From The Olio

Gutcheon JEFFREY DAVID GUTCHEON
620 Fort Washington Ave. New York City
Prepared at Stuyvesant High School
English
Phi Alpha Psi
Hockey 1962, Swimming 1,
LIterary Magazine, Art Editor
Sabrina, Managing Editor,
Zumbyes, Director

Jeffrey (Jeff) David Gutcheon '62 died June 23, 2013.
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In Memory

From Amherst Magazine ---

Jeff Gutcheon was the first to arrive at 414 Morrow, the narrow room we shared freshman year. He had unpacked. I recall a couple of handsome tweed jackets, an array of repp ties, and his collection of LPs, from Rimsky-Korsakov to Thelonious Monk. These artifacts resonate in memory, evoking the young guy I came to know, already somehow more sophisticated than the world he wanted to enter. All his life Jeff had an uneasy relationship with privilege, and it gave energy and edge to his art.

Jeff had almost an embarrassment of talents -–for math and science and for design--in addition to his musical gifts. He had begun studying classical piano at age 7, and as a teenager took up jazz. He left a lasting mark on Amherst music with his innovative arrangements for the Zumbyes. After graduation, he earned a degree in architecture from MIT. He never formally practiced in that profession, though he designed and built two beautiful houses in coastal Maine, and a recording studio in New York. Music was his abiding interest and the true heart of a career that also involved various business ventures.

He recorded with such figures as Willie Nelson, Gladys Knight, Steve Goodman, Ringo Starr, Great Speckled Bird and Geoff and Maria Muldaur. He was known as one of the great stride pianists of his generation, and he arranged much of the music for the original version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the hit Broadway show. He was still recording, with the Texas band Lost Country, when ill health overtook him.

In 1982 he endowed The Jeffrey D. Gutcheon 1962 Music Fund in support of student musicians.

His two marriages ended in divorce. With his first wife, the novelist Beth Gutcheon, he had a son, David. David was his devoted companion and caregiver during his last difficult years. Jeff died of the degenerative disease Lewy body dementia, on June 23, 2013, in Brooklyn.

----DICK TODD '62

Here, from our Reunion Book, is a picture of Jeff with Dick Todd (Jeff on right)---

Gutcheon And Todd


And here is Jeff's obituary, to which is attached a very moving guestbook --
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?pid=165590912