[Dixielandjazz] Irving Berlin's piano

[Harry Callaghan]

John Pizzarelli (son of Bucky) besides being a better than average singer
and excellent guitarist like his Dad, is quite the story teller.

On the 10th anniversary of the John Pizzarelli Trio at NY's Birdland, in
2003, he told of a time when he and his brother Martin (bass) and Ray
Kennedy (piano) were performing somewhere in the nation's capitol

He said that they took a time out to do some sightseeing and in addition to
the usual Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, etc. dropped in at the
Library of Congress.

On display there was a piano that had once belonged to George Gershwin only
protected from the public by a velvet rope.

Ray slipped under the rope and went and sat down at the piano and was about
to play when a security guard came along and started yelling at him to get
out.

John said that he explained to the guard that Ray wasn't just some tourist
but a professional musician and asked him to please let him play, if only
briefly.

The guard relented and Ray tickled the ivories for a bit.

Then, as he was getting up from the piano, a voice came from out of
nowhere'  "Say, do you happen to know "I Got Rhythm"?

I wasn't at Birdland that night.........I just have the CD

Tides
HC


On 9/19/10, Robert Ringwald <rsr at ringwald.com> wrote:
>
> Irving Berlin's piano
>
> Be Careful, It's My Heart: An Irving Berlin Piano Is Moved
> by James Barron
> New York Times "City Room" blog, September 18, 2010
>
> Josh Perelman loves a piano -- not just any piano, but the one on which
> Irving Berlin
> wrote "I Love a Piano" in 1915. He loves it so much that he is borrowing it
> for 14
> months.
> Dr. Perelman is a deputy director of the National Museum of American Jewish
> History
> in Philadelphia, which is preparing for the November opening of its new
> $150 million
> home near Independence Mall. The piano -- no high-tone baby grand, but an
> upright,
> and a distinctive one, at that -- will be part of an exhibition called
> "Only in America,"
> about the Jewish experience in the United States.
> All that explains why Dr. Perelman was standing in an alcove at Ascap's
> headquarters,
> opposite Lincoln Center, where the Berlin piano has resided for 15 years
> while on
> loan from his family. Before the movers wheeled it to a service elevator,
> Dr. Perelman
> played a few chords.
> "This is one of those artifacts that was in our dreams when we started our
> planning:
> 'Wouldn't it be amazing if we were able to bring Irving Berlin's piano to
> the public,'"
> he said. "You can talk about him, you can show a movie about him, but to
> see the
> piano, to see the mechanism, to feel, as I did, that you're really in
> Irving Berlin's
> shoes -- that's something."
> Berlin bought the piano for $100, big money for a former singing waiter in
> a Chinatown
> restaurant, in 1909. He had other pianos later on, but that one was the one
> he had
> when he wrote "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911.
> "It was part of him," said his daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett.
> As pianos go, it is distinctive because it came with a lever Berlin could
> pull or
> push to transpose the music from one key to another -- the lever moved the
> keys so
> the hammers could strike different strings. Berlin worked only in one key,
> F-sharp.
> Singers may know "How Deep Is the Ocean" in E-flat or "Blue Skies" in the
> sunny key
> of G, but they were all F-sharp tunes to him.
> That gave rise to the tale Mrs. Barrett took issue with. "The one mistake
> people
> make is they say, 'Irving Berlin only played the five black notes.' I say,
> no, he
> played in the key of F-sharp, the black-note key." Of course, the key of
> F-sharp
> has two white notes, E-sharp (which looks like F) and B.
> But his pianos with the transposing mechanism, a mechanical contrivance
> that made
> so many famous tunes possible, "became a legend," Mrs. Barrett said. She
> recalled
> a conversation she had had with the actress Alice Faye, who starred in the
> 1938 film
> version of "Alexander's Ragtime Band."
> "She didn't have many memories except 'I remember him and that funny
> piano,'" Mrs.
> Barrett said.
> Music historians say Berlin had a name for his transposing piano: "The
> Buick." Whether
> it first applied to the particular piano at Ascap or one of the others,
> Mrs. Barrett
> did not know. Nor did she know which of Berlin's pianos might have inspired
> the song
> that became "Me and My Melinda." The original version was about another
> three-syllable
> mesmerizer:
> Me and my piano, my piano and me
> We are bound up together with sympathy
> Me and my piano
> We are seldom apart
> On Thursday, the movers loaded the piano into a wooden crate. As the movers
> pushed
> it onto West 64th Street, where their van was waiting, Dr. Perelman said
> goodbye
> to Ascap officials who had tagged along as the piano was squeezed into a
> service
> elevator and crated.
> "We'll take good care of it," Dr. Perelman promised.
>
>
> --Bob Ringwald
> www.ringwald.com
> Fulton Street Jazz Band
> 916/806-9551
> Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV
>
> "We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like
> a man standing
> in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle"
> -- Winston Churchill
>
>
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-- 
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he
hears a different drummer.  Let him step to
the music which he hears, however measured or far away
   (The story of my life)
                           - Henry David Thoreau
                             (1817-1862)