Sparkly Charm and Bebopping Fingers:
Storyteller and Musician Bob Lombardi Enchants Bar Harbor for Decades
BAR HARBOR—Imagine fingers picking out fast notes on a standing bass that’s scratched and loved and about the same height as the debonair man who is playing it. The notes sizzle into a beat spawned by fingers moving so quickly that they’re hard to photograph in dim light. The fingers connect to a man smoothly singing out melodic lines that run counter to or accompanying the trippy, rhythmic beat. People at Havana’s bar area, watch, sway, get a little swoony. Did you imagine that bass player to be over 90 years old? Well, you should have.
That’s Bob Lombardi and if he’s not already a local legend? He should be.
Bob’s been playing at Havana on Main Street for decades, trekking down on Saturday nights every week. This New Year’s was the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh that he’s played in a row, a gig that keeps him on his toes and keeps music in the Bar Harbor community consistently and masterfully. And he likes it, likes playing there for proprietor Michael Boland, who owns the restaurant with his wife Deidre Swords.
“In 25 years, he’s never said: you’re playing too soft, you’re playing too long, you’re taking too much time off,” Bob said of the gig and Michael. It’s a gig where he stations himself and guitarist Dan Nicholas against the wall and across from the bar. “These people want to talk to you. They sit at the bar and they want to talk to you.”
It’s true. Every time the men take a break, people call Bob over to the bar to talk. Some old friends will turn around on their chairs and sing with him. He’s got the charm of Sinatra and a love for bebop that can blow you away. Bebop was the music that uprooted jazz and twisted it around in the early 1940s, thanks mostly to Charlie Parker. It’s characterized by ultra-fast improvisation and notes, and it pushed the boundaries of what jazz was. Instead of big band swing’s forward thrust and dancing beats, bebop became more subtle percussively, focusing on the hi-hat, the ride cymbal, and the upright bass. Riffs were common. Blues weaved its way in. Harmonics became even richer, thicker.
And its musicians? They had to be fast. They had to be ready to improv. They had to know it all.
Bob is one of those musicians.
“Everything. Everything is music,” Bob said from the living room of his Bar Harbor home that he shares with his wife, Nancy. Her nephew, Brian Shaw, built it for them. The home is on land that once housed the summer estate of some Bar Harbor seasonal visitors. Bob said of music, “You can’t go anywhere (without hearing it, living it).”
Music, Bob said, brings people together. They might be “zillionaire” summer residents or people whose incomes are a bit more modest, but the love of sound and tempo and melody creates a common ground. He’s seen a lot of those zillionaires at Havana, the restaurant on lower Main Street, but also in his decades as a performer and salesman.
“He’s like Sinatra,” said Dan, who is a masterfully skilled guitarist and the director of Rootsmotion in the Hague. “He’s young at heart.”
They’ve been playing together for three years now.
“One of the great perks in the music that I specialize in is that you get to play with older musicians. I’ve always had older friends and older musicians. It’s not just a musical thing. It’s a cultural thing. Bob’s the real version,” Dan said.
According to Dan, Bob’s the real version of a musician from his era and of this era. He’s the real thing.
All his life experience comes out in his music and there’s more to Bob’s story than Havana. And Bob’s more than an exemplary musician. Like any human being, it’s hard to explain a life lived exuberantly in the flat surface of a news article.
HAVANA
Even how Bob started playing at Havana is a bit of his legend.
Proprietor Michael Boland said, “He came in and my memory tells me that he didn't really ask as much as (say), ‘Hey fella, I'm Bob, and I'm going to play jazz for you on Saturdays. I don't remember it being a question, more of a simple fact. And that was that.
That was twenty-five years ago. Now, Bob’s played there pretty much every single Saturday between May and the end of October.
Bob’s version of the story is a little longer: he was retiring from the furniture business; he arrived in Bar Harbor for good; he gathered a group of musician friends because he’s Bob, so of course he did. Bob makes friends just standing in a room.
“I go to Lompoc and there’s beautiful jazz music,” he remembered. “There’s always two good jazz groups in town.”
So, he started talking to the guitar player in the group playing at Lompoc.
“I would play at Lompoc and the girls liked me. I’m playing with this guitar player, a very good guitar player.” He called that guitar player and four days after they talk, Bob was playing four gigs a month. One of the places they play was at the Lompoc where Mark “Duffy” Dyer was the bartender. “He’s a disc jockey, you know. He knows music, really knows music.”
