“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” —Thelonious Monk
They say that every piano has a great story to tell, of all the people who have sat at her keys, playing innumerable songs, and often residing in many different places. This is one such story.
During the height of the Great Recession in 2008, I moved back to Seattle to look for a teaching job at one of the many universities in and around the city. I had sold my house years earlier, and because of the ongoing housing crisis, it was extremely difficult to find a decent apartment anywhere in the city. Finally I did, however, and shortly after moving in I saw a 5 x 7 card thumbtacked to the corkboard in the downstairs lobby, which simply read, “Baby Grand Piano $500.” I called the number on the card, which turned out to be one of my downstairs neighbors who was moving into an assisted living facility. Her two elderly nieces were emptying out her apartment and thus, her piano had been put up for sale. I felt a twinge of sadness, but at their invitation I went downstairs to have a look.
The woman who answered the door greeted me warmly and we began a conversation about her aunt who had lived in the apartment for over 20 years, which was about as long as I had been playing as a professional musician. I could see the dark mahogany baby grand in the corner, surrounded by décor from the 1930s—a pristine, antique couch, a brass torchiere lamp, original oil paintings depicting various European cities, and a giant Persian carpet in the middle of it all. There were also the expected cardboard boxes being filled with the collected memorabilia of a very long lifetime emblazoned with travel and adventure. It was a moment in history, a time capsule of a glamorous era I could only imagine, all contained within the relatively small space of a ground floor apartment.
I sat down at the piano and after playing a few clumsy jazz chords, I could hear that it was a beautiful instrument indeed. I told them that I needed to think about it and would definitely get back to them. The truth is, I had decided to buy it the moment I saw it, but the recession had financially destroyed me back in New Mexico and with the move back to Seattle and starting a new job, I just didn’t have an extra $500 lying around (not to mention the expense of moving it up three flights of stairs). I needed some time to figure out how to raise the cash— maybe I could sell a piece of the recording equipment I had in storage?
Over the course of the following week, the two nieces came and went with boxes of their aunt’s treasure. One of them told me that she herself was 91 years old, but she was as clear-eyed and energetic as anyone in their 60s. One of the boxes she was carrying was full of turn-of-the- century sheet music, with the beautiful painted covers and original price tags that said 5 cents or 10 cents. On top of the sheet music was an antique miniature bride and groom from her aunt’s original wedding cake. In the course of my daily movements around the building I helped them load a few of the heavier things into their car and during one of these encounters they started telling me stories about their “Auntie Baba.”
It began with two black and white photos from the 1920s, so old that they had turned a beautiful sepiatone bronze color. In the photos was a very young and very beautiful Auntie Baba, whose real name, she revealed, was Rosetta Cleary. In the photo she was dressed in a full-length mink coat and a matching fur beret with a peacock feather sticking out of the top. I immediately said, “Wow, what a beautiful and elegant woman,” and I was about to add, “She looks like a flapper!” but then I thought better of it, thinking that the term might be an insult to these conservative looking ladies.
Before the flapper comment could even escape my mouth, the 91-year-old exclaimed with glee, “She was a flapper!” and we both laughed in mutual understanding. She went on to tell me how their exotic Auntie Baba would come visit them during the Great Depression, wearing flapper dresses with black fringe, and always wearing a string of pearls. She would teach them how to dance the Foxtrot, and they’d even smoke a cigarette on occasion. A favorite ritual was to draw a little birthmark on their cheeks, to make them feel a little more elegant and stylish in the grinding poverty of the Great Depression. This was a time when people had literally nothing except for the clothes on their backs and barely enough food to eat—but maybe a dance lesson and a birthmark drawn by their favorite, slightly wild aunt could ease the suffering a bit.
Auntie Baba never had any children of her own, and when her beloved husband of over 50 years finally died, she never remarried. Instead, she continued to play the baby grand on a daily basis, surrounded by her elegant furniture, Persian carpet, and the paintings, which she had bought on their trips to Europe. The piano, I was told, had been a wedding gift from her husband so many years earlier and it was her prized possession. Apparently after she was widowed, she got a gig playing piano on a cruise ship that sailed from Seattle to Alaska, and that was her last professional job—as an ocean-going piano player. That’s when I knew I had to buy this piano no matter what, to protect it, to preserve it, and to play it.
It was an American made Price & Teeple, with a 5-foot soundboard and a dark brown mahogany body. It was sun bleached in a few spots from the windows in her sunny apartment, but even that gave it a more elegant, antiqued look. I looked up Price and Teeple and found that it was a defunct family-owned business that was started in the late 1800s in Chicago, the heartland of American piano making. P & T made good, solid, affordable pianos well into the 1960s, marketed for the American family parlor. They were not particularly fancy, in fact, their design was very simple and elegant, yet they were widely praised for their quality and affordable prices. It’s exactly the kind of piano you’d want to have in your own home—classy but not ostentatious. Nowadays, most consumer level pianos are made in China or South Korea, and American made pianos are mostly antiques. This was a rare find indeed.
