PATRICK BUTLER
Patrick Butler studied and played guitar with icons in four styles of music - Funk, Rock, Jazz, and Celtic music. He studied with guitarists Harry Leahey, Uli Jon Roth, and Roland Prince.
As a child, Butler was taught Celtic and Bluegrass by his father then learned rock and funk while studying the comprehensive method of Harry Leahey. Leahey was a student of Johnny Smith, the Master of Chordal Theory, and Dennis Sandole, the legendary Philadelphia based guitar and music theory teacher whose most famous students included saxophonist John Coltrane, Pat Martino, Art Farmer, James Moody, Benny Golsen, Michael Brecker and others. Butler studied consistently with Harry Leahey for 12 years, and continued to jam informally until him until his untimely death. Butler still has all his Leahey lesson books that contain this priceless musical knowledge.
Harry urged his students to study with different teachers. Butler started studying with the famous Trinidadian jazz guitarist, Roland Prince, who was living in Brooklyn. Prince is known for his work with Elvin Jones, James Moody and Roy Haines.
Upon graduating high school, Butler played with jazz legends James Spaulding and Richie Cole, but started getting more gigs in the R&B market. He also did studio work at most of the famous recording studios in the Tri State area, including the infamous Joe Robinson’s All Platinum Studios.
After touring stints with the 50s icon, The Drifters, Butler was invited to join The Fatback Band, a Polydor Records funk unit from Queens, New York. The first record he recorded with Fatback, Brite Lites/Big City, went gold. He recorded two more records with the band, including XII, which contains the track King Tim III, the first rap track ever released on a major label. Butler toured extensively with the Fatback Band, opening for Legendary acts including James Brown, The O'Jays, and The Brother's Johnson Band.
Moving to Los Angeles, Butler concentrated on original rock music with his funk rock power trio Unstoppable. The boys had many adventures and met many LA-based musicians famous and obscure. Butler recorded with Stephen Perkins’ acid jazz jam band, Banyan which included Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He also appears on Mike Watt’s Sony release Ball Hog or Tug Boat on a track featuring Henry Rollins.
Into the new millennium, Butler went back to his roots and led and toured with the Celtic rock band Superkeltic. The band was mentioned as one of the top Celtic rock bands in America by Winnie Czulinski in her history of Celtic music, Drone On! In 2005, he converted his Celtic Band to back up Country Western singers in military base tours which culminated in a week at Guantanamo Bay Marine base for the 2006 Fourth of July celebration. This gig was filmed and made into a Texas Public TV documentary.
In 2007, worn out by constant gigging, he decided to stop being a professional musician and got his BA and teaching credential in Social Studies at Cal State Long Beach and spent the next decade in California public schools. He has written two books about his experience in teaching and is seeking a publisher.
During this time, Butler still sought to study music and record. He released eight jazz influenced projects, seven of which made the Jazz top 100 charts. He also displayed his production skills by writing and producing a project featuring Los Angeles’ great blues guitar player, Marvin McDaniel, with a release called In Cahoots. Butler also studied with the classical rock master Uli Roth attending the Los Angeles Sky Academy sessions.
Butler then took the complete music composition course with Pail Navidad at Orange County Community College
Butler currently plays with the Long Beach, CA-based acid jazz band MajicBulletTheory and Billy Meza’s Praise Band every Sunday at Calvary Cross Chapel in Cerritos.