Marc became the bartender at Havana. Before it became Havana in 1999, the building was Two Cats before that it was a Thai food factory, Lombardi said. Bob went in, met with Michael, and Bob set at a little spot at the end of the bar, and told Michael that he’d played a half hour for nothing. Michael could decide, he said, if Bob was up his alley.
“Exactly what I want,” Michael said.
Bob laughed. “Now he won’t let me go.”
In between the orange wall and the bar, Bob and Dan set up. Patrons for the restaurant come through the nearby front door, bringing in the cold or warmth of the air outside. Between the floor and ceiling, weaving through the sounds of glasses clinking, diners laughing, drinkers gossiping, and the foot taps of music lovers, the duo weaves their magic, beats thrumming, voice humming through the spaces of the room as luscious and easy going as any whiskey. Between sets, Bob banters with the crowd, greets newcomers and returning friends with equal joy.
When Bob sees you, he sees you.
When Bob greets you, he greets you.
And when Bob plays for you, he truly plays for you.
“He’s an entertainer. He has a good time and he’s positive. He plays golf. He walks around and chats with everyone. He really is expressing something that was collectively valued in that culture. The stars and their vibe. There was kind of a sparkly charm that you get back there,” Dan said of Bob and jazz musicians of the middle 20th Century.
SALT PEANUTS
Some people have that sparkly charm, a special aspect to them. They stand by a wall and people gravitate toward them like they’re magnets. These people don’t have to say a thing, but when they do? The stories sing out of them and draw in others even more.
They are people you remember meeting.
Michael ruminated on what it is that makes Bob so special.
“Of course, a life well and fully lived is always amazing to see/experience but it's much more. For one, there's his and Nancy's amazing sprawling family that joyously celebrates his birthday every July and fills every nook and cranny in the little bar area,” Michael said. “And then, of course, there's the stories of that life—rich and complicated and humble and amazing all at once.”
Bob’s rich and complicated life began in Massachusetts. He was born in Everett in 1928.
“I was born of a family of eight, four boys and four girls. My parents came from Italy at nine years old, young. One of my mother’s people came from Calabria. They had a citrus orchard. So, they had money.”
His father was a barber when he was just seven, a journeyman at nine.
“Europe was serfdom” back then, Bob said. “You were born in the garage or the shack, and you died in the garage or the shack.” His family was a part of that.
“So, my grandfather, I think, had some serfs on the farm. This would be about 1885, 1884.” Friends came and told them, “The socialists are coming. You better get out of here.” Bob said, “So, he sold everything.”
Almost 4.2 million Italians came to the United States between 1880 and 1921. That immigration was fueled by tension between the north and south of the country and taxes on salt and wheat. Disease did not help that tension and one epidemic after another hit the country.
His grandfather was a merchant. Another part of the family were master tailors. They came to New York and then right to Boston, sponsored by others. They bought a house near Franklin Park in Boston and moved the business to Boston’s south end.
Global Boston writes,
“By the turn of the century, Jews and Italians had become a significant presence in the South End, especially along Dover (East Berkeley) Street and in the New York Streets (formerly between Albany and Harrison Streets). Many of them worked in local factories and steam laundries or along the docks and railroads that proliferated south of Washington Street.”
“All Italians are natural singers and when you’re in Italy, they pick the kids out,” to train more, he said. “Everybody’s born and they hear opera. How do you remember every note in an opera? My father could. My father had the brain. I inherited his brain.”
His father would solo in cathedrals. Thanks to that same brain, Bob’s father was a champion bridge player. He was an aficionado of baseball, remembering all the players’ stats.
“He had famous people come to his barbershop,” Bob said. “He was famous. When he died, it was like the mayor died.”
They were an all music family. Bob had a brother who played violin. His sister played. One of his brothers, died young at 46, but he played, too.
“We had bad hearts. I had the best heart they’ve ever had in the family. I had a quadruple bypass at 88.”
It didn’t stop him.
“I came back and played golf in four months and played music. That was a blessing.”
BILLIE’S BOUNCE
When Bob was young, people said he couldn’t make any money singing even though he could hold a tune beautifully, but that it was good to have the vocals as a second. So, he picked standing bass as his first skill: a practical choice.
