Gene Bertoncini, a prolific jazz guitarist celebrated for his bountiful lyricism and driving swing, for accompanying celebrated singers like Tony Bennett and Lena Horne, and for performances and arrangements that blurred the line between jazz and classical music, died on Saturday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 89.
His niece Nina Collins confirmed the death.
Throughout a career that began in a duo with his older brother, Renny, an accordionist, playing in restaurants and catering halls near their childhood home in the Bronx, Mr. Bertoncini was heralded as a sensitive accompanist and innovative leader.
In a sideman role, he worked with many of the greatest jazz singers of the 20th century, including Mr. Bennett, Ms. Horne and Nancy Wilson, and with instrumentalists as varied as Benny Goodman, Wayne Shorter and Michel Legrand.
As a bandleader, Mr. Bertoncini forged a groundbreaking partnership with the bass virtuoso Michael Moore that, over roughly 15 years and six albums, was credited by The New Yorker’s jazz critic Whitney Balliett with redefining the concept of the jazz duo.
He praised the Bertoncini-Moore duet, one of the first and most enduring guitar-bass duos in jazz, for “brevity, gracefulness and subtlety” that is “harmonically up-to-date and acoustically old-fashioned,” featuring arrangements by Mr. Bertoncini that “point up the melodic beauties of its repertory.”
Mr. Bertoncini was equally at home with the Great American Songbook, the European classical repertoire and, in advance of his fellow jazz guitarists, Brazilian works in the bossa nova style composed by such colleagues as Antonio Carlos Jobim and his close friend Joao Gilberto.
Mr. Bertoncini was in his early 20s when he played his first major date with a nationally known headliner, Buddy Rich, and passed muster with the notoriously temperamental drummer and bandleader.
“Buddy really liked the way I played rhythm with him,” Mr. Bertoncini said in an interview last year. “He liked that he didn’t have to tell me anything. I was able to lock into the beat with him, which was amazing, because he was such a dominant force.”
In the early 1960s, Mr. Bertoncini found plentiful work in New York studios, not least because his facility with nylon-string classical guitar technique lent itself to bossa nova at a time when few established guitarists could play it.
During those years, he played on Ahmad Jamal’s 1963 album “Macanudo”; formed a trio with the pianist Monty Alexander and the bassist Bob Cranshaw; performed on two albums by the trumpeter Clark Terry; and became a regular in the “Tonight Show” band until that late-night program moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1972. (Mr. Bertoncini said he helped teach the host, Johnny Carson, an amateur guitarist, how to play the jazz standard “Here’s That Rainy Day.”)
Over the next several decades, Mr. Bertoncini played thousands of studio dates. They included pop hits like B.J. Thomas’s recording of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and jazz projects, including several dozen albums for the producer Creed Taylor’s CTI label, many of which teamed him with the bassist Ron Carter. Mr. Bertoncini gave his last major performance in New York, at Mezzrow, with Mr. Carter in December.
In a 2008 review of Mr. Bertoncini at Le Madeleine in Manhattan, Ben Ratliff in The New York Times lauded Mr. Bertoncini for an improvisational style that was unshowy, deliberate and delightful, in a set that mixed jazz standards by Billy Strayhorn and Bill Evans with works by Gilberto and even an aria by Puccini.
“He could afford to pause after a phrase and think where he wanted to go next, how he might add or subtract a note,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “This was background music only by virtue of its softness. So long as you listened, you heard a great musician trying to be better.”
Gene Joseph Bertoncini, the younger of two sons, was born in the Bronx on April 6, 1937, to the Italian immigrants Mario and Anita (Ori) Bertoncini.
Mario Bertoncini, a waiter who later owned and operated a diner called Joe’s on Third Avenue in Manhattan, also taught his sons to play the music of the old country, with Renate (known as Renny) on accordion and Gene on guitar.
Around the time Gene was 12 and Renny was 15, they were regulars on the TV program “The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour.” While at the NBC studios, Gene first met the jazz guitar virtuoso Johnny Smith, who became his first mentor. A few years later, he studied classical technique with the British-born Julian Bream.
Growing up, Mr. Bertoncini also became enamored of the jazz guitarists Charlie Christian, an early practitioner of the electric guitar who came to fame in Benny Goodman’s bands, and Oscar Moore, a key member of the Nat King Cole Trio.
At 17, Mr. Bertoncini accepted a scholarship to study architecture at Notre Dame, which seemed like a safer career bet than the itinerant life of a musician. During the five-year program, he also played in student ensembles and directed the school’s swing band.
Upon returning to New York after graduating in 1959, Mr. Bertoncini took an entry-level position in the architecture firm of David Henken, a prominent disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, and moonlighted in big bands. In the middle of one show with a dance band led by Richard Maltby, Mr. Bertoncini later said, he had an epiphany after he hit a wrong note, which was a shock to his system at the time.
“Probably nobody noticed but me, but I couldn’t live with that,” he said. “I attributed it to the fact that I hadn’t been practicing enough.” He decided to quit his day job and commit full-time to the guitar.
The most difficult part was telling his parents, who had supported him through college. Sixty-five years later, he still teared up when he described how his father responded, saying, in Italian, “Son, whatever you want to do, I’ll support you 100 percent.”
Mr. Bertoncini taught at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., for more than 50 years, as well as at William Paterson University in New Jersey and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston; many of his students became successful professional guitarists, such as Peter Bernstein, Roni Ben-Hur, Paul Meyers and Paul Ricci.
Mr. Bertoncini also played at every opportunity in guitar duos and trios with Bucky Pizzarelli, whom he considered a mentor and best friend. “They shared the same love of harmony and melody, but each in their own style,” Mr. Pizzarelli’s son John said in an interview.
The discographer Glenn Broadhead compiled a listing of 188 known albums featuring Mr. Bertoncini — 32 as leader and 156 as sideman — but even that was far from an exhaustive list, considering the guitarist’s work on thousands of sessions for pop albums and singles, and film and TV soundtracks.
In the jazz world especially, it’s largely acknowledged that Mr. Bertoncini — who never married and left no immediate survivors — influenced legions of guitarists through his music.
As Pedro Rodriguez, one of his students, said: “I asked him once, ‘Do you realize how many children you have fathered?’ For a bachelor, that’s pretty good.”
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