Remembering Alvino Rey
Respected Swing-era Bandleader’s Final Song

 by Ron Simpson

Alvino Rey died earlier this year.

The room was packed, sold out. Jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli was in Salt Lake for a long-anticipated concert. Applause broke out as the lights dimmed and he strode to the stage with the other members of his trio. “Before we start,” he remarked, “I have a guest I’d like you to meet.  This is a special night for me because Alvino Rey is here. He’s ninety-four years old, ladies and gentlemen, and one of the great guitar innovators of all time. So where are you Alvino?”

Pizzarelli peered into the stage lights and located his guest in about the third row. “There he is! Stand up, Alvino.”

Alvino Rey slowly stood, turned, smiled, waved self-consciously, and then sat down again to warm, affectionate applause. Everyone was feeling good as Pizzarelli, his bassist brother Martin, and their longtime sidekick, pianist Ray Kennedy, kicked off the first song, and the evening was under way, at blazing tempo.

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Two generations ago music fans wouldn’t have needed any help identifying Alvino Rey. They would know instinctively the sound of his unique jazz steel guitar, which blended or contrasted as needed with the sound of his always-cooking big band.

They might even have been able to name some of the hits that dotted Alvino Rey’s record career. I always found it ironic that this elegant man, this product of cosmopolitan San Francisco, had his first hits with a couple of down-home songs. His band introduced the song “Idaho,” and then—here’s a bit of musical trivia you can use at a party—he had the very first hit record of the ubiquitous “Deep in the Heart of Texas.”

Nor would anyone have been stumped if you asked the name of his wife, for bandleader Alvino Rey courted and eventually married Luise King, one of the Four King Sisters, the featured vocal group with Rey’s band in the earlier days. Well known in the whole nation, the King Sisters were special favorites of Mormon music fans, having migrated to Los Angeles from Utah with their mom and dad.

Born in the Bay Area on July 1, 1911 his birth certificate reads “Alvin McBurney.” He changed his name, he said, in New York, when all the bands were featuring Latin music. Even though “Rey” is “King” in Spanish, he always maintained the name change had nothing to do with his association with the King Sisters.

I’m old enough to have heard Alvino’s last few hits on the radio in the fifties and to recognize his steel guitar sound, but too young to have caught the King Sisters with the band. But I heard about them—often—because my Mormon mom and my dad had their first apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco in the 30s, the city where Alvino Rey and The Four King Sisters not only had their musical home base in the grand hotels and the dance halls, but also where Alvino became a radio personality on the Mutual network, taking over for fellow bandleader Meredith Willson.

My mother was a great fan of the King Sisters. To have a Mormon singing family from Utah reach such stature seemed to give a lift to everyone associated with the Church in those years, especially those, like Mom’s family the Wests, who had migrated from Utah to California just like King Driggs, father of the stage-named King Sisters had done.

Toward the end of the 50s, the King Sisters made a sensational jazz-tinged comeback album, which received sustained airplay on into the 60s. It seems to me I was the bass player when they played BYU. (It’s embarrassing to admit that so important a memory would be hazy: I know I was at the rehearsal, and can’t imagine how I’d have gotten in unless as one of the musicians.)

The next chapter of King history involved Alvino Rey. The sisters were fabulously well connected, having married record executives and bandleaders, which didn’t hurt the idea of a King Family TV show, featuring the whole extended family. But it was Luise King’s Alvino Rey who was the in-law poster husband for the show. With his recognizable face and the celebrity name to go with it, Alvino, the show’s conductor, brought star quality to the King Family TV show, and was featured toward the front and center of many of the family’s publicity photos.

A few years after the show went off the air I met two of Alvino and Luise’s three children. Rob Rey was the quiet, affable bass player in one of my favorite rock bands around BYU. A fine musician, Rob nevertheless had little interest in letting the music disrupt his nights and dictate his travel schedule. He would go on to build a suburban life with his wife Carla in Utah.

On the other hand Liza Rey, his sister, had the same passion for the business their folks had had, and I would bump into Liza in music circles for years after. One convergence was at Harrah’s Tahoe in the 70s. I was in the lounge show as the arranger and bass player for Sun Shade ‘n Rain, the LDS touring group, and bumped into Barry Jensen, originally from the Gents (about whom I have written previously in these pages). Barry, an old friend from Provo, Utah, was playing drums for Fabian, who was attempting a much-publicized comeback. And then in the top-floor restaurant, we discovered Liza Rey was the featured artist, playing jazz harp and singing in her infectious style. Late the next morning, after a refreshing walk in the residential lanes of Lake Tahoe, I bumped into Liza again, in front of Raley’s Market. It was the last time we had the chance to really talk, as she would soon continue performing in South America, taken there by the career of her petroleum-geologist husband.

The Reys’ third child, Jon, was someone I’ve known more from a distance. He and his family now live in the spacious Sandy, Utah home, where the Reys moved after the King Family TV show finally went off the air in the early 60s. In the years that followed, not only the Rey kids, but also some of their King family cousins such as Lex de Azevedo and Cam Clark would find their way to Utah for a time.       