I told the nieces about my varied music career, how I started out as a classically trained jazz and orchestral percussionist, before I had been seduced by the dark lord of rock & roll. But that was many years ago and I was now working on a solo career and a recent appointment as a professor of music at a local university. I told them how my lectures that week were focused on blues, jazz, and swing bands from the early 1900s up through World War II. The nieces smiled in agreement about how much they loved that era of music, and they remembered dancing to the big swing bands when they were young women. Of course it was Auntie Baba who had turned them on to that music—she was always way ahead of the times in that regard. Our conversation went on for quite some time and they seemed to love the historical stroll we were taking, because I too grew up on that music in the form of my grandparent’s record collection. These ladies, however, had lived it in real time, back when it was America’s hippest music.
Another week passed and the nieces never received another call from anyone interested in the baby grand. People often forget that pianos are quite a bit harder to sell than you might expect, largely because they are expensive to purchase, sometimes the most valuable thing in a home. More importantly, you need the space for it, you have to hire a professional mover to move it (another big expense), and you usually have to play the piano in the first place, something that fewer and fewer people seem to do. A couple generations ago, there was usually at least one person in a household who played piano, just as my grandmother did. Nowadays, a piano in the home is rare, but you will find 3 computers, a couple of tablets, and a smart phone for everyone in the house. Instead of playing piano, they play video games.
The nieces asked me if I still wanted to buy it, “I did,” I said, “but I hadn’t raised the money yet.” I explained that even though I was a professor, I had a very small salary, and I was also in the final stages of finishing a solo album and that was taking all the extra cash I had. On top of that, I had ankle surgery coming up that was going to lay me out me for a few months. In general, I was broke, but I acknowledged that it was nothing compared to what they had gone through in the 1930s.
I advised them that they should try and sell it at an estate auction, because certainly someone was bound to bid on it and they would get a much better price. They immediately countered and said, “Well, we’ve already considered that, and we’ve decided that we want you to have the piano if you can just pay for the piano movers.” They had all agreed that the piano should go to a real musician, and not the auctioneer’s block; that’s what Auntie Baba would have wanted. They didn’t need the money anyway, they winked. I was stunned at their generosity, but I graciously accepted and I called the piano movers that same afternoon. The following day they moved the piano into my upstairs apartment for exactly $200.
I moved it again years later, this time to a house on the other end of Seattle. It was the same moving company and even the same team of movers, led by a wonderful gentleman who had emigrated from Mexico. My wife, who is also Mexican, spoke with him in Spanish and we found out that his son had just been accepted to Harvard. This news made us all very happy, and it was all because we were standing around that beautiful, baby grand.
I’m looking at it now, there in the living room. It has a dark, rich tone, almost smoky in its timbre. I’ve used it to compose many songs, and it’s the same piano you’ll hear on the album that accompanies this book. I’ve used it to orchestrate ideas for other albums I have produced, including an album that won a Latin Grammy, so now the baby grand has a golden Grammy statue sitting on her flank. Every time I walk past her I admire the simple design and the rich, dark wood. It beckons me to come and sit, which I frequently do, without even having a musical idea in my head. It’s the sitting at the keys that creates the space for the ideas to come, the emptiness and potentiality of music—that’s when the Muses come, and every piano player knows this great truth.
Sometimes I imagine Rosetta Cleary sitting there on the piano bench, her beloved husband leaning against the far end of the sounding board. She is playing from some sheet music on the music stand, a song they both love. He’s smiling while she’s singing and he tries to harmonize with her naturally gifted voice, but he’s a little off key because he was never a musician, but he sure loved his musician-wife. The song they are singing is one of their favorites, they used to dance to it, a long, long time ago when a jazz band came to town and they danced the foxtrot.
I’m writing this story because I want to remind you of something we so easily forget, and that is that every elderly person you meet was, not so long ago, a young, beautiful, optimistic human being with an entire life ahead of them. Some of them might have been flappers, some might have been jazz musicians, and some might have even been rock & rollers. They were cool and hip for the times in which they lived, aware of the artistic and social movements that shaped their generation. That was their time and they lived it, fully. Please show them deep respect, because you’ll be there sooner than you realize.
When you really think about it, all we leave behind when our life comes to an end are the few things we have collected in this life, the sacred objects that our children (or nieces and nephews) will later go through when they pack up the house and say, “Wow, what’s the story on this thing, what did it mean to them?” They can’t begin to imagine the glorious history behind each artifact and the profound meaning attached to it. More importantly is the way we touch people throughout our lives, through our music, our stories, and the adventures we sing, play, act, and write down for other people to enjoy.
Rosetta Cleary is surely long gone from this Earth, as are likely her 2 nieces. What she so generously left to me, someone she never met, was not just her beloved baby grand.
She also gave me the story that goes with it.