With playing credits including Liza Minelli, Debbie Reynolds, Charles Mingus, Bob Mintzer, David Bowie, Roberta Flack, George Benson, and Nancy Wilson…….a better question to ask is who hasn’t Al Regni played with? Al is currently an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. It was truly an honor to interview this world- renowned master musician.

How did you get started in regards to music?

How did I get started? When I was a kid, it was the early days of television and the waning days of radio and there was a show called Ted Max Amateur Hour in New York City and I auditioned for it. I had been playing the saxophone a couple years, I think I was thirteen so maybe three or four years, and I was surprised, I got accepted to the show and I played on the radio show and I played a solo called Oodles of Noodles. It was a Jimmy Dorsey favorite; it was kind of a flashy piece for saxophones. And as a result of that they asked me back to play on their television show and then as a result of that I played again on their radio show. In those days they were all live shows and they were all live bands. There were studio audiences and everything was done live. What you heard on the television or radio is what was played. So that sort of wet my whistle and I said, this is what I want to do when I get to be a big boy and I wanted to come to New York and be a studio man. Well that was like 1952 or 53 and by the time I got through college and went to New York it was 1961 and those days were kind of on the wane; they were leaving us. Although I did get to do some studio work, quite a bit in fact, but it was nothing like what I had in mind when I got there. I used to say to myself, this isn’t what I had in mind at all. But as things go, we saw enormous change. So that is what I would say got me started.

Of course my local city, which was upstate New York, we had all kinds of bands that would come through and I would hear the famous bands of the day, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, you name it, Sauter-Finnegan [Orchestra] was a big band that inspired me at the time because all the woodwind players doubled, flutes and oboes and recorders and clarinets – it excited me. I went back there recently, to my old town, for my 50^th high school reunion. (Laughs) I can’t imagine how 50 years went by, but anyway, I went by the old dance hall where I used to see all of these bands, and the weeds were just growing over the place, it just broke my heart because this was a place that I always felt was a part of American history, you know? Great music was done and it was just an outgrowth from where our music came from and was leading to. It was just wonderful days… So anyway, that’s what got started my interest in music.

Of course I went to the Eastman School of Music when I got out of high school so I got thrown into the big boys and I got to meet some very good musicians. I went to school with people who became very famous musicians like Ron Carter who was at the school at the time, Larry Combs who was the first clarinet in Chicago (Symphony Orchestra) and we had a band, in those days a jazz band. And in those days that was frowned upon. The Eastman School of Music was a training ground for symphony musicians, not for jazz musicians. In fact, somebody just told me the other day that a fabulous Jazz piano player went to Eastman for about two weeks and found out that their attitude toward jazz was not to his liking and he left and went to New York. So at that particular time it was not a good breeding ground for jazz musicians. But now, today, it’s one of the best breeding grounds because they have a fabulous jazz program and good writing instruction. Some of the world’s best writers come out of there – jazz, television, multimedia. So I felt like we kind of represented the beginning of that transition where the school became more eclectic and showed that people didn’t only have to learn to play serious classical music but jazz was as much serious music as anything else and western, country western, all of that music had the possibilities of being played at a very high standard.

So anyway, I got through with that and went into the army band in Washington, D.C. which was a good experience because again, I got to play the clarinet in a concert band. I got to do a lot of serious chamber music but also got to play jazz with a relatively small group of some very good musicians who backed the singer, Steve Lawrence, so that was a nice experience. Plus, the weekend gig I had was with the now famous writer, Sammy Nestico and that was a wonderful experience because we would play every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Fridays in the NCO Club, Saturdays in the Service Club, and Sunday nights in the Officer’s Club so that was a great experience. It was an eight piece band and of course Sammy was just getting off the ground with his writing in those days. His charts were just fabulous. A lot of them were copies of what Sinatra had done and Neil Hefti; those were his big influences. But to be able to play that music and to get the experience to be able to play with such great musicians; it was a great education for me. Those three years I was in the army were terrific.

