Artis Wodehouse

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, DECEMBER 17, 1995

The Flying Pianist And Other Wizards Of the Keyboard

By Barbara Jepson

he comedian Fred Allen dubbed Pauline Alpert "The Young Lady Who Sounds Like Two Pianos." Radio stations promoted her as the Whirlwind Pianist. But the most bizarre nickname for Alpert, one of a dozen or so artists to be featured in "Keyboard Wizards of the Gershwin Era,'' a new reissue project from Pearl Records, was Flying Pianist, in a 1920's vaudeville show.

"They called her the Lindbergh of the piano." said Artis Wodehouse, a historian of music performance, who is producing "Keyboard Wizards." "Alpert and her piano were coated with phosphorescent paint, attached to ropes and pulleys, and hoisted above a darkened stage, where she played while circling above the dancers." (After a pulley snapped and Ms. Alpert narrowly avoided an accident, the story goes, she wrote a piano solo entitled "Perils of Pauