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So how has this throwback to another era managed to survive not only the rock revolution, in all its geologic phases, but all the distractions of country-and-western and rhythm and blues? Coleman, who is no fossil but an immensely energetic and youthful fellow of 61, has the answer wrapped and ready to go. "Selective hearing," he snaps. To which he adds that he is not writing imitation '30s songs ("Pastiche is for college kids") but the same kind of music, as if it had continued to evolve uninterrupted, fed by the latest developments in jazz -- to which he listens voraciously.
It's never too early to begin on a course like Coleman's, and at the age of four young Cy was already playing everything he could get his ears on on the family piano in the Bronx. "Did you have any musical relatives?" he is asked. "No," he responds with a charming non sequitur, "my family couldn't even speak English."
Coleman's father was, in fact, a carpenter whose sole visible contribution to his son's art was to nail the piano shut so he could get some peace around here. "Fortunately, as a carpenter's son, I figured out how to open it." After which he was left undisturbed, and unencouraged, until the local milkman, who'd heard him on his morning rounds, somehow talked the family into getting the kid lessons.
With just this lick of help, it was the work of a moment for Coleman to become a child prodigy, with a particular affinity for Beethoven. "I could already do the technical stuff, and I was looking for 'feeling' " -- an excellent career choice for a seven-year-old, because to this day virtuosity and feeling fight it out for attention in Coleman's work, which sometimes sounds almost too clever to be quite great.
But what his critics are hearing is not emotional coldness (the act of composition moves him to the roots of his being) but the coolness of modern jazz laid on top of the type of supersophisticated melody lines he first heard from his major influence and first great love, the radio.
In those days, announcers seldom told you who wrote what, so Coleman simply fell in love with the whole period, namely the middle to late '30s, by which time the American song had reached a pitch of harmonic subtlety and adventuresomeness. And it is this kind of song that Coleman started playing in clubs as a teenager ("a school you can't pay tuition to") and still writes today with whatever refinements Miles Davis, Bill Evans, et al., might have brought to it.
"I think of myself first and last as a professional pianist," he says, and this order of things, which he sustains with a few dazzling concerts a year, gives him the serenity to continue when rising costs threaten musical theater with extinction. If extinction comes, "I'd probably become my own publisher and produce my own videos. I would always write music."
Since he can hear a full orchestra in his head, he probably has no choice. - Tunes have come to him unbidden during cocktail conversations, and if there's no polite way of writing them down, he just remembers them with one ear and fields dialogue with the other.