Remembering Vic Juris

an under-appreciated great

We’re coming up on the 5th anniversary of Vic’ Juris’ death. Vic was a friend to all guitar players in NYC and beyond, a guy who worked all the time, and yet received scant credit. Here is a chapter from my book Pity the Genius about dear Vic, a gentleman, a beloved teacher, and one helluva jazz guitarist.

I’ll remind you that I hope you subscribe so I can keep doing this…

And here is a link to the book! Or buy it off my website, signed. Could make a good Christmas present—

https://amzn.to/3B2QIyF

Vic Juris: Time Remembered

Sunday evening on Christopher Street at The 55 Bar, Vic’s monthly Greenwich Village residency. Jay Anderson on upright, Anthony Pincotti on drums, Vic out front with a semi hollow body hanging from a leather strap. He’s in a suit jacket, slacks, dress shoes, his graying hair is neat and combed back as he leans into the neck of the guitar and lets loose a string of thick, eerie chords on a slow, quiet tune. The sound is lush inside the funky dive with its tattered and worn walls, its whoosh of history, so wonderfully and completely New York. Vic is expressionless— a handsome man, some wrinkles, but fit at age 65. Then a slight grimace as he counts off Miles Davis’ tune ESP, a fast, oblique progression that has always eluded me. He somehow makes sense of it, surprising, practiced, elegant and sure.

The crowd, maybe 22 of us, is hushed. The bartender tries to stir a drink without making a sound. Things heat up, there’s an exchange of phrases, a buoyant, swinging pulse. It occurs to me that I, and others, take Vic for granted. In any other town he’d dominate, be feted. But it’s the city. He’s been playing like this for decades, bars this size, part of the pulse of the town.

Vic, who died of liver disease in 2019, was amongst a handful of go-to players for jazz bandleaders in New York. You want your music to be played right? Call Vic. He knew what to play and not to play, big bands, singers, duets, anything really. When Vic joined saxophonist Dave Liebman’s band in the 1990’s, one of the first things Dave noticed was how serious Vic was about getting the job right. He would record the rehearsals on cassette, and several days after the session would call Dave to ask about a few things he wasn't sure he understood. Dave was asking him to play quite challenging music, more advanced than what Vic had been doing. For Vic to play with Liebman, especially once it was a quartet with no piano, he had to navigate the A to Z harmony that’s Liebman’s trademark. Pretty Brazilian tunes, bitonal slash chords, free playing, long Coltrane-inspired modal jams. He did it all without breaking a sweat. He was relentless in his desire to give Dave what he needed. They played together for 23 years.