Harry Leahey

[joelf]

Thank you! He was beautiful...

[wintermoon]

Great player and legendary teacher too, taught a lot of people including some well known cats. Was part of the "Delaware Water Gap" crew including Phil Woods, Bob Dorough, Steve Gilmore, Bill Goodwin, etc
I believe he was one of the legendary Philly teachers, Dennis Sandole's, students that also included Trane, Martino, Moody, Brecker, even Jim Hall iirc. One of my closest friends, rip HK, studied with both Dennis and Harry.

[sgcim]

Amazing! That video was less than a year before he died of cancer, and he was playing as great as I've ever heard him. You could see that he lost a lot of weight due to the illness. One of the best!

[AndyV]

This was the only LP I ever heard with Harry. He was a mystery guitarist for me for a long time. It's great to learn more about him.

[djg]

Hey gang, just found a great vid of the Harry Leahey Trio playing live circa 1989. Great stuff!

fantastic find. "silver threads" is one of my favorites.

[jazzkritter]

Happy to see this thread alive, share a memory or two about Harry. We used to trek up to a restaurant near weekly in Watchung from Keyport where our boat was with friends to hear Harry, he was I think the best chord melody player in NJ.
Also had a fun afternoon at the Meadowlands race track (horses for out of staters) when Harry, Tal and either Jack Wilkins or Gene Bertoncini (can’t recall) did a ‘Great Guitars’ trio thing. They were having a ball and just kept playing, talking to the ‘crowd’ maybe 10-15 of us fans. Harry and Tal together were having a time of it trading solos. Quite a day.

the watchung trips became solo after our friends one night put their car keys down in front of me and asked for mine. Naive me is like ‘huh?’. Silence the rest of the night and never talked to us again.

[JGinNJ]

Nice to see this thread re-surface. I grew up a few towns away, I'd heard of Harry, but had other teachers. I remember meeting his son Jimmy, who's my age, and jamming with him once. I heard him play several times over the years, and in retrospect I wish I'd studied with him. But, a couple of years ago I decided to do something about that, and found a teacher who did study with him for several years, so I was able to absorb some of his system. Harry left a big legacy of great players.

[Pat Clare]

Great player and legendary teacher too, taught a lot of people including some well known cats. Was part of the "Delaware Water Gap" crew including Phil Woods, Bob Dorough, Steve Gilmore, Bill Goodwin, etc
I believe he was one of the legendary Philly teachers, Dennis Sandole's, students that also included Trane, Martino, Moody, Brecker, even Jim Hall iirc. One of my closest friends, rip HK, studied with both Dennis and Harry.

I studied with Harry for about 5 years in the 80's. Once he told me that he had also studied with Lenny Tristano, for the first lesson Lenny told him to transcribe Coleman Hawkins solo on Body and Soul and to memorize it and be able sing it and play it in all 12 keys.