Barney Kessel, guitarist for jazz greats, dies at 80

NEW YORK (Online Jazz Magazine) - Jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, who shared the stage with such music legends as Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and Art Tatum, died at his San Diego, California, home of brain cancer on Thursday.
Kessel was 80.
He began his career at the age of 14 with a band in which he was the only white musician, and set up shop in 1942 in Los Angeles, where he played with a group led by Chico Marx of the famed Marx Brothers comedians.

Barney Kessel's reputation as one of the greatest guitarists jazz has ever known dates back to his seminal 1944 recordings with Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Lester Young. But his impact also extended to the many classic songs he recorded with everyone from Elvis Presley ("Return to Sender"), the Righteous Brothers ("You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling") and the Beach Boys, whose landmark "Pet Sounds" album prominently featured his impeccable guitar work. And Kessel, who died Thursday evening in his University Heights home at age 80, counted among his fans such superstars as the late Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison.

By the 1960s, Kessel was among the best known and most recorded artists on the burgeoning jazz scene.

Early in the 1970s he and contemporaries Herb Ellis and Charlie Byrd formed the group Great Guitars, which lasted into the next decade.
A stroke ended his music career in 1992.