NONFICTION - June 7, 1992

NOTES FROM A BATTERED GRAND by Don Asher (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich: $22.95; 267 pp.) The secret to this story is the detail Asher finally lets slip toward the end--he’s recently been in London, working on a screenplay about musicians and entertainers for an unnamed British director. No wonder this memoir of a jazz pianist reads like a series of scenes (which in no way is meant as a criticism). Surely the great screenwriter in the sky did the outline for Asher’s life: Poor white kid in Massachusetts gets piano lessons because older brother Herb turns out to be musical, and little Don proves to be quite adept at his scales, his technique, all the classical pieces his teachers teach him. The only problem is the music: There’s something missing, a something he discovers in black jazz, at clubs where any musician with sufficient nerve and verve can sit in on a session, even a white kid. That is, if he’s willing to endure all the teasing, much of it entirely justified. Asher ends up, in addition to writing book and screenplay, playing dinner music at the Cafe Majestic. He is reassured every time some young kid asks for “My Funny Valentine” instead of the latest from Run DMC, gentle when he corrects the boy who wants to hear Willie Nelson’s “Stardust.” The prose along the way is a little bit precious, too insistently hip, but then Asher has had to compensate for that deprived upbringing of his, as a kid who only knew the classics.