So from there I decided, okay I’m too far gone in this thing, I have to go to New York and get my feet wet and if I can’t make it, I can always be a teacher, I hope. So I went to New York in 1961 and fortunately I got there right at the end of the big band era. So my first encounter with being in New York was getting a gig that was four months on the road traveling around the country playing for state fairs. And that was a good gig because again it was with a big band and we’d play a week in Toledo, Ohio or somewhere in Michigan or somewhere in Kansas, and each one was a week – Hutchinson, Kansas I remember. But anyway, each one of those places, the acts that traveled with us was… I can’t think of his name, he was just getting the electric guitar thing started. And also the man that lives here in Richmond. Boy, I’m giving away my age because I can’t remember a single name – the man who’s now producing sausage. I remember him saying, I can’t stand the road anymore, I want to get into this business I just started. Jimmy Dean! Jimmy Dean played the guitar and did stuff with Les Paul and Mary Ford. He said, yeah I’ve had enough of this road; I think it’s time to get into a business and put my feet down somewhere and stay there. Anyway, that was the beginning of his sausage business. It was the early 60’s and you know what happened then, he’s a multi-billionaire. Anyway I thought, what’s this going to be? I was recently married and I thought, here I am on the road, if this is what it’s going to be, I don’t want to do this if I’m going to be constantly traveling.

So fortunately, I go back to New York and a friend of mine asks me to sub for him at Radio City Music Hall. In those days it was four shows a day – 9, 12 noon, 3 in the afternoon, and 6 at night and they made me do one or two days a week and I thought, oh this is great. So I was starting to make enough money to pay the rent and still stay in town. And then I got a job playing in a nightclub. It was out in Queens and it was a great gig; it was six nights a week. I don’t know if I should be saying this on live video but we got paid under the table. I mean everything was cash in those days and I thought, oh this great! I’m playing jazz, I’m doing what I want to do, I’m playing four or five nights a week, I’m getting good chops here, I’m playing all this stuff I’ve always loved playing and it was November 1963 and John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I think it was a Thursday night and I went home at 4 o’clock in the morning (the night before he was assassinated) and almost got mugged on the street. I thought I don’t know how long I can do this life and then the next morning I got the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. So I thought I don’t know if I can do this, staying out that late, because everybody was so shocked and thinking about where your life was going and what life meant and all that. I went to work the next night in this club and everybody there was carrying on as if nothing happened and it just blew me away. So I told the leader, I said, I hope you can get somebody for tomorrow night because I can’t make it anymore, you have to get somebody. So he was shocked. I was shocked that I had even said that and we were shocked most of all that my wife went back home and told her, because we had just moved into a new apartment. I said look, if I had to do this I could always get a job as a teacher, I don’t want to have to stay out until 4am and try to have a family and lead this life.

So that was that and all of a sudden things just started breaking in New York. I guess I just stepped in the right puddle or something and I started working in New York. Radio City Music Hall opened up, I started doing that. Broadway, I would get calls for subs for Broadway musicals. And it was 1964, about six months after that Kennedy assassination and I started working on Broadway and got my own show. It was show called Bajour with Chita Rivera and that was a nice gig. And I started working in Funny Girl as a sub and later on as a full-time regular and it lasted about a year and a half and I was making money. I had a health plan and things started rolling and little by little I started doing recording work. And also, during that time, I got really much into doing serious classical or contemporary music, playing saxophone mostly, with some very good groups. A group called the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble with Arthur Weisberg and Columbia University had a group. There was another group, the beginning days of a group called Speculum Musicae which had some wonderful musicians and we would rehearse midnight until 2 o’clock in the morning after the show and we did some serious music and did some very good stuff at the time. A famous composer, Elliott Carter, was very prominent at that time and he would write music for the group. So I’m thinking, here I’m getting exposure to all these great musicians, this great music and I’m doing a whole wide variety of stuff and they’re paying me. I’m still amazed to this day that they’re still paying me to play because it’s always been something I’ve loved a lot so I guess you’d say it’s a hobby in a way. I used to take pleasure in saying music is not a hobby but in a way it’s always been the thing I love doing the most.

About 15 years later, I got an offer to teach at the University of Texas as a saxophone professor and I never thought I would take the job because by that time, this was 1977; I was entrenched in New York in the music scene there, but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. So I decided to take it and went out there and had a wonderful life there. But I decided I was missing New York too much and trying to live two lives so I decided to go back. The reason I thought about this is because when I moved into this very nice community on the outskirts of Austin, Texas I lived in between an oil man and a retired colonel and they were both terrific neighbors. The one guy was always after me to play golf or to join the country club. I said, I don’t do that and he said, well do you play tennis? I said, no and he said do you want to go sailing? I said I have never done that in my life and he said, well what do you do? I said well music’s my hobby. He said, no that’s your work and I said yeah, but it’s my hobby too. So that was it. So I decided I never had any diverse interests other than music, so I decided to take up photography a bit.