Joe Negri dies days short of 100 after long Pittsburgh career
joe negri died Saturday, just days short of his 100th birthday. Lisa Negri said that her father died of natural causes. The Pittsburgh guitarist and educator had spent most of his life in the city, where his work reached television viewers, club audiences, and university students.
Pittsburgh to national television
Negri began to play guitar at age 8 and was touring nationally with swing bands by 16. That early start carried into a career that made him a familiar figure in two very different settings: jazz clubs and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, where he appeared as Handyman Negri and ran Negri's Music Shop. He stayed with the program for its entire three-decade run.
Deane Root, then a Pitt professor of music and chair of the department, once said, "Joe Negri radiates life as an art form". The line fits a performer who moved from local stages to national television without leaving Pittsburgh behind for long; he spent most of his life there except for a brief stint in New York City.
Teaching at Pitt and Duquesne
Negri taught for decades at the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University, bringing the same steady presence to classrooms that he brought to clubs. He founded the jazz guitar program at Duquesne and taught there until 2022. At Pitt, he retired in 2019 after nearly 50 years of teaching.
He also played at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild and the Pittsburgh Symphony, keeping one foot in formal concert halls and the other in the city's club circuit. In 2019, Pennsylvania gave him a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts award, recognition that arrived after decades of influence rather than a late-career spike.
June 10 approached
Negri had been preparing to celebrate his 100th birthday on June 10. In a 2016 TribLive article previewing a performance of Mass of Hope: The Mass in the Jazz Idiom, he said, "My love and my passion for music continues to dominate my daily life". That sentence still reads like the cleanest summary of his career: not nostalgia, but work that stayed active into old age.