My Teachers
Harry Leahey
My dad played guitar, so I fooled around with the instrument learning basic chords and jamming bluegrass and Celtic songs with him.In 1968 I got into some trouble, and my parents discussed military school as a solution. Luckily my mom came up with a alternate solution of being grounded and take guitar lessons since I had just developed a fascination with Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Winter. I would have to practice 3 hours a day then I could play some ball.The guitar teacher would be quizzed every week to see if I had put in the hours. Of course, I agreed to this since I had heard stories about military school. Little did I know that just by chance I was going to take lessons from perhaps the greatest guitar music theory teacher of all time: Harry LeaheyHarry came off as an unassuming, even bland personality. I was loaded up with a load of dexterity exercises with names like: The Finger Gym, The Tremolo Exercise, The Back Pick Exercise, the Barre Exercise. I was assigned the Mel Bay Primer to learn to read music. I couldn’t see how any of this could help me play like Hendrix but U sure wasn’t going to go to military school, so I put in my hours. When he assigned songs, he usually did pop hits that I thought were corny. I can’t remember who told me to get an egg timer and use it to do blocks of practice without getting up out of chair for any reason. After a few months I started getting restless with the exercises and brought a Johnny Winter LP to my lesson. Harry showed me the blues scale and its country mode, and I never looked back. My neighbor had a bunch of Blues records and I had heard the rock guys talk about where their style came from so, I became a blues fanatic. I practiced bending notes so much that the skin would tear away from my fingernails and I would have to stop bending notes for a week. Harry had a huge LP collection, which lay about the house in disorganized piles. While waiting to go into my lesson I would go through them and see for the first time the names of the jazz legends. It was funny at first, he never pushed jazz at me, and I had no idea he was a top Jazz guitarist. In Ninth grade I heard Jazz Fusion and that’s when Harry and I really bonded. Harry played an L5 with .015-gauge strings on the high string so he wasn’t a master of bending notes so until this time he could only show me the scales and chords of rock music, not how to play it. He appreciated Hendrix but he was already set in his style. With Harrys help I suddenly discovered John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell, Pat Martino, whom Harry knew personally. Soon he broke out a Wes Montgomery LP “Bumpin” and let me take it home. I remember thinking the strings were corny, but Wes’s playing was beguiling.
Harry lived in Plainfield NJ which was famous for being the site of one of Funkadelic’s George Clintons barber shops. It was a town that had seen its heyday during 192-30’s compared to New Brunswick and Piscataway but used to be a high-class suburb with huge mansion like houses. These houses were rundown and cheap to rent. Harry had two kids when I started lessons but soon had two more, so he moved into one of the biggest houses I had ever was in, on Myrtle Ave off Seventh street. This house was so big that there were locked rooms that Harry had never looked in for years. The methodical lesson program paid off and by Tenth grade I had totally mastered my fretboard, meaning I know every scale in every key in 8 positions. I had heard modern jazz before, but it never clicked with me since the greats usually used pianists. I started collecting Wes LPs but the Don Sebesky arrangements almost seemed like “elevator” music. I’ve come to love those recordings as I got older. One day Harry handed me a Charlie Parker Savoy record. After trying to decipher McLaughlin, Coryell licks which entailed a lot of straight up and down pentatonic scales, I suddenly saw the light and had a new goal: to play BeBop.
It was at this time that I was a competent guitarist enough to start playing in bands and soon was playing with grown men. Harry started getting me wedding gigs that he couldn’t make. I liked the money and could read the charts, but the bandleaders expected me to know all the current rock hits and lead the wedding band guys for some tunes that “the kids” could relate to. At that time, it was expensive and time consuming to learn songs, you had to buy the 45’s or LPs and figure it out by ear. I was so into learning Bebop and doing freeform jamming that I chafed at the regimentation of playing cover music, and despite my skills was always a cover musician with a bad attitude. Plus, I was not old enough to drive so I had to finagle a ride, so my wedding band career never took off. My buddies or the older guys in my rock band would always be glad to give me ride to a jam or a gig but waiting around for four hours for a wedding was not motivating to them. I usually had to get my dad to drive me. Harry had a ancient German Shepard named Otto that was on his last legs. One day I showed up to my lesson and was greeted by the biggest Shepard I had ever seen named Ralph. Ralph was a lovable knucklehead so strong that he would break his leash and go a roving around Plainfield where just the sight of his immense size would send people running. Many was the lesson spent looking for Ralph rather than doing lesson. At this point my lessons changed, I had mastered virtually everything but sight reading and since I could see no benefit from this arduous task, I spent my lessons jamming with Harry. Before I learned the rudiments of BeBop we would do jams on a specific mode, trying to extract every bit of sound of it. We would jam for a hour on the Lydian mode and Harry might write out an 8 bar exploration. This is when I found out about Harry’s teachers Dennis Sandole and Johnny Smith. I had seen Johnny Smiths LPs at his house, but they seemed a little corny although I could hear the obvious virtuosity. Harry told me about Sandole where he would take 15-minute lessons! Harry would show up and Sandole would write out a page of 8th notes and that was the lesson. I found out Pat Martino was also a student and as I got better acquainted with real jazz found out Sandole’s students included John Coltrane, Mcoy Tyner, Oliver Nelson, The Brecker Brothers, Art Farmer, Benny Golson, James Moody, and Jim Hall. Sandole had a brother who went to LA and got some work in film scores, so Dennis followed. His style was so unusual he was nicknamed “The Chinese Guitarist”. Sandole couldn’t play normally so he failed in LA and returned home just in time to influence the next stalwarts of modern jazz after BeBop. His teachings were taken by Coltrane and Tyner and turned into the last major innovation of “jazz”. Harry told me about the Three Note Scales and Fourth Chords and their inversions that are at the heart of Coltrane’s later work.
