Charlie Byrd was born in Chuckatuck, Virginia on September 16,
1925. Byrd began playing the guitar while he was still a small
child. By the start of World War II he was a proficient player.
During the war, he met and played with Djano Reinhardt. After
the end of the war, Byrd became a full-time professional musician.
When Byrd returned to the United States, he enrolled in Manhattan's
Harnett National School, with an emphasis on jazz guitar, and
helped to support himself by playing pick-up jazz gigs around
town. He took up the study of classical guitar in the late 1940s.
Thanks to a scholarship, Byrd traveled to Siena, Italy in 1954
for six weeks' study with the great Spanish classical guitarist,
Andres Segovia. Byrd rounded out his studies in South America,
where he learned music with a Latin beat.
A master of diverse musical styles, Byrd never blended them.
Instead, his programs included something for every musical taste
- as he put it, everything from "blues to Bach." His
1962 album "Jazz Samba," with saxophonist Stan Getz,
is credited with introducing the bossa nova movement to America.
He was designated the first "Maryland Arts Treasure"
in 1997, and was named a Knight of the Rio Branco by the government
of Brazil in 1999.
During a career that spanned five decades, Byrd recorded more
than 100 albums, one as recently as September. Many of those recordings
were with his Charlie Byrd Trio, which included his brother, Joe
Byrd, on bass.
"He's so versatile and so widely experienced, and his technique
is so solid in so many different kinds of music. There's really
a great range of expression that you don't find in any other jazz
guitarist that I know of" - John Spitzer, who teaches music
history at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore
His last performance was Sept. 18, 1999 at the Maryland Inn's
King of France Tavern in Annapolis, less than three months before
his death.
