'Each Man's Death Diminishes Me'

Reading through the list of names of deceased Covid-19 victims on the front page of the New York Times Sunday, I was sorry to see famed, immensely talented jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli's name.

Bucky Pizzarelli, 94, Saddleback, NJ, master of jazz guitar, jumped out from the list of names on the Times' front page, just 1 percent of the nearly 100,000 dead from the Coronavirus pandemic.

Bucky Pizzarelli

Bucky Pizzarelli. It was a musically punchy name my brother and I heard a lot growing up. It's a name that's fun to say. Bucky Pizzarelli. It was a name my mother, Doris Kavanaugh McKinney, mentioned often.

"He could really play that guitar," my Mom would rave, pretending to fast strum a guitar as she relived exciting days of her youth and her brush with fame as the lead female vocalist with The Vaughn Monroe Orchestra in the late 1940's.

Bucky was the young, versatile rhythm guitarman, in his early 20's, for Monroe's big band when my mother joined Monroe's orchestra for a year right after graduating from Notre Dame High School for girls in Radnor, PA. in 1948.

My Mother Doris Kavanaugh

My mother, then, simply Doris Kavanaugh, aged 18, was often featured with Monroe's orchestra, accompanied by the "Moon Maids" quartet, on the Camel Caravan, a musical variety radio program. They broadcast out of New York City. My father, who had yet to marry my mother, would be listening in Philadelphia.

After a year, my mother lovestruck and homesick, would return to Philadelphia and marry my father, Jack McKinney who shared my mother's love for music.

While my father landed a gig as music/opera critic at the Philadelphia Daily News, my mother would continue to sing professionally the rest of her life, but closer to home.

As I reflect on the unfathomable number of lives lost from the pandemic, I can't help reminisce, conscious not so much of our transient lives, but the intransigent gifts of music, song, laughter, love and artistry in many forms that live on long after we've gone.

My mother would be a featured performer at the South Jersey Shore summertimes through the late '50s into the early '90s -- singing at Cozy Morley's in North Wildwood, The Whitebrier in Avalon and the Two Mile Inn just outside Wildwood Crest.

In the late '70s and early '80s, Doris Kavanaugh headlined summers at the Red Garter in North Wildwood, NJ, belting out Roaring Twenties favorites like "Hard Hearted Hannah" and "Second Hand Rose" to jubilant, crowds of Styrofoam "straw" hat-wearing, pitcher-of-beer drinking crowds. 

My father, Jack, gained notoriety as a fine music critic and then would become known as "Fearless Jack" in the Daily News' sports pages, sparring with Heavyweight Boxing Champ Sonny Liston and braving a cage of Clyde Beatty's lions, armed with just a whip and a chair. Later, he helped pioneer talk radio with his four-hour program "Night Talk."
.

My father Jack McKinney

Jack and Doris would have five children. Their artistry lives on.

Bucky Pizzarelli would go on to greatness, often behind the scenes, nailing down the rhythmic bottom on hundreds of records for scores of music legends.

He performed and recorded with a who's who of big names, including Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Ben E. King to name a few.

Pizzarelli was a member of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show band when the show broadcast from New York. He widely recorded and performed up to his final years in his 90's.

I met Bucky about 15 years ago or so, when he performed at the Cape May Jazz Festival. He was awesome; a controlled explosion of jazzy chordal rhythms and exquisite runs.

Bucky was welcoming to me after his performance. "I remember her," he said fondly of my mother, the petite blonde with a bombshell voice, who had passed a few years earlier. I handed him a compact disc of my mom singing with tracks from the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.

He gladly took it and told me an acquaintance had just discovered some old recordings from the period my mom sang and Bucky played with Monroe's orchestra. I hoped to get a hold of them, particularly if they included my mother's singing. Bucky and I communicated through his manager, but apparently no recordings of my mother on the Camel Caravan or other gigs were discovered.

Seeing Bucky's name on the front page of the Times today, brought the toll of the Coronavirus pandemic a little closer to home. These just aren't simply names any more than they are mere statistics. They had families, hobbies, unique talents, dreams and loves as we all do.

They were teachers, singers, musicians, poets, cooks, artists, dancers, bus drivers and maintenance men. They strived, sweated, laughed, prayed and cried. And they loved -- a wife, a husband, their children, a pet bird or a cat. They were, and are, us.

Some reached for the stars and got a hold of one, like Bucky. I couldn't help thinking how much history, how much instructive wisdom and knowledge these mostly older Americans took with them. What gems could they have shared with us?

Many fought for their country on faraway battlefields and survived with the scars, only to be let down by their own government's failure to timely alert its citizens to a lethal virus that has claimed more lives in America in just two months than war has taken the past half century. 

A particularly inauspicious and sobering fact on this Memorial Day weekend, as we honor our fallen heroes.

Each life is so precious, worth so much more than jewels. And we lost a whole treasure chest full in just a matter of months. They are all part of a singular family now. They will be missed and thought of often and fondly.

I'm reminded of a quote from John Donne's poem, "For Whom the Bell Tolls":

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.