Some enchanted evening, when a fellow meets a girl for cocktails for two, life is just a bowl of cherries. The music goes round and round—an unchained melody or a fascinating rhythm—and it seems like old times. It’s just one of those things. Like a marshmallow moon in a buttermilk sky, it’s magic. Whippoorwills call. ‘Swonderful. Delightful. Delirious. Delovely.
Or so it can seem when the moods are manufactured by that offbeat brand of musician, the cocktail pianist. The sign outside says “Music for Hand Holders,” but he plays for not only the bewitched but also the bothered, bewildered and just plain bombed. His salon is a saloon with carpeting, usually sporting a get-away-from-it-all name like the Shangri-la or the Windjammer. The lights are low, and the prices are high. And what escape the customer cannot find in the alcohol and easy ambiance, the cocktail pianist provides with a painless medley of ballads, show tunes, light classics and, inevitably, a Happy Birthday or two.
More than just live Muzak, the best of the cocktail pianists “play the room,” alternating from up-tempo numbers to dreamy lullabies to suit the mood of the audience. Requests are encouraged (current favorite: Lara’s Theme from the film score of Doctor Zhivago), but in many instances the cocktail pianist is more prized for his fellowship than his musicianship. Table hopping between sets is essential, and any pianist worth his arpeggio greets the entrance of old customers by sliding into their favorite numbers.
Though the proliferation of jukeboxes and discotheques has winnowed the ranks of the cocktail pianists since their heyday in the 1950s, most U.S. cities have at least one velvet-lined cave where night-lifers go to swig and sway to their favorite mood merchants. Among the best of them:
— Cy Walter, at Manhattan’s Drake Room, who has patrolled the bar beat for 30 years, is generally considered the dean of cocktail pianists. A sometime composer, he plays novel and harmonically inventive arrangements, numbers among his devotees such celebrities as Noel Coward and Lynda Bird Johnson. Sipping gin and Coca-Cola, he holds forth six nights a week from 6 p.m. until 1 a.m., earns $20,000 a year. He cannot abide sing-along customers, discourages them by “changing keys so often that they become confused.” — Ernie Swann, at Detroit’s Salamandre room, prides himself on living up to the motto “You’re a Stranger Here Once.” Between gulps of Liebfraumilch, he listens sympathetically to the troubles of the drinkers who huddle around his piano bar, treats each individually with an appropriate number drawn from a repertory of 2,000 songs. “I’ve always had a feeling for the other side of the piano,” he says. Looking like a walrus in repose, he plays for three hours at a clip, occasionally breaks out his “polished Louis Armstrong voice.” He claims that his version of Canadian Sunset is great for loosening up his upper arms and shoulders.
—Matty Cortes, at Miami Beach’s Yacht South Seas, a 171-ft. ship formerly owned by the Woolworth family, is a 38-year veteran of the cocktail circuit, specializes in the sophisticated songs of the 1930s and ’40s. Hunched over his piano in the ship’s dimly lit, couch-lined salon, he plays with a rolling, lilting style that is guaranteed not to rock the patrons or the boat, which is moored at the 79th Street causeway. The son of a New York Philharmonic percussionist, he says that the chatter of the customers does not bother him, especially since they put up to $200 a week in tips on his piano. His secret, he explains, is that “I don’t play at them; I make them come to me.” — Norman Wallace, at Chicago’s Mon Petit, is a singer in the tradition of Mabel Mercer—quiet, cool, reassuring. In the ’40s, he wrote songs for Edith Piaf; later he tried his hand at musicals in New York before migrating to Chicago, where he leavens a Continental repertory with up-tempo show tunes and a few Beatle ballads. The social set and young marrieds think he’s keen. Says one fan: “His French songs give me the feeling of not being in Chicago, which many of us find very gratifying at the end of a day.”
—Judy West, at Los Angeles’ Red Roulette room, is a kind of Patti Page of the keyboard. Combining elegance and brash good humor, she bounces freely from Latin to folk, Hawaiian to Dixieland, but is most effective in numbers with a hint of country twang. An attractive divorcee, she has a large following among the men, to whom she plays as deftly as she plays the piano. She can be either nursemaid or sedup-tress, gauging her attack by “the different stages of drink.” Says she: “If they’re looking at me, I try to entertain. If they’re occupied with themselves, I just sit back and sort of mess around.” — Nappy Gagno, at Boston’s Merry-Go-Round Lounge, has been rising atop the lounge’s rotating bar for twelve years. He has an uncanny memory for the favorite tunes of conventioneers who return only once every two or three years, bones up on a little red notebook in which he keeps the names of patrons, their physical characteristics and their songs. With a spotlight trained on his hands, he sometimes plays Mozart and Chopin, remembered from his days at the New England Conservatory. Like all cocktail pianists, he is philosophical about lack of attention. “When they don’t listen,” he says, “I listen myself.”
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