Tommy Tedesco

Tommy Tedesco ( born July 3, 1930 in Niagara Falls (New York ) and Thomas J. Tedesco, † November 10, 1997 in Northridge, California ) was an American guitarist in jazz, rock and pop and belonged to a group called by Californian studio musicians, Wrecking Crew.

Life and work

Tommy Tedesco came in the late 1950s, to California and has since been one of the most sought after studio guitarists. He plays guitar while melody Bonanza Theme TV television series that was first shown on 12 September 1959 in the United States. Since then he has been involved in well over a thousand shots. Although he was primarily a guitarist, he played a large number of other stringed instruments such as banjo, mandolin, bouzouki, balalaika, ukulele or sitar. However, He used these instruments often the guitar tuning. He worked on the west coast of the U.S. for many well-known artists such as the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, Phil Spector, The Mamas and the Papas, Elvis Presley, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Zappa ( Lumpy Gravy, 1968), The Monkees, The 5th Dimension or Cher. He appeared in the early 1960s with even at the Studio Project B. Bumble And The Stingers.

Tommy Tedesco was involved as a studio musician in addition to recordings for other musicians in a variety of productions for film and television. He can be heard for example in the soundtracks of The French Connection, The Godfather, Jaws, The Deer Hunter and Field of Dreams. For television, he made ​​recordings for series like The Twilight Zone, Green Acres, M * A * S * H or Batman.

He also played under his own name since 1978, a number of albums in. The pieces of Tedesco were influenced by, among other things, by the guitarist Howard Roberts, Jimmy Raney, Barney Kessel and Tal Farlow. In 1992, a stroke and the resulting partial paralysis of his work came to an abrupt end. The following year he published his autobiography entitled Confessions of a Guitar Player.

For the trade magazine Guitar Player Tedesco wrote several years regularly Column Studio log, in which he reported in detail on his studio work for production of records, films and television.

Cinematic reception

In the film The Wrecking Crew from 2008, which was produced by his son, Denny, Tommy Tedesco is portrayed as a session musician with a number of his colleagues.