boyhood friend of Eddie Lang (jazz's first great guitarist) and the duo teamed up in a countless number of settings during the second half of the 1920s, including recording influential duets. Venuti moved to New York in 1925, and immediately he and Lang were greatly in demand for jazz recordings, studio work, and club appearances. Venuti seemed to play with every top white jazz musician during the segregated era and, in 1929, he and Lang joined Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, appearing in the film The King of Jazz.
Lang's premature death in 1933 was a major blow to Venuti, who gradually faded away from the spotlight. In 1935, after visiting Europe, the violinist formed a big band and, although it survived quite awhile and helped introduce both singer Kay Starr and drummer Barrett Deems, it was a minor-league orchestra that only recorded four songs (which Venuti characteristically titled "Flip," "Flop," "Something," and "Nothing"). His brief stint in the military during World War II ended the big band, and when he was discharged, Venuti stuck to studio work in Los Angeles. He was regularly featured on Bing Crosby's early-'50s radio show, but in reality the 1936-1966 period was the Dark Ages for Venuti as he drifted into alcoholism and was largely forgotten by the jazz world.
However, in 1967 Joe Venuti began a major comeback, playing at the peak of his powers at Dick Gibson's Colorado Jazz Party. His long-interrupted recording career resumed with many fine sessions (matching his violin with the likes of Zoot Sims, Earl Hines, Marian McPartland, George Barnes, Dave McKenna, and Bucky Pizzarelli, among others) and, despite his increasingly bad health, Venuti's final decade was a triumph.