In a way it could be theorized that the unexpected legs the King Sisters’ career had, followed by the TV celebrity status of the King family, took some much-deserved attention away from Alvino in the 60s and 70s. In the mid-to-late 30s Alvino was voted a member of the Metronome All Stars band. Among his bandmates in that stellar readers’ choice group were Count Basie (piano), Gene Krupa (drums), Benny Goodman (clarinet), etc. (In a later incarnation of this aggregation, Rey surrendered the guitar chair to another guitar innovator, the great Les Paul.) 

About this same time Alvino Rey became fascinated with the steel guitar, and it would be this instrument that would give Alvino much of his publicity as a guitar inventor. Largely through his leadership, the steel guitar would evolve from the lap steel into the console steel, or pedal steel, known today. I daresay Alvino Rey may be the only member of the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame who has not a single country bone in his entire body.  

In World War II, while Glenn Miller formed a military band, Alvino put his electronic knowledge to work and served in the Navy as a radar technician. On leave in Chicago, Alvino visited venues where his band had only recently been the headliner. Now he found himself just blending in with the crowd of servicemen. Fame, he realized ruefully, can be a fleeting thing.

Steve Call likes to tell how Alvino always seemed to stay a step ahead of the musical game. In the late 40s, for example, Alvino experimented in his band with ten brass—almost double the norm—with half of them in mutes, so he could deliver a sort of stereo effect in live concerts years before stereo records were available. With the steel guitar mixed in with the muted brass, it gave the band a spectacular, unique color.

That Alvino Rey eventually found and embraced his wife’s religion is an oft-repeated story. I heard it like this: In about 1966-67 Rob Rey, after announcing he would no longer be pursuing Church activity, joined the Navy, following his dad’s footsteps. Gradually he started attending church with the LDS sailors on board ship. He dug in, did some reading, and almost to his own surprise, he acquired a strong testimony.

Some time after that, apparently moved by Rob’s conviction, Alvino phoned the bishop of their Southern California ward. “You’ve always said you wanted to baptize me,” began Alvino. “Well, let’s do it. Today.”

“Why today?” hesitated the bishop. “There’s a procedure...” “No, today,” insisted Alvino. “Why?” repeated the bishop.

“ ‘Cause tomorrow I might change my mind.”

Luise King Rey offers this same story, with slightly more conservative details, in her book, Those Swinging Years. But whatever the details of the beginning, Alvino, once baptized, never looked back. To the end he was a devoted, generous, service-oriented member of the Church.

Sometime after the King Family Show went off the air, Alvino and Luise moved to Utah, where Alvino was a classy big-name addition to the Utah music scene, and where he put together many big bands for conventions and other special events.

With Luise and a smaller band, he covered the Dixieland festival circuit, which galvanized fans of swing music—and particularly those who liked to dance—reliving the good old days at destinations such as Palm Springs, Sun Valley, Sacramento, and the Southern California beach cities. The publication of Luise’s book was timed for sale to the Reys’ appreciative festival audiences.

In the 70s and 80s LDS media professionals in Southern California and Utah gathered in an organization called ALMA (Associated Latter-day Media Artists). Alvino and Luise were particularly enthusiastic members of ALMA, opening their Sandy home for many meetings and parties, and treating those of us with fewer years and lesser credentials as absolute colleagues.

Their marriage was a great example to all of us: Alvino and Luise found joy in each other, with interests and hobbies that evolved with time and technology. Once on an afternoon break from our downtown Salt Lake recording studio, Clive Romney and I wandered into a mom and pop grocery store around the corner on State Street. I thought I recognized Alvino’s big Cadillac parked in front. Sure enough, Alvino and Luise were inside. After greetings, I said, “Isn’t this kind of out of your neighborhood?” Alvino answered, “Maybe, but you guys probably don’t realized that this little place is the cheese headquarters of Utah.” Luise piped in, “They have everything,” and she pointed to the Brie, the Roquefort, the Havarti, and several other more obscure cheeses. She was right: we had no clue, buying sodas and potato chips as we thought all musicians did. 

Alvino’s life always orbited close to the technology of music. Steve Call told me, “At the age of 94 Alvino was rebuilding his studio, acquiring some newer digital gear and still tweaking the sound. Can you believe that?”

But from another angle, the elegant, cosmopolitan San Franciscan learned to look for all the world like a good old boy from Utah. More than once when I would visit in their home, Alvino would excuse himself, and Luise would explain he had to get ready for a fishing trip with some of the high priest guys from the neighborhood.  

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The concert ended; the John Pizzarelli trio left the stage. I bumped into Steve Call, Utah’s greatest expert on the life and career of Alvino Rey. I remarked, “What a classy thing for Pizzarelli to do, mentioning Alvino like that.”

“You know, John has such a sense of history. He totally understands how important Alvino has been. He’d heard somewhere about a guitar in Alvino’s collection that was once owned by [pioneer jazz guitarist] Eddie Lang, so he arranged to go up to Alvino’s house in Sandy. They ended up spending the whole day together.”

Just a few months later, Alvino Rey’s health took a sudden turn for the worse, and he was gone.

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The author acknowledges research assistance from Dr. Steve Call of BYU, who visited regularly with Alvino and facilitated the donation of selected Alvino Rey band arrangements and papers to be donated to BYU. At the request of the Rey family, Steve and pianist Bob Bailey performed at Alvino’s funeral. Thanks also to Jon Rey for a chance to review Luise King Rey’s book, Those Swinging Years, which is laden with priceless history, anecdotes, and photographs. It is available from Internet sources such as www.scottysmusic.com.