As I got more into BeBop and became interested in Chord Solos I started appreciating Johhny Smith. Smith lived in Jersey and Harry started studying with him in high school. Smith then moved to Staten Island and Harry wasn’t old enough to drive. Smith had a private plane and was a pilot so incredibly he would fly from Staten Island to Hadley Airport in the old Camp Kilmer, located next to Plainfield and pick him up, then fly him to his house to give the lesson, then fly him back! This shows that Harry must have been already an incredible player in high school. As I got to know Harry, he was a stereotypical Irishman, always joking and smiling, never showing any of his problems to the world.His brother Pat told me that as a teen Harry trained to be a boxer and was encouraged by his dad! Harry never said anything about this and seemed the antithesis of a tough guy. Like I said, a real Irishman; every Irishman wants to be a boxer at some point in his life. I’m sure glad he quit before he busted up his hands! I also found out he teamed with his sister to do a Les Paul and Mary Ford style group. He ended up on the Ed Sullivan show and did a tour of Europe. For a 151 page biography of Harry see Peters, Philip M. (2006). Harry Leahey: master guitarist, musician and teacherHarry was such a humble guy he never bragged about his playing but over time I discovered he was the first choice to be Sonny Rollins guitarist for The Bridge. This project was the first time a guitarist would be used as the sole chordal instrument by a Jazz legend. Harry at that time had kids and was making 20 bucks an hour teaching, he sometimes taught ten hours a day so he had to turn Rollins down to support his family. Another thing I learned was Harry was a favorite of the top Westie Irish gangster of the 1960’s Mick Spillane. Spillane made sure Harry played all the NYC Irish weddings. Harry also was a favorite of Don Sebesky and Micheal LeGrand and did a lot of studio work for them. These recordings never included guitar solos or even credited musicians but were lucrative.Harry later did get credited for Sebesky’s Big Box LP where Sebesky did some Fusion tunes! Harry was running himself ragged teaching 9-7 then running out to do gigs every night, he also smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and like a good Irishman had a taste for the “Water of Life”.
My lessons now moved into a new phase as I became fluent with BeBop. First Harry made sure I could walk basslines. To accomplish this, I would take whatever standard I chose Harry would write a page out. I would take these axioms and write my own pages out. After a few of his guides I could do it all myself. He then showed me how to shoot the chords out while playing the basslines. This was challenging but paid off since horn players could use me one duo gigs and still swing. Once I could do this our lessons became fun as I backed Harry as he soloed. Around this point Harry offered me free lessons. When it came to soloing, Harry told me that when you learn solos, you must learn them in all keys. With the guitar this is easier than other instruments since you can slide up or down a fret and cover half the keys. You learn everything in positions. First starting with index finger, then second finger, then pinky. You use three with the E string root then learn three off A string root. As I figured out a Charlie Parker solo out and learned in all six positions. Harry advised me to look at the solos in the smallest unit; usually a two-five or two-five ones, then try the solo over other tunes or try it backwards using last two-five-one runes over first. I still use these licks today because they became so ingrained. I have taped these jams but my solos sound so lame next to Harry, it’s embarrassing. Maybe I will edit me out and post these tapes. When I was in 12th grade Harry started taking me to rehearsals and gigs. I met the legendary John Coates; he took me over to Tal Farlow’s sign shop. We went to a Joe Pass gig where Joe Pass announced on the stage that one of the world’s greatest guitarists was in the audience. Harry’s head swiveled around to see who it was. He never would think it was him; he was such a humble guy.
