Silver Tones and Golden Arches

Consider the piano man. Just listen for a while. From jazz to classical to mambo, from Ellington to Chopin to Puente, just about any kind of music rolls off his nimble fingers. He scats sometimes, too, and croons a bar or two of the blues. He bounces lightly as he plays, as if dancing with the latest in a long line of baby grands he’s partnered all his life.

He’s the piano man of the Golden Arches, the maestro of McDonaldland. He is David George Preudhomme, 66. Six days a week, from his balcony perch overlooking the financial district in the atrium of a huge, pink-neon-lit McDonald’s restaurant, he churns out his many tunes. McDonald’s officials aren’t totally sure, but say they don’t think any of their other restaurants has a regular pianist.

He plays as if he’s still jamming in one of the hot jazz clubs of his past. Completing a lovely “Satin Doll” the other day, he mumbled the name “Billy Strayhorn,” one of the Duke Ellington song’s composers. Though no one even applauded, the piano man said later, “Sometimes I like to imagine I’m playing in a big place again.”

Lovers of Latin jazz will remember the New York-based Joe Panama Sextet he led to some critical acclaim. His music was popular and respected in the 1950s and ‘60s, until times changed and music styles with it.

And after a long journey through the ballrooms, stages, hotel lounges and cafes that are the pianist’s life, “Joe Panama” landed here in 1999, beneath the golden arches. He’s prepared to play wherever there’s a piano and a paycheck.

“I don’t care where I play my piano,” Preudhomme says, doubling over with laughter. But seriously, he says: “I take it like this. I’m giving it my best effort, wherever I play. It could be the middle of the street. I’ll still be kickin’.” He bobs and weaves as he speaks, still kickin’ indeed.

Because it’s a block from ground zero, many of the customers are firefighters, and other workers at the Trade Center site. They wear hard hats, carry respirators and are covered with ash. Sometimes the piano man plays patriotic tunes.

Lots of other working stiffs, in suits and ties, eat there, too. The Nasdaq building is just across the street and the New York Stock Exchange is three blocks away.

Lower Manhattan passes outside his perch, and he looks to it for inspiration. In fact, from inside the McDonald’s at 160 Broadway you see Panama’s back more than his front. He doesn’t look at the diners much. He’s too high up to really interact with them, save for the occasional patron who’ll yell up a request. So he watches the world outside and plays a spontaneous soundtrack.

“Out there gives me a push. It inspires me,” he says of the bustle of lower Broadway. “I look at the people and I think about the World Trade Center and I look at the expressions of people walking by and I think to myself how it’s changed.”

In his long list of many gigs around town, he says, he played several months in 1998 at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the trade center’s north tower. Around the same time, Preudhomme got a job filling in on piano at the McDonald’s, becoming the latest in a line of piano men going back to the restaurant’s opening in 1988.

Last July Preudhomme was on his perch, wailing away on a fast tune. “I made one of those big piano moves and wham! It hit me like a bomb. Pain! You can’t breathe. You start sweating.”

The heart attack was huge. He attributes it to a life of eating pig knuckles and pig feet, though smoking and drinking might have played a part, too. After weeks of hospitalization, and open-heart surgery, he returned to the Brooklyn apartment he shares with Bullet, his German shepherd. That’s where he was Sept. 11.

The McDonald’s, virtually buried in the blanket of ash that covered lower Manhattan, managed to reopen a couple of weeks after the attacks. Preudhomme finally, returned to work in early November and wore a mask for a time to filter out smoke and dust.

He was born in the Bronx. It was his father who came from Panama. And it was his mother, from Dominica, who pushed him toward music when he was 5. He started playing the Latin jazz circuit as a teen.

He was never a star. But he had a name back in the 1950s, ‘60s, even ‘70s. With timbales, vibes, conga, bass, piano and vocalist, the Joe Panama Sextet swirled in the musical ferment that, for a time, built a bridge between black and brown New York. The Latin jazz groups, whose leading lights were the likes of Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez, were all the rage in the ‘50s in the Harlem social clubs. Preudhomme played the circuit, in places like the St. Nicholas Arena and Celebrity Club, even the famous Savoy Ballroom. Downtown he played the Palladium at 55th and Broadway. Max Salazar, a Bronx-based Latin music historian and journalist, remembers hearing Panama play and says Joe was a “Class A” pianist very much in the music mix of those times.

“He was a great pianist,” says Salazar, who writes for Latin Beat magazine. “I remember hearing him one night in Harlem. He sounded great. He was swinging. He could have made it. But there’s a lot of politics in music. They fight for top billing, all those things.”

Preudhomme cut one boogaloo/Latin soul album in 1967, “The Explosive Side of Joe Panama.” He worked resorts in the Catskills upstate and a few lengthy gigs in Manhattan. Widowed in 1991, he spent most of the 1990s at the piano bar of Mimi’s Restaurant on the East Side.

He will remain, he says, a man trying to improve his craft. “After watching all the greats playing--the Ellingtons, the Brubecks, the Oscar Petersons, the Billy Taylors--I realized that you can’t play at all compared to them. I still view myself as a student of music.”

Sure, deep down, who wouldn’t want to cut another album? But he doesn’t think it’s in the cards. So each day, he takes the subway in from Brooklyn. He climbs the stairs to his perch, leaning heavily on the banister. His heart is still a concern. He walks down a long corridor that leads to the front of the restaurant, where his latest dance partner, his latest piano, awaits.