David R. Gessner, music lover and manager of many prominent New England acts, avid reader, friend to all, died from a heart attack at Lahey Hospital in Burlington, Massachusetts, July 22. He was 81.
Born in 1942 in Escanaba, a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, David entered this world with a heart defect – he was a “Blue Baby”. Thanks to the courage of his parents, Ruth and Charles Gessner, he was taken to Boston at age 4 to have his heart repaired by a team at Boston Children’s Hospital with an early open-heart surgery that had a success rate of 50% at best.
In 1954 the Gessner family moved to Cambridge, and David attended Brown and Nichols school for a few years and became an avid reader. While school was not one of David’s favorite activities, he demonstrated to all who knew him that he was smart and very well read on topics of interest and would engage in lively and knowledgeable conversation on a wide variety of subjects.
David was an avid sports fan and prized his season tickets to the highly successful Celtics during their glory days in the 1960’s. He also had season tickets to the Red Sox and was thrilled when they finally won a world series in 2004. He was in the habit of buying two seats to these games, always generously inviting one friend or another to join him.
David and his older brother and younger sister were intensely exposed to music because their home was filled by Ruth Gessner’s (faculty, Longy School of Music) piano practice – at least four hours a day. Thus, it comes as no surprise that David landed in the world of music. He became a regular on Harvard radio – WHRB – even though he was not a student at the university, and recorded many rising acts as they passed through the area in the late sixties and early seventies. From that point on, his knowledge of every jazz joint, blues place and folk venue in Greater Boston kept him busy late into most nights.
As time went on, David became a music manager, handling the careers of many top New England based musicians and bands, including John Lincoln Wright and the Sourmash Boys, Didi Stewart and the Amplifiers, Mom Over Dad, and the Dennis Brennan band, and touring with them to New York and as far away as Nashville. After his mother established the Gessner-Schocken Concert Series at the Longy School, David recruited the performers for the series throughout the 2010’s. He will be greatly missed by the many musicians and audiences whose lives he touched.
David Gessner is survived by his brother Charles Gessner and his wife Susan from Marblehead, his brother-in-law George Travis from Mashpee, two nieces and two nephews and one grandniece and three grandnephews.
Funeral Service will be Wednesday, July 24th at 11:00am at the Bigelow Chapel in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mt. Auburn Street, Cambridge. Burial will be private.
In lieu of flowers donations can be made to the Gessner-Schocken Concert Series at Longy School of Music, 27 Garden Street Cambridge MA 02138.
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