Buzzy Linhart

Buzzy Linhart was born March 3, 1943, in Pittsburgh PA. His mother, Agnes Linhart, was a music educator. His first musical inspiration was when he heard the crows singing in the 1941 Walt Disney animated feature Dumbo. His dad was in a Mason lodge as grand master, Linhart told AMG in a May 2002 interview: "He played some percussion and did novelty songs with an act called the Cornpoppers in their lodge so I saw this stuff when I was two and three years old. Rock & roll wasn't in yet, my parents liked to produce shows....They would do these big stage extravaganzas, a lot of music from the 1890s, they would write entire shows...including minstrel shows, so I really heard a lot of good live music when I was very young." He started taking classical drum lessons and performed in the grade-school orchestra at seven years of age. On Buzzy Linhart's first band: "When John Coltrane played it was just deeper. I've been trying to hire musicians that give you those goose bumps since I was starting my first band at age 11, the Five Diamonds. It was Dixieland, and we were reading out of the famous combo/orch books." He later formed the Bel-Aires, not the Scottish group of the same name, always having a band through junior-high and high school, sometimes under his own name. He studied classical xylophone and jazz xylophone with the mallet man for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, Robert Matson, "I got college-level music training when I was 13 and 14, and when I went into the Navy Conservatory's college-level school of music." He drove to D.C. to join the Navy Symphony and they took him even though Linhart was 4-F. "Their plan was to use me just playing music." He caught emphysema during the Cuban Missile Crisis from fighting a fire, also "a guy was killed ten feet from me on watch,"...