When I graduated from High School, I got a full-time job and was gigging regularly so I didn’t have time to practice for hours. I thus started taping Harry doing chord solos. Harry Leahey has been called the Art Tatum of guitar. His unaccompanied guitar work is unparalleled even by the greats. Every week I brought my Marantz portable cassette player and recorded Harry for a half hour. My day job was at Knickerbocker Toy Company famous for Raggedy Ann and Andy. Toy companies generally shut down for a few months after Christmas. Since I worked for 10 months I could collect unemployment. I decided to take this time and go into a rigorous regime of practice focusing in transcribing Harry’s chord solos I had recorded. When I ran into some chords I couldn’t figure out; he would show on our Saturday lessons.I got out the old trusty egg timer, the one I used at my first lesson to avoid military school. I didn’t answer the door when buddies dropped by. I logged my three hours then I would go to Rutgers gym and hoop. What a life. I got hired back at Knickerbocker and did the cycle again. I look forward to putting out the library of Harry Leahey chord solos. Harry eventually recorded a project with Rudy Van Gelder called Unaccompanied Guitar right before he passed on. I would like to think my cheerleading and constant recording had something to do with this project. I constantly encouraged Harry to compose a book of written chord solos to famous standards. He finally did and I proudly have the original. After all it must have been unusual for him to have a student just let him play for a half hour. But his career was about to take off as he got called by Phil Woods to be in his band. Phil was at peak of fame having blown the famous solo for the Billy Joel hit. They did two LPs did a European, Japanese tour and played the Newport Jazz Festival then won a Grammy! It was also at that time I started gigging a lot and would stay in New York. I called him every week. After Phil Woods Harry cut two LPs at Rudy Van Gelders. These recordings are the epitome of a modern player who can play in the classic bebop jazz style as well as the new Coltrane sound. Hopefully one day they can be re-released and promoted.
He resumed teaching and local gigging, and I was so busy we rarely got together and when we did, we usually socialized rather than did a lesson. It was around then that his wife got sick and died within the year of lymph cancer. It was also at that time I started gigging a lot and would stay in New York. I called him every week as he got through this tragedy. I moved to LA in 1984 and we had a long-distance. I would visit my family in Jersey about twice a year and we always got together. Around 1988 Harry contracted lymph cancer and was in chemotherapy. He had lost a lot of weight, and I drove him around to do errands. He never showed bitterness or moroseness but was still upbeat as always. He passed in 1990. His motto was: He learned as much from teaching than the students
Roland Prince
The second largest jazz guitar influence in my life was the Antiguan Roland Prince. I met him at a concert around 1976 that was titled Three Generations of Jazz Guitar or something like that. It was held at Livingston College. The bill was Tiny Grimes, Jim Hall and Ron Carter, and Roland Prince whom I had never heard of. He was promoting his first release as a leader on Vanguard “Color Visions” and was representing the younger generation of guitarists. His playing is still a example of the most modern sounding jazz guitar. To me this means the player has also played funk and can improvise for long periods on one chord.