“Why bass? Because they said if you can play and sing, you can play and sing at the same time. You can play guitar and sing, but you’re holding a chord of four notes. You aren’t playing single notes that have to be correct.”
With bass, every beat has to be a different note or a changed note.
“To be able to do, you have to be able to divide your brain in half. One half has to be playing the right note. And there are no frets on a bass.”
You might wonder, Bob said, “So, where the hell is d? You’ve got to have the correct brain to do that. Then you have to have the correct brain to sing the lyrics.”
Then, you have to have the brain to remember the notes of the chords, one by one.
“Instead of playing a chord, you have to play a bunch of notes.”
To learn all that, Bob didn’t just have to have the right kind of brain, he had to have the right kind of teacher. He found one, the perfect one, but the teacher didn’t want anything to do with him.
“The teacher would not take me because he was such a famous teacher—little Italian guy, genius—he was a teacher at seventy years old, eight students,” he said. “All Italians can play mandolin, so he decided the string bass was the one you could make money on. There’s only one bass.” There might be a million saxophones out there, but there are never a million standing basses.
That teacher was Cross Centamore, whose name, Bob said, meant “the cross of 100 loves.” Centamore’s grandfather was a legendary troubadour in Sicily in the 1800s.
“‘Bob, I can’t teach you,’ he said.”
Bob only even got to talk to Centamore because he had a friend who learned with the legendary teacher, who also taught John Neves.
Neves told The Boston Globe’s Ernie Santosuosso in 1981, “He was a very fine teacher. I stayed with him for six years.”
“I don’t teach beginners,” Centamore told Bob. In the meantime, Bob was also studying voice. He gave up smoking and proudly stated that he only smoked for two years in his life. Thanks to Bob’s persistence and Centamore’s character, Centamore changed his mind.
“I never had a pure student,” Centamore told Bob. By “pure,” he meant someone not previously taught by someone else. “He was experimenting. I am his test tube,” Bob recalled.
The experiment worked. Once he started studying with Centamore, Bob was playing professionally in 3.5 years.
“I was wanted because I was a singing musician. So, I studied bass with a teacher that was a phenomenal teacher. I got a break. I studied classical in Boston. On the side, bebop came in and the bebop players, the music was so fast and the beat came in and it was complicated mathematically. Younger guys grabbed onto it and developed it.” Older players couldn’t develop it that quickly, he said.
“You can’t make good money unless you’d travel. You’re on the road. You’d die if you didn’t eat in the right restaurants,” Bob said. They’d get to a venue, play, jump in the bus.
“You had a couple pair of underwear,” he said. “You’d drive 300 miles through the woods, through the bad roads.”
“So, I said, I didn’t want that.”
And he switched careers, but the music stayed and so did the memories.
“The Samoset when I played it was a big, old building like the big old buildings you saw in Maine at the time. It had 85 waitresses at the time. They had a fancy band, expensive bands from Boston. They had top music, dancers.” He’d go there for three months at a time and he played three years into his marriage with Nancy, making money. And that’s when he made a change.
“In the music business, nothing phases you,” he said.
THE MAGIC OR IN WALKED BUD
“I have a magic for meeting important people. When I was in the service, I slept in the same hotel as MacArthur,” Bob said.
That was in Manilla. Bob handled the general’s correspondence and top-secret communications and knew what General MacArthur would say in his Independence Speech, which was when the Philippines was publicly lauded as a country that was independent and sovereign as the United States stopped its authority over it. That occurred in 1946 after the Japanese withdrew, after the Tydings-McDuffie Act became law. “MacArthur became the king—the emperor.”
In 1947, Gandhi came into town. “I saw him.”
“I met so many . . . At one point, I was a known musician in Boston, but that doesn’t mean anything. A famous musician came into Storyville in Boston.” It was in Kenmore Square. Nat King Cole was supposed to come in but couldn’t make it. Bob met George Wein, Gene Krupa, and so many other musical greats, but his closest friends were always drummers. That’s because he was a bassist.
“Your best buddy would be a drummer because you have to have a feeling together.”
Meeting the pianist Red Garland was one of his biggest thrills.
SCRAPPLE FROM THE EDGE OF BOSTON
Bob joined the Navy in December of 1945. “I went to Manilla.”
He said his time in Everett, Mass, growing up helped prepare him for the war. His family lived on the edge of Boston.
