As Time (or Creme Brulee) Goes By

The other night at the Stoney Point, an elderly patron in a beige cashmere coat launched into a rolling version of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.” The man’s name was Chute. Behind Chute, playing piano, sat the Point’s real draw: Bill Howe, who provides weekly backup to anyone willing to sing “Sabor a Mi” or dance the Charleston between dinner courses. When Chute eventually sat down to his encore--a ramekin of creme brulee --Howe smiled momentarily, shouted “Anniversary!” and led six tables of diners through the old standard.

The Dresden may have Marty and Elayne, but the odds of finding a packed piano bar that sustains full-length versions of “Don’t Fence Me In” or “There, I’ve Said It Again” diminish with the release of each new Smashmouth CD. There is only so much storage space in the collective jukebox of music memory. Besides, as Howe says, “Modern music is not conducive to the piano bar--it’s a dying form.” Howe is 82. He has played in piano bars since a place named The Piano Bar opened in Santa Monica in 1938. Don the Beachcomber, three Brown Derbys and innumerable one-night stands followed, until Howe found himself playing the Stoney Point, which sits near the edge of Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco--a semi-wild, demi-rustic, wholly wealthy neighborhood where he finds his fan base.

They are, generally, genteel, venerable-looking and regulars. At 72, Angie Synodis, whose station is the last seat at the bar, acts as a kind of concierge to Howe. “Go on, ask Bill to play a song,” he tells anyone who walks in. “He knows more than a thousand.” A few tentative chords are struck, the stranger sneaks into a Vaughn Monroe number, and Howe looks on, content, a tugboat captain leading a ship into its berth.

Howe reads the world through songs: Ask about his family, and he will play the lilting tune he composed for his daughter. So when someone makes a comment about, say, the weather that Howe doesn’t quite hear, the look that comes over his face is of a man attempting to fit a sound into a song title. Recently, on a busy evening, a diner yelled at Howe, “It’s a big night, Bill!”

“What?” Howe yelled back, half-distracted.

“You’re having a big night.”

“Is that a song?” Howe called out, and then, smiling, launched into “Summer Wind.”