He was the first guitarist I ever heard that recorded Giant Steps. I spoke to him after the show and asked if he gave lessons. I could tell by his reaction that he hadn’t made lessons a priority. He said he lived in Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn and assumed I wouldn’t travel out there. When I pressed him, he agreed, and a long friendship ensued until he moved back to Trinidad around the turn of century. Bedford Stuyvesant was a tough area. He lived in a project near DeKalb street. The subway stop was J train Kosciuszko St. I remember that because I wondered how that street got named so I looked it up. Kosciuszko was a Polish General who fought with Washington in 1776. My first lesson was an analysis of Jordu . Roland explained he didn’t know what to teach me, but I explained I wanted to just jam and watch him play. He then pulled out a chart of Jordu, which is a rather intricate set of changes involving circle of 4rths Dominant 7th chords that change every 2 beats. Usually these would be 2-5 chords and you could play the same scale for each pair but with the Dominants you had to play the different scales or arpeggios like Giant Steps. As we played, he started jotting down his ideas, I cant locate this paper and feel sorry I didn’t bring a whole spiral notebook to his lessons. We ran through the Coltrane tunes that were written during the Giant Steps phase: Countdown, Satellite, Central Park West, and the alternate changes he wrote for But Not For Me and Body and Soul. We also covered tunes he was working on for Elvin Jones whom he was playing with at that time. During the two years of bi-weekly lessons Roland cut a LP with James Moody at that time called Timeless Aura where Moody played some funky jazz unlike anything he had ever recorded.
Roland started to get very busy as he was trying to launch a solo career and ended up quitting Elvins band for a year. I got to see Roland Prince front his own group when he promoted his second Vanguard LP “Free Spirit” in 1977. But the solo project did not take off and Vanguard did not resign him, so he rejoined Elvin in 78. Elvin Jones was a relentless gigger and wore his guys out. So now Roland was touring a lot and coupled with the fact I was just starting to penetrate the NYC funk scene our lessons became few and far between, but we talked on the phone when I could reach him. This was a time when there were no message machines and business folk had to hire real live people that ran answering services.
I learned a little about Roland's history while taking lessons. He grew up in Antigua which is a small island next to Barbados with a population of 95,000. Barbados is three times as large but still too small for an ambitious musician. So most musicians move to Trinidad which has a population of 1.4 Million. Trinidad is famous for its Steel Drum musical culture. But there is no jazz scene to speak of. I ended up touring in the Caribbean and playing shows in Trinidad, which was mostly a rural country. We did a landing in Barbados, and it was incredibly small when looking at it at a few thousand feet. Roland told me he first moved to Toronto, as a lot of British Caribe Island folks do, because of easy immigration policies but after a year relocated to USA after being seen and recruited by Brother Jack McDuff. After playing with the legends of Jazz and becoming a fixture in NYC scene, he tried to take advantage of the Fusion movement and formed a band called Compost. But the so called Jazz Fusion movement was one of the most short lived periods in music history being completely swallowed up by a lightweight funk called “smooth jazz” by 1978.
My lessons with Roland were mostly just me watching him improvise as I backed him up with the walking bass chord accompaniment style Harry Leahey showed me. Roland told me that I already knew all the technical theory from Harry. I brought over Harry’s LPs and Roland became a big fan himself. Soon our lessons became so enjoyable to him he stopped charging me for lessons. We started meeting at his guitar repairman’s tiny little shop in the Village and jamming there. I cant remember the guy’s name. When I moved to LA in 1984 we would still call every now and then, I had his phone number up until he moved back to Antigua. I believe that was in the mid 1990’s. His last NYC recording was with David Murray on a small label called Red Baron in 1991. It was at a Murray gig in the Village that I got to see him one time when I came back East to visit my folks. By the 1990’s smooth jazz was the thing and Roland would complain all the real Jazz session work was drying up and the focus of “Jazz” was moving to colleges. Roland was not going to go to college to prove he was a master and he made it clear he disliked ‘smooth jazz”, so he started talking about moving back to his hometown. He always hated the weather in NYC and East Coast.
He continued making music and was the most famous Jazz musician to come out of Trinidad/Barbados/Antigua area. His last release was titled “Pop Goes the Zazzle” with his wife on bass. Ironically this little-known release contained a Caribbean tune called “Antigua” that became a classic amongst jazz musicians and was covered extensively. I don’t know how that happened because the Zazzle project is virtually unknown. My life and musical knowledge was greatly enriched by my time with such a unique musician and person as Roland Prince and I urge everybody to go look up his information and get his music. He is one of the greats of “jazz” guitar.
Let’s Work Together
Get in touch so we can start working together.