“Mystic River separated us. Once you went over that bridge, it was a different world. They taught you, ‘You’re not in Everett now.’ One thing they taught you was that when you get frightened, the hair on the back of your neck stands up,” Bob said. He carried that sense with him to the military.
“They tried to blow you up. They tried to shoot at you. Everything. Everything.”
Before he got to Manilla, the young guy from Everett went by train from Maryland to California. They ran out of food, he said. Then they took a ship from San Francisco.
“We ran out of food. We didn’t hit land at all. There you are, seventeen years old . . .” he said. “Everything aboard ship is the same as Bar Harbor.” Everyone had a job and everyone was a firefighter. Security units handled all the secret correspondence, decoded secret messages. “At the end of World War Two, the Russians declared war on Japan when they were all done.” The Russians had ships all over the Pacific, hoping to acquire land. “We didn’t know what we were doing, but we had Morse code.” The Japanese had a machine that sent secret messages. The Americans had an electric code machine to decode those same messages.
“I’m good with history,” Bob said. He’s lived some of it or been where it happened. The Spanish American War, World War II, the history of Bar Harbor and Boston? Bob can tell you about it. In the war, for five months he was a code router. “It was a sweet job.”
The war ended. Bob went back to the Boston area with his world expanded and ready to make music.
TAKING A CHANCE ON LOVE
Bob’s been coming to Mount Desert Island since 1958. His wife was a Pineo and a Shaw who had a relative that owned much of downtown proper.
“I came here from Boston. I met my wife in Boston,” he said. His wife was working at Children’s Hospital, she’d attended Tufts, and he was a professional jazz musician. She came to see the groups. They met, but he said, he initially didn’t pay enough attention. He went to Vero Beach, came back, and they became a couple.
He played at Vero Beach, which he said, closed up at a quarter to eight every night. Then Miami. He spent about a year in Florida that stint. That year, Frank Sinatra was there. When Sinatra was there, everything changed, Bob said. The groupies came.
In 1958, Ruth Nancy Shaw (she goes by Nancy) and Bob, married. They were both working. Nancy’s father was Judge Normal Shaw. Bob was Italian, Roman Catholic. Nancy’s family was Episcopalians. “It was a rough thing at first, but later on . . . ” Bob reminisces, things went well. So, well that his mother-in-law would teach him about estate sales and antique furniture.
“Her father was a judge, so I had to be a little bit correct,” Lombardi said.
His wife’s family hardly ever went to Ellsworth. For a treat at Christmas time, they’d go to Bangor. The high school was what is currently the town hall. Bit by bit, the town has changed. Music has, too, but the resonations of time and music before, the people, the places, the feelings, are all still notes and chords singing through the air.
“I used to play in Boston for all the bands. I had a reputation. Music is all reputation. If you screw up, everyone knows it,” Bob said.
“The Bar Harbor Club was the wealthiest club in the world and I knew all of them. David Rockefeller, Enos, Vanderbilts—it was just unbelievable,” he said. “I get a call from the manager of the band. They called me and said Bob, ‘I heard you married a Bar Harbor girl, want to go for the summer?’”
He did.
“The job was seven nights, seven days, twenty-four hours a day. It didn’t happen that way. We were hired that way.”
If someone had a yacht party and they wanted a band at 2 a.m. They went.
“We wore tuxedos all the time,” he said.
He’s the last surviving member of his band. He was in his thirties at the time. “The band was older than me. I was the younger guy.”
There were six of them. He was the driver because he wasn’t a drinker. “I did it for two years.”
“I played in the swimming club. I played in a place called the Kimball House. The Kimball House was a fantastic, old place in Northeast. The wealthy people wanted their kids to learn to dance. They taught them to dance a little differently, out of beat, so everyone would know who they were,” Bob said.
They’d play three hours nonstop. “The beat had to go on three hours. The drummer would get up and I’d have to take over.”
“They wanted live music.” His band was the only band they’d listen to, he said. “There was no other band that played here in the summer.”
Saturday night was the big night at the Bar Harbor Club, he said. And they also had parties at LaRochelle all the time.
“At the end of the season in August, you would go to their home—their mansion—their cottage—whatever you want to call it. I saw everything,” he said.
BOPERATION
When Bob first started touring, it was the end of the war and you couldn’t get help. Women were leaving factories and getting married. Soldiers were going to school. “That’s how the suburb happened.”
