Joe Bushkin, 87; Jazz Pianist Worked With Sinatra, Crosby, Billie Holiday

Joe Bushkin, an exuberant, swing-era jazz pianist best known for his work with Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, has died. He was 87.

Bushkin died in his sleep Wednesday at his Santa Barbara home of complications from pneumonia, according to his son-in-law, Bob Merrill.

The eclectic jazzman sang, wrote songs and played trumpet as well as piano, equally at ease in small groups or big bands, in clubs, recording studios or on the Broadway stage and Hollywood movie sets.

Brought up around music -- his immigrant barber father kept a cello at hand to play between haircuts -- Bushkin began playing the piano at age 10, and by 13 he was considered a prodigy.

He first got paid for playing in the summer of 1932 with Frank LeMarr’s band at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, and he quickly moved up to a better-paying job at the Prince George Hotel in Hoboken, N.J. The teenager’s working hours were unorthodox -- 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. -- but he was making $40 a night, a considerable sum during the Depression.

The money and the hours, however, attracted the attention of his father, who quietly followed Bushkin to work one night. He immediately pulled his son out of the hotel after discovering that it was really a brothel.

By the mid-1930s, Bushkin was working as the intermission pianist at the Famous Door, a New York jazz club where trumpeter Bunny Berigan had a band that featured the noted guitarist Eddie Condon. Called to fill in one night for the pianist, who had passed out, Bushkin earned a place with the band and began to make a name for himself as a jazz player.

Within the year, Bushkin had become a popular recording session player in New York and played backup to Billie Holiday on one of her first record dates under her own name.

From 1940 to 1942, he played in the Tommy Dorsey band. While there, the band’s featured singer, a young Frank Sinatra, recorded “Oh! Look at Me Now,” a song Bushkin wrote with Johnny De Vries, and it became a hit.

During World War II, Bushkin played trumpet, an instrument he had picked up as a youth, in the Army Air Forces band and was assistant musical director for the Moss Hart show “Winged Victory,” which played on Broadway for several months. With De Vries, he also co-wrote “Hot Time in the Town of Berlin,” which was a small hit for Crosby and Sinatra.

After the war, Bushkin played a band leader in Garson Kanin’s Broadway play “The Rat Race” and years later reprised his role in the film version, which starred Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds. Bushkin and Kanin also collaborated on a number of songs.

The 1950s and ‘60s were productive for Bushkin. With his quartet, he found a steady gig at the Embers, a leading club on New York’s West 54th Street. In 1951, he led Sinatra’s backup band in the singer’s “comeback” engagement, and, in 1953, he toured and recorded with the great Louis Armstrong. Bushkin led several bands under his own name, recorded well-received albums for Columbia and Capitol and continued to write songs, including some with noted lyricist Johnny Burke.

But as musical tastes in the country turned more to rock ‘n’ roll, Bushkin went into semi-retirement in the early 1970s and raised thoroughbred horses in Santa Barbara. He worked on a Christmas television special with Crosby and Fred Astaire in 1975 and went on the road as Crosby’s musical director. One of the last recordings Crosby made before his death was on an album Bushkin was making to benefit the Norwegian Red Cross.

Through the 1980s and early ‘90s, Bushkin made limited appearances in his native New York City at the Cafe Carlyle, the St. Regis and Michael’s Pub.

He is survived by his wife, Francice Netcher Bushkin; four daughters, Nina Bushkin Judson, Maria Stave, Tippy Bushkin and Christina Merrill; and six grandchildren.

A private family funeral is planned for today, which would have been Bushkin’s 88th birthday.

“He always wanted to make it to his 88th birthday because there are 88 keys on the piano,” said Merrill, his son-in-law.