I love pianos, the least portable instruments in the world, but wander away from the well-maintained specimen at home and you will be a hostage to fortune if you get invited to play one. Tuning to concert pitch is nice but usually a random piano will be out of tune with notes that stick or don’t work at all. The felt on the hammers of old heavily used pianos in institutions becomes compacted producing a distinctive plonking sound.
There is a story about Art Tatum and a speakeasy. Tatum was blind but his other senses were remarkably sharp. He had perfect pitch. He could tell you the date of a nickel by the noise it made when it fell on the floor or the amount of beer left in his bottle by tapping it to detect the change in pitch. This speakeasy happened to be hidden in the rear of a funeral parlour. Tatum noted the strange embalming smells as he was conducted to the hidden room at the back. There, a pianist was entertaining the customers on a terrible piano. Tatum sat down and after listening for a while remarked that the A above middle C was sticking. Presently he said, ‘Take me up there.’
‘But Art, that piano is awful,’ his companion protested.
‘Never mind, take me up there,’ he insisted.
He sat down, pushed up the stuck A key and started playing. As the dazzling runs flew over the keyboard he used his left hand to flick up the stuck-down key each time he hit it with his right. He didn’t miss a note and to the listeners there seemed to be nothing wrong with the piano.
The first piano I can recall belonged to my grandparents. It was an upright Bechstein and stood in the parlour of the house they bought in Eskbank after my grandfather retired. My mother and her older sister Hilda had played it when they were growing up. Hilda was the better and more enthusiastic musician. She died young in the 1930s of ‘acidosis’, a mysterious diagnosis that was never clarified. I suspect they kept the piano for sentimental reasons because no one was playing it by the time I appeared on the scene.
We had no piano at home in Ayrshire but we visited my grandparents regularly and I became fascinated by the amazing machine, experimenting with the noises it made. One day we arrived to stay as usual – and the piano was gone. It had been sold. I was inconsolable. My grandmother said she would not have disposed of it had she known I was so keen.
After that my only regular access to a piano was in the hotel where we ate Sunday lunch after church. I would hurry through the meal and skip dessert to rush off to the ballroom for a few minutes of experimentation. I tried to pick out hymn tunes and TV themes. Eventually my parents decided they ought to encourage me and an upright – a Cramer – was purchased.
Of course it was not their intention that I play any old thing I fancied so lessons were arranged with Mr Walker, a music teacher at the local secondary school. He had a small grand piano and a very cold house. While you negotiated your badly prepared pieces with frozen fingers he would warm his hands down the back of the radiator. Although I did want to learn to read music I did not enjoy the lessons nor the annual concerts his pupils were made to play. I didn’t go as far as my younger brother who, in his desperation to avoid a piano lesson, had a bath, put on his pyjamas and went to bed. After doing the Grade I Theory exams I gave up attending Mr Walker, ostensibly to concentrate on my O-Levels, but I never went back.
Those were the days of obsessional playing and rapid progress in my ‘by-ear’ technique. I just wouldn’t stop playing and my mother sometimes locked the piano to force me to do some homework. By late secondary school I could knock out some half decent blues and boogie woogie numbers. Once, having finished an appearance as Mr Bumble the beadle in the school production of Oliver! I was ‘entertaining’ the rest of the off-stage cast with some Champion Jack Dupree in the music room behind the stage when a breathless ASM came rushing in to say I could be heard ‘front of house’ and Mr Hunter (our scary director) said I was to stop immediately.
Music was a dichotomy for me then: the cryptic specks and spots on the stave which caused me so much grief, and the melodies and chord changes I had begun to work out for myself by experimentation. It would be decades before I began to see how the two related to each other. To this day I am much happier working with chord changes and a top line than I am with formal written music – I still cannot read with any fluency.
Ironically, the point at which your friends start to think you can play is often the moment you realise you can’t. Musicians’ self-knowledge is acute. Only other musicians truly appreciate how good the best are. Technical competence is an unattainable goal for many of us but a starting point for the really gifted. Perhaps a deep knowledge of what the great players achieve is the true benefit of being a serious amateur.
Leaving for Edinburgh University meant not having access to a piano again. I could play the pianos in the bars of the Teviot Row Union but that was always a ‘performance’ in a public place. I had nowhere to practise. Then I discovered a grand piano in an unlocked side room on the top floor of the Union, above the debating hall. There was competition for this instrument from other keen students, often very good players.
A short wander from the Medical School and the Union was a music shop cheesily entitled ‘Varsity Music‘. It sold a variety of instruments including a wide range of reconditioned pianos. Despite a rather gruff affect, the owner was prepared to let me play the pianos in the shop because he thought it created a good atmosphere. In the process I learned a little about the mechanics of pianos. He recommended German makes which were steel framed and overstrung. A steel frame was proof against warping and over-stringing meant longer base strings and a better tone. Above all you did not want to buy a piece of old British furniture with a wooden frame.
Eventually, when I got a flat of my own in third year, I bought a suitable reconditioned upright piano from Varsity Music. I was then able to resume my obsession – and the musical torture of the neighbours. I also acquired a Wurlitzer 200A Electronic Piano. This instrument had been used in recordings by Ray Charles (What’d I Say?) and the band Supertramp (Dreamer). I had hopes to perform with it but at 25kg with awkward screw-in legs it wasn’t really portable.
I played a bit in pubs and clubs around the city after that, then in August 1977 I arranged my fourth year medical student elective at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, a teaching hospital that was part of New York University Medical School. I would be in the States for 9 weeks. At that time it was still possible to hear the best jazz musicians in the world playing at intimate venues in Midtown and Greenwich Village. The Village Gate on Bleecker Street was recommended. It had a ground floor bar that was open to the street and a performance venue upstairs. The piano in the bar had been stripped down to show the action and a mic was suspended over it for amplification.
My problem was the $15 cover charge which represented three days-worth of my allowance. I starved myself until I had enough cash. A kindly barman took pity on me and offered me free drinks if I could play the piano. In desperation I accepted. Once I got going, and drinks started arriving, he introduced me to the owner Art D’Lugoff who said I could play in the bar for drinks and get free admission to the gigs upstairs. I accepted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Gate
Musicians hung around the bar and one night I played with Steve Knight formerly of Mountain. The big room upstairs was L-shaped with a stage at the angle. Over the weeks of my ‘residency’ I saw Memphis Slim, Earl Hines, Charlie Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie; each of them twice. At one point Memphis Slim was drinking in the downstairs bar while I was playing, tapping his fingers in time on the table. I got to speak to him and shake his hand.
A New York DJ I met asked if I wanted to stay with him while I tried to get gigs, but the few short weeks I was there were enough to convince me I had neither the talent nor the desire to emulate the outwardly rather grim lives of the brilliant musicians I had met. I returned to university in Edinburgh and to playing in pubs.
A few years later once I was embroiled in the junior doctor years my grandmother died and left me a little money. I hadn’t given this windfall much thought when my girlfriend suggested I replace my old upright with something decent. I went to a proper piano shop, the kind that had a flock of grands in the showroom with their lids up, asking to be played. It was immediately obvious that a new German grand was well out of my reach but I noticed they had a Yamaha G2 ‘boudoir grand’ that was within budget. As far as I was aware Yamaha made motorcycles. It had never occurred to me that their logo was three crossed tuning forks.
Yamaha has been making musical instruments, including pianos, since the nineteenth century, long before they made motor bikes. In the Far East their pianos populate the hotels, schools and concert halls. The Yamaha in the shop sounded bright and clean to me and had a nice action. I thought it suited jazz and blues. The girl in the shop said it was her favourite instrument too – so I bought it.
My flat at the time was on the top two floors of an Edinburgh New Town tenement. I was wondering how the shop might deliver such a massive object to such an inaccessible place. The van turned up with the piano crated up in the back. The rear lift lowered the crate onto the pavement where a team of men lifted it onto a small aluminium dolly with solid rubber wheels. They only lifted the piano when they came to steps. The rest of the time they moved it effortlessly on the dolly. In no time the piano was in my study and being de-crated. They fixed the legs on, turned it over and were gone. My friend Jim Dalziel painted it for me to celebrate the occasion. In due course it migrated to our current home where it sits in the bay window of the dining room. I’ve played it almost every day for over 35 years.
I abandoned the lonely business of playing piano in pubs as proper work took over my life but after a very long break with no performances I started playing with rock bands. Properly amplified music with a PA and fold-backs was terra incognita to me. This meant adding a proper stage piano, a Yamaha P-80 with the full 88 weighted keys. It had several very convincing sampled piano sounds and a decent range of organs. As the Capitols sang in Cool Jerk, “Now, give me a little bit of bass, with those 88’s”.
Later still, as a radiologist, I attended a series of medical conferences in Chicago. We settled on the Palmer House Hilton as our favourite shake-down. It’s impossibly grand with a painted ceiling in the vast atrium. It also has the Empire Room where Liberace made his debut. In it is a suitably grand piano. I have no idea if it is the grand piano – but I played it and one of my juniors recorded it.
A final note: the farm I grew up on is called Changue, a descriptive Gaelic place name pronounced ‘chang’. Farmers are often known by the name of their farms rather than their actual surnames – as in Knockterra, Auchengilsie, Cooperhill, Changue etc. Their sons are referred to as ‘Young’ followed by the farm name. I was therefore ‘Young Changue’ to many local farmers. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that in South Korea there is a company called Young Chang – and they make pianos.
The Bohemian Waxwing 