“I played with Gene Krouper in Fort Lauderdale. One of the best in the 30s to 40 something,” Bob said. The site had a railing all the way around. “You walked in. It was a big place.” The railing was waist high. so you couldn’t see the musicians from waist down.
There was also the five-month tour in Europe, and of course, Bob played all over the East Coast, performing, playing the notes, laying down the rhythms, singing the melodies.
“That music and performance are intricately linked with him,” Michael said.
That link has been there for a long time even when he wasn’t professionally playing: it was there.
NOSTALGIA OR MAYBE NANCY (WITH THE LAUGHING FACE)
Bob took a hiatus from professional gigs, a long hiatus, building a family and a life in Massachusetts, working in the furniture business.
According to the FurnInfo site, in 1955, President of Banner-Whitehill Corporation, Harry W. Schacter, wrote in Furniture World, “The furniture business is still in its horse and buggy days and must be brought into the second half of the Twentieth Century. The industry has not measured up in any appreciable way to the standards of modern distribution. It is the only form of retailing which has not kept in step with the times.”
Bob was one of the men who moved it ahead, working in a furniture business in Boston.
Bob’s buddy, a drummer, was a bit of a screwup and he was how Bob ended up in the furniture business. “He’d tell me stories. You go in there and you tell them, ‘Don’t mention my name.’”
He had three interviews.
“Finally, I got the job and my wife almost jumped in the air,” he said.
Inside the marketplace of furniture were big displays, Florida Cyprus walls.
“I was overwhelmed, but they saw what I could do—I could talk,” he recalled. He was one of 16 salesmen. “You weren’t paid a salary, just commission. It took me three years to get a check. It was like joining the New York Yankees as a super rookie. I’m playing against Joe DiMaggio. They all had accounts.”
Bob eventually got the accounts, too, spending 35 years at different companies. He also had some pretty famous clients.
“The decorator says, ‘I got this client coming. His name is Larry Bird. I’m going to send him to you,’” Bob said. “So, the top basketball player in the world came in. I worked with him. He was six-foot-ten, six-foot-eleven and I’m like nothing.”
Another client was F. Lee Bailey, a famous attorney.
That time the designer said, “This guy is going to come in to you. I can’t tell you his name.” Bob found out his name and a whole lot more, learning about Bailey’s divorce and new wife, an airline attendant far sooner than the rest of the public.
They were all coming in.
“Ball players, basketball players, football players . . . so I got this reputation,” he said. “We used to drink with the ball players, the hockey players. We would have lunch in the same restaurants.”
And Bob made connection after connection, hearing the stories of people’s lives, and building his own.
ONE FOR MY BABY (AND ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD)
“At Havana, they have a group of people, intelligentsia that come in. They like to talk to me because I’m an entertainer and they love me because I have the answers,” he said.
Music makes you unafraid of everyone, he said. You can talk to any person you meet.
“When I got here, I was retired.” He said of coming home to Bar Harbor. He hadn’t time to play while he was in the furniture business, but he’d practiced. He practiced for 73 years. He still practices for eight hours a week. “You have to keep your fingers hard.” You have to keep the calluses there so that you can play.
One of the stories that Bob tells is of a 93-year-old Spanish cello player living in Puerto Rico, who was interviewed by the New York Times and featured often in the paper’s pages. A reporter goes to interview him at his home, but the maestro is practicing. NYT interview. “Finally, he came out. He sat down,” Bob said, and the reporter asked him why he was still practicing.
He was because he saw an improvement.
“You can live 400 lifetimes and still not master the instrument,” Bob said. The maestro went to Carnegie Hall to prove what he could do. “He blew them all away.”
Bob does that too, maybe not in Carnegie Hall, but every Saturday that Havana hosts him.
Bob almost always starts his sets at the restaurant with a song that has lyrics about "through the years."
“Which is pretty powerful coming from a 95 year old,” Michael said.
And he often ends the night with "The Party's Over," but it’s not. Bob’s making sure the party lasts for himself, his family, Havana, and Bar Harbor as long as it can, keeping bebop alive and music in the air.
Fantastic story about what can be learned from experience. I’ve been to Havana’s, the food is excellent and the bar scene with the group is special. “Keep swinging baby”
Simply superb writing and photography.