Buzz Kimball

Biography by Denny Genovese

Like myself, Buzz Kimball met Ivor Darreg through Ivor’s 1978 article in Guitar Player magazine (a copy of which resides at www.worldharmonyproject.com). While visiting Ivor, he showed me a letter from Buzz and suggested that we would like to know each other, since we were both building microtonal instruments, and were both experimenting with computers for music making, which was quite unusual in those days. Buzz lived on a family farm in New Hampshire, while I lived in Hawaii. Interstate telephoning was costly at the time, so our correspondence was by letters. At some point, Buzz spent some time living in his car in front of Ivor’s house in Glendale, California, to apprentice with Ivor. After that, he wrote articles in various magazines and journals and self published a newsletter that he called NOVOSONICS.

Several years later, I was facilitating the Southeast Just Intonation Center, in Gainesville, Florida and Buzz came to spend a season there with me, helping to refurbish instruments, share knowledge and skills and participate in the Exotic Music Ensemble. He removed the fret board from my electric guitar and replaced it with a custom fretless finger board. He brought with him one of Ivor’s cosmolyres (the screaming yellow zonker), which Ivor had given him in the past. I had a Caribbean steel drum that I had no use for and so we made a mutually happy trade. I played that cosmolyre throughout the 1990’s, and it was one of my favorite instruments (also featured at www.worldharmonyproject.com).

A decade later, I visited him in New Hampshire and we had many good times together. By then he had a following for his guitars and recordings. He had quite a collection of custom electric guitars and basses that he had made and a collection of laptop computers which he had customized as microtonal musical instruments. I had a really nice guitar that I wanted to put one of Mark Rankin’s magnetic fret board kits on and Buzz installed it for me.
A few years later, his father contacted me and told me that Buzz had died in his sleep. I was very sad to lose my friend, and the microtonal community lost a valuable member. I hope his guitars are continuing to be played with joy.

-Denny Genovese