David Malachowski, a Schenectady native who started playing guitar at the age of 8 and has progressed from regional bands to music director for country superstar Shania Twain in the mid-1990s and touring worldwide musician in pit bands for Broadway musicals such as “Rent” and “Mamma Mia,” died Thursday.
He was 67 years old. The news was announced on Instagram by his daughter Lindsay, who wrote that she held his hand as he died. Lindsay Malachowski said Friday he died of heart failure related to cancer treatment he underwent as a teenager. He died at the hospice in New York City where he had moved in 2013.
Known for his long, flowing hair and slim jeans, and for collecting speeding tickets in his beloved Corvettes, Malachowski looked and lived like a guitar hero, although he was personally known as a warm and humble friend. He liked to sum up his life by saying it was a mixture of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll combined with country, blues and Broadway, all united by the guitar. Malachowski also prided himself on the sobriety he had maintained since he was about 30 years old.
“He was a rock star, but he was so much more than that. He knew an incredible amount about all kinds of music – more than a lot of people gave him credit for,” said Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill, artistic director of Capital Repertory Theater in Albany. Malachowski has served as music director on multiple productions of The Rep’s Always… Patsy Cline and Hank Williams: Lost Highway.
“David has always been a consummate professional guitarist,” said John Tichy, rhythm guitarist since the formation of the band Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen in 1967, who joined Malachowski for several years after re-forming locally in the late 1990s. Tichy, a professor of engineering at the RPI in Troy since 1976, said via email on Friday that Malachowski exhibited “world-class country and roots music chops” on stage, adding, “He also proved to be a big Talent demonstrated in the theater world. which requires completely different talents.”
Malachowski worked part-time as a music columnist and critic, starting at the formerly Albany-based alternative weekly Metroland in the late 1990s and later for the Times Union. Between bylines and mentions of concerts or shows he’s been to, Malachowski’s name appeared more than 1,300 times in the Times Union between 2003 and 2021.
“It’s often difficult to be a critic who is also practicing the craft criticized, but David’s writing drew strength from his musical experience — he knew good, ambitious, enjoyable work when he heard it,” said Casey Seiler, who directs Malachowski worked with when Seiler was the newspaper’s entertainment editor and is now the newspaper’s editor, Seiler said, “He was also an extremely nice guy whose enthusiasm spilled through both personally and on the page.”
Born on 16 January 1955 at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, Malachowski was the grandson of Polish immigrants on his father’s side and Scottish on his mother’s side. Both sets of grandparents were lured from their respective home countries to the USA to work at the GE plant in the electric city. Malachowski grew up on the banks of the Mohawk River in southern Saratoga County, a childhood he described as pastorally beautiful but lonely, without peers.
His mother, Mary L. Colquhoun Malachowski, asked young David if he wanted to play the guitar or the piano. It was the summer of 1963 and by the end of the year he had his first guitar of his own, a three-fourth Gibson acoustic. A few months later, in February 1964, The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and as Malachowski was fond of saying decades later, 9-year-old David saw what the future could hold if he knew what he was doing with a Six should start -string.
As a teenager in the 1960s and early ’70s, Malachowski idolized the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin’s guitar gods Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, and gave up formal guitar lessons for a period of self-education in an attempt to recreate that what he heard on the radio and on albums.
The skills that developed were honed over the decades, and Malachowski eventually played with artists such as Janie Fricke, who had 17 top 10 singles on the country charts, and Garth Hudson of the band. He also spent years playing as part of bands for Broadway tours including the Abba tribute Mamma Mia, which took him as far as Japan and South America, and Rent. Through the latter, he met and performed with members of the original “Rent” cast, including Daphne Rubin-Vega, Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp. He played for Pascal and Rapp on concert tours and traveled with a musical theater show starring Rapp.
“He was a very special man and a real pleasure to be around and work with,” Rapp said via email.
And, of course, Malachowski was Shania Twain’s music director for several years. The celebrity-level odyssey began with seeing an ad in Metroland. He replied that although he had never heard of the artist, he was stunned to find out her husband was multi-million selling record producer Mutt Lange, and thrilled that the couple was thereafter demonstrating their guitar skills for the first time at a sparsely attended club show in Vermont was a two-hour drive from their home in the Adirondacks. The new Twain band first appeared on The Tonight Show in 1995.
“The next two years were a heady life: limos, Ritz-Carltons, instrument commercials, all the things musicians secretly dream of,” Malachowski wrote in a 2015 memoir to the Times Union.
“He was so down to earth. You would never know he had those credentials,” said Peter Lesser, managing director of The Egg in Albany. Lesser knew Malachowski from years of requesting review tickets, later worked with him to book the Rapp Pascal tour at The Egg, and Malachowski volunteered his services to perform at a benefit concert at The Egg.
“He was a perfectly normal guy,” said Paul Rapp, member of the band Blotto and also a lawyer. Although the two never performed together, they had both a professional relationship and a friendship. (Paul Rapp is not related to Anthony Rapp.)
“He always had a Corvette and always got speeding tickets,” Rapp said. “I’ve gone from being a random friend to a fixer in charge of these tickets.”
During his years in bands, Malachowski lived in Clifton Park and later Woodstock before relocating to New York City in 2013 as his involvement in musical theater continued to grow. Although he hadn’t lived locally in nearly a decade, Malachowski remained connected to those he had long known in the capital area.
“He was many levels superior to me as a guitarist, but when we got together to write songs it never came up. He was very respectful of other musicians. He wanted to know what you were thinking,” said Michael Eck, a local musician, visual artist and writer who has known Malachowski for more than 35 years.
Eck, a theater critic for the Times Union for about two decades, said Malachoski often spoke about how much it meant to be so welcome and comfortable when performing Broadway musicals.
“I think he really felt like he had found a home and I was so happy for him,” Eck said.
“I was happy to tell him that he might have done all of that with Rent and Mamma Mia, “but I always reminded him that we (at The Rep) discovered his talent in musical theater,” Mancinelli said . Cahill with a laugh.
When Malachowski approached her about playing guitar for “Always… Patsy Cline,” he surprised her by asking to be music director, even though he had never done the job before and knew a lot about theater.
“I told him, ‘The guitarist isn’t the music director! It’s the pianist,'” Mancinelli-Cahill said. “He said, ‘Maggie, do you know Patsy Cline’s music? It should be the guitarist, and nobody knows that music like I do.'”
He was a quick learner, leading the band and singers, and even delivered two lines in Hank Williams: Lost Highway, one of which always got a laugh.
“He said, ‘Look, I told you I could act,'” Mancinelli-Cahill said. “We’ve always made sure that it’s limited to one or two lines.”
What Mancinelli-Cahill noticed about Malachowski was that while he was still Twain’s music director in 1997, when he first worked on Patsy Cline, he didn’t have a shred of celebrity about him.
“I’ve never met anyone who dealt with fame like he did,” she said. “Whether you were a star or a crew member, he treated you like he was your equal. I will miss a world without David.”
Malachowski is survived by his daughter Lindsay Malachowski and ex-wife Laurie Snyder. His mother, father Frank W. Malachowski, and brother John Malachowski predeceased him.
Malachowski is cremated and his ashes scattered in the Mohawk River according to a request he passed on to his daughter. In lieu of a service, Lindsay Malachowski said she hopes to organize a concert celebrating his life in the coming months. Those wishing to donate in his memory are asked to do so to the American Cancer Society.