A Little Night Music

No one seems to know the exact number of piano players in L.A. who occupy corners of saloons or restaurants after dark, trying to provide background music against the almost impossible competition of chewing sounds and mating rituals. Dave Snyder at the Musicians Union says he knows of about 200 contracts in the entire county that include piano players and there might be 200 more who are working outside the union.

The reason I asked is because I’m fascinated by the people who sit in those corners and make music when no one seems to care about what they’re playing except them. I’ve talked to a lot of them over the years and still do, after the crowds thin and the music drifts like strands of ribbon into the quiet nights. One of them said to me that it really didn’t matter whether anyone was listening, that he was only playing for an audience of one anyhow.

My latest acquaintance in the area of those who provide background tunes is a woman who calls herself Sunshine. She got into music banging a tambourine and singing hymns for the Salvation Army on the street corners of western Pennsylvania. Now she plays and sings at Paoli’s Pizzeria in Woodland Hills, which is an unlikely place for rare talent, jammed between Sam’s Books and a hot dog place called the Wienery (“dogs and suds”) on a cheerless strip of Ventura Boulevard.

I wandered into Paoli’s on an evening dark with rain for what a friend used to call a somber Scotch. Sunshine was playing and singing “As Time Goes By,” which I suspect is a staple for all the piano players in the world, but the way she sang it gave the tune a quality I had never heard before. She’s a contralto, and even without knowing much about music, one knew instinctively she was not your usual saloon singer. She’s maybe in her late 50s and looks like everybody’s mom, sitting in a corner at a piano lined with votive candles, presiding over a room crowded with people eating pizza and linguine.

Sunshine is a childhood nickname, which is all she wants used. Her parents were officers in the Salvation Army and her earliest memories involve standing in the cold on a wintry corner of Clearfield, Pa., listening to her father preach Jesus.

“The idea was to save souls,” she said between sets at Paoli’s. “After he’d preach, I’d sing and bang tambourines and sometimes play a fold-up pump organ. I played it by ear, I guess, because I didn’t take lessons until years later.”

She began working the street corners, as she tells it, right out of the cradle. She hated it because other kids laughed at her and she was embarrassed by all the preaching. But then one day a voice teacher passed by and offered her three years of free lessons and nobody laughed. The lessons took, and at age 17 Sunshine was granted a scholarship to the Julliard School of Music.

Later she married an accomplished pianist and together they performed in concerts and recitals across the United States, including nine in the Hollywood Bowl. They were married for 36 years and when he died not long ago, it was as though her world had ended too.

“I didn’t want to do anything or go anywhere,” she said. “He was my life.” Then her son, who knew the owner of Paoli’s, suggested that she start playing there. Sunshine had worked in lounges off and on and discovered she loved the intimacy of a close audience. She has a repertoire of about a thousand songs and a voice that can shatter crystal, which she holds to an easy-listening level.

“It was kind of like playing on street corners again for the Salvation Army,” she said. “I began to realize how much those years meant to me.”

She talks about arguments she’s settled over the years and drunks she’s cautioned and about the “family” that grows up around someone who plays piano in a saloon.

“One night I had three people in the club all crying about something. One had lost a friend, the other had broken up with a lover and I can’t remember why the third one cried. But I ended up getting them involved in a sing-along and the tears stopped. You can’t cry when you’re singing.”

Sometimes Sunshine wonders what her parents would think about her playing in a bar. But she justifies it by saying she’s still bringing pleasure to people, the way she did on the wintry corners of Pennsylvania. “I offer a little happiness and maybe a moment of calm,” she says. “I give a message of love. Isn’t that what we’re all about?”

Then she went back to the piano and sang “Try to Remember.” It gave the whole room pleasure, so I guess she’s right. That’s what it’s all about.