Jazz piano player

As I was walking down the street on an Indian summer evening in Troy, NY, I heard the faint tinkling of some fine jazz piano. Drawn by these soothing tones, I entered an establishment known as the Monkey’s Paw. The entrance was a steep walk-down off Third Avenue and as I opened the door, I almost thought I was being transported back to a mid-1930’s speakeasy.

The bar itself featured a wide polished rail, a nicely finished wood grain and the almost mandatory full mirror lining the wall behind it. The establishment wasn’t real crowded but, the interior was almost completely filled with a cloud of smoke.

The piano was sequestered along the back wall of the dining area and the player appeared to be a balding, somewhat round, white man who flashed a warm smile at me as I approached.

He wore a sweater vest that seemed to hide some of his bulk. His face had wizened look and the grin he almost seemed to continually wear, was enhanced by a graying moustache and five o’clock shadow.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of my favorite uncle as I was growing up. His name was Ivan and he also played piano. His misfortunes as an adult were many. He never could seem to hang onto money. He worked in several movie theaters in northern New Jersey when I was small but, something happened in the late 1960’s (something neither he nor my parents ever confided in me about) and he was forced to move in with us when I was about eight or nine years old.

My mom’s family had seven children. Which wasn’t all that unusual in those days. The area where she grew up was very rural in setting. Two of her siblings died during childbirth or as a young baby. Mom was the middle child with two brothers younger than her and one older sister and brother. Ivan was the next to last of the surviving kids. My maternal grandmother died when my Mom was about 12 years old. Because of the situation, she, for the most part, played mom to her younger brothers. Ivan was always very loving and appreciative of his older sister’s care. In his eyes, she could do no wrong.

At first when my uncle moved in with us, I was thrilled. He was, without a doubt, the most fun relative I had. He was playful and enjoyed laughing and joking with almost anyone. He also was a great storyteller. He never had to work hard to get laughter out of either my sister or myself.

As I stated earlier, he also played piano. In my mom’s family, every kid played an instrument. The oldest sister sang and played some piano (not as much or as well as Ivan), the oldest brother was a fiddle player, my mom played the mandolin, Ivan was the piano player and the youngest brother played guitar.

My mom tried to teach me the mandolin when I was kid and was drawn to the instrument. She had a very old, antiqued mandolin that was built and purchased back in the 1920’s from the Montgomery Ward catalog. It was a beautiful instrument and in time I became a little more adept at playing it. It wasn’t until Ivan moved in and encouraged me to play with him taking keyboard parts that I truly embraced the instrument. We developed a little bit of a catalog and would play at family gatherings mostly. Ivan loved the pop music of the 1950’s and 1960’s but mostly what we played was ragtime and bluegrass with a smattering of classic country.

I remember one great story that occurred shortly after Ivan moved in. We had a fairly severe cold snap that followed a significant snowstorm. At the end of the storm, the temp shifted during the day and the result was a slight drizzle of rain in the following day followed (again) with a cold night.

What all of these sudden swings in temperature yielded were the absolute perfect conditions for creating a hard shell of ice atop a foot of deep snow. This was great for sliding. When I returned home that afternoon, I went body sliding down the hill and found the conditions to be extremely slick. It was great fun. The only problem was that I couldn’t get back up the hill.

Being the resourceful young man that I was, I walked further down the hill and dipped my rubber boots into a cold stream after breaking through some ice to get to the liquid. The combination of the water on the rubber boots made the rubber stick to the ice thus allowing for the means to walk easily around on the slick ice covered snow. Once I discovered this, I called a neighbor friend of mine over and showed him the same trick.

Now all of this led to some scheming that would not be uncommon in a typical 8 year old. Let’s lure other unsuspecting kids to the hill and not tell them about the ice water trick. We had great fun after we lured both my younger sister and another neighborhood friend of mine to the hill and laughed at the top of the hill while we watched them struggle to try and climb up the hill on the slick surface.

Well, this all came to a sudden halt when we heard my Uncle calling from the house and making his way out to the top of the hill where the two of us (my friend and I) were standing. We gulped and tried to feign ignorance as to how the two young ladies at the bottom of the hill got there.

Ivan had been sleeping as he was working nights in those days and therefore was dressed in pajamas, a robe, and slippers. Shortly, on his heels, my mother (who had returned home while I wasn’t looking) came stomping out to the hillside as well. My mom and Ivan surveyed the situation for a few seconds. My mom (being the logical creature she was) decided to look for a walking stick, something she could use to chop through the ice and provide some means to maintain a footing on the slick surface of the snow-covered ice.

The outside temperature wasn’t too severe but, the ice had hardened so much on the overnight that it was truly an ice skating caliber surface atop the snow.

Ivan, being the illogical person that he was, decided to trudge towards the girls “stuck” at the bottom of the hill. My mom called out a warning to my Uncle as he started to walk down the hill but, he ignored the warning and stated the famous last words… “ Oh, I won’t fall, I have slippers … on…” Of course he started sliding on “slippers” and was bowling over the girls at the bottom of the hill before he got out the word “on.”

My friend and I being the logical kids that we were decided that discretion being the better portion of valor… we should make ourselves scarce. I circled the group, re-dipped my rubber boots in the water and then decided I should help out. My Mom had already worked her way down the hill and had escorted the other neighbor girl up the hill and was returning for my sister. I was at that point trying to act gallant and was escorting my sister up the hill with the aid of my wet rubber boots up the slippery slope.

Once we had all gotten up onto the top of the hill, my neighbor buddy made like a hockey player and got the puck out of there. My sister’s friend had already vacated the premises after being rescued by my mother.

Which left me (the mastermind to the ill fated “prank”) to face the combined wrath of both my mom and my uncle. My sister had already sequestered herself within her room and had moved onto homework.

I reluctantly started to make my way indoors to receive my punishment. I walked into the kitchen to see both my mom and my uncle laughing hysterically while sitting at the kitchen table. They kept repeating… “Oh, I won’t fall, I have slippers….” And then the two of them would again break up into fresh peals of laughter.

I shuffled into the scene and was about to stammer out an apology when the infectious laughter hit me. I still managed to get an apology out in between the chuckling but, it almost wasn’t necessary.

I’m not sure I got away with anything on this or rather my mom just couldn’t (with a straight face) begin to admonish my actions on this day in between laughing fits at the silliness of the plight of all involved.

This story would be repeated and embellished for year’s to come particularly when my mom would have the opportunity to reminisce with any or all of her siblings.

This memory came back to me in that subtle but very powerful way that fond memories will resurface and then linger within your consciousness at some seemingly unrelated twist of circumstance.

I stayed and listened to this jazz pianist play a couple of tunes that I was unfamiliar with but, then cranked up my courage (I think bolstered by that familiar smile on his lips) and requested that he play Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”

He said that it had been a long time since anyone had suggested any ragtime but, he knew it was only too happy to acquiesce and gave it a whirl. Afterwards, he asked how I knew the tune. Not surprisingly, I cited the movie “The Sting” for which it was the theme song but I also talked with him about my uncle and how he taught me the song.

I told him how Ivan had always had impressed upon to learn the tune, how we always played by ear and felt the music rather than “played” the music. The response I received from the jazz piano player was that “I think he told you the right way to play music.” He also admitted that, he too, had never learned to read sheet music and played only by ear (or by feel… as Ivan would have put it).