SALOON PIANIST: THE KEYS TO SURVIVAL

As you could prove by half the Westerns ever made, the saloon pianist is an American institution as old as the stagecoach and possibly even the livery stable.

The black hats and the white hats might have been doing an indoor version of the shoot-out at the OK Corral, but the pianist kept playing his sleeve garters off, trying to restore order and a feeling for the finer things of life.

The tradition of the saloon pianist survives as the piano bar; and while the piano bar can be found in other places, it flourishes in the West still, as it does no place else.

There are probably some profound reasons why this should be so, not least as the legacy of the frontier saloon itself, plus the need, now as then, for friendly gathering places amid our vast lateral dispersions.

What time has changed is the repertoire and the talent. Judging, again by the Westerns, your swinging-doors pianist, flailing away at a tinny upright, knew “Camptown Races” and a couple of sentimental ballads, favoring the black keys because they were easier to locate in the gloom.

The revelation to me when I came West these several years ago and sought out friendly gathering places was that some of the best pianists in the business, known to me from records, radio and the pages of Downbeat, were accessible for the price of a beer, working their magic in the dim and smoky air of bars, competing with cash registers and noisy celebrants.

Competing not always happily. I remember a night at the Frascati’s at Crescent Heights when Calvin Jackson, a virtuoso improviser who had worked in the musical factory at MGM, had had enough of the distracted customers, slammed the cover down on the keys and said, “I can’t insult that lovely tune any more.” He’d been working a little musical satire, trying to see how bad you could get before anybody noticed, as some of us did.

There were better nights, and Calvin, like Joe Marino, who was playing at the Swiss Cafe when I first used to hear him and is now at the Bistro Garden, and other masters of the genre acquired followings who go where they go.

Joe Marino plays the Kern-Porter-Gershwin-Harry Warren legacy so beautifully that Warren, until just before his recent death, used to come by to hear Joe play his songs done the way Warren thought they ought to be played.

One of the best pianists in the business, like Marino an alumnus of the big bands, was gathered up the other day, as Noel Coward used to say. Johnny Guarnieri, a name I’d known long before I met him, from his days with Artie Shaw and the Gramercy Five, died at the age of 67. He used to play at the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant in the Valley, where his regulars paid respectful attention and attended him with a fierce loyalty.

The amazing thing was that Guarnieri had rather stubby fingers for a pianist. You’d have thought an early teacher might have switched him to bass drum or something with valves. Luckily no one did. But Johnny knew he was playing under a slight handicap and in middle life, when he had been a successful professional for years, he started doing stretching exercises. As he showed me one night, very proudly, he had been able to extend by a note what he could reach between thumb and pinkie.

It was Johnny’s blazing speed as a stride pianist that a lot of his customers came to hear, and see, and I once noticed that there were crescent trails on the board behind the keys, where his flying fingernails had grazed the varnish. He ran fast, cascading arpeggios and could hang embellishments on a ballad like lights on a Christmas tree.

He had had personal griefs, including a son who died after a lingering affliction, but he had achieved, when I last chatted with him, a quite special serenity that was an instructive blending of acceptance and ambition.

Johnny could doubtless have gone on finding places to stride through “Stealin’ Apples,” one of his big numbers, as long as he could lift his arms. But he kept exploring the possibilities of 5/4 time (an infrequent offering in saloons) and composing and aspiring to concert performances.

I’m not sure that inspiration is what you go to piano bars for; diversion and reconciliation are more like it. But, as the West is unpredictable in matters large and small, it seems only right that you could absorb excellence and inspiration, attending Johnny Guarnieri at work.