I am what I call an "improv" piano player. I love playing background music for events, restaurants, parties, with a huge repertoire of songs. I play Girshwin and Cole Porter; Scott Joplin's ragtime "The Entertainer;" Billie Joel's "Baby Grand," "Piano Man," and "New York State of Mind;" the Eagles' "Desperado" and "Hotel California;" Beatles, Beegees, Simon and Garfunkle, John Denver, just to name a few; any decade from the Gay Nineties up through the 1980s, even some '90s, but newer than that just isn't as melodic as I like to play. I don't have the benefit of today's video effects, fireworks and staging; for me, it's just music. When I'm not playing out somewhere, I'm playing in my living room, however the spirit moves me. Over the 60 plus years I've been playing, piano has been my musical psychiatrist, never failing to put me in a very happy place.
I play show tunes and movie themes, the scores from Chicago, Les Miserables, Phantom, Sound of Music, Fiddler, Man of La Mancha, Fantastics, West Side Story, among many others. I make a piano sing, playing the way I'd sing a song if I were still doing that, or the way I remember hearing it years ago. I play from "Fake Books" or "Real Books" professional pianists call them, big lead sheet books with just the melody line and chord notations so that I can improvise the rest. That way I can play anything, and most people listening don't realize I'm making it all up, instant arrangements, never the same twice. And I can play for hours without repeating a song unless requested to; I've played five hour restaurant nights, wandering around to solicit requests, which I can almost always play. My choices depend on the atmosphere, the noise level, the size of the crowd, how I'm feeling, all of that.
Some years ago in the Willamette Valley I was the primary pianist for a melodrama theater, and one theatrical production was a weeks long run of a mystery spoof on Humphrey Bogart. For that, I selected over a hundred favorite songs, mostly from the thirties and forties, to play for two hours during dinner and dessert, requests and anything I want to play, like the "Rhapsody In Blue," the "Warsaw Concerto," "Maple Leaf Rag." And of course, Casablanca's "As Time Goes By."
A woman came up with a request.
"Don't your hands get tired?" she asked me.
"Never," I smiled back. I could play for days, weeks, months. Some days, when I am at home alone, after doing the farm chores I sit at my piano almost all day, playing all the great classics, everything I love, losing all track of time.
I have three keyboards, a digital piano, and an acoustic piano which was a bequest from a beloved grandmother, a Baldwin Acrosonic Spinet left to me because my concert pianist aunt didn't want it, a treasured possession I have moved all over the country with me since I was eleven years old. When I play, in my mind I am in Carnegie Hall, and my fingers fly over the keys, stunned audiences gasping to their feet in spontaneous applause....
I played the request: 'She may be weary, women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress...She may be waiting, just anticipating things she may never possess...While she's without them, Try a Little Tenderness...'
I stood in the receiving line after the play and a man squeezed my hand.
"Oh I loved your music!" he said. "Fifty years ago was my favorite time!" Life was new to him then.
The muscles in my scalp above my ears ached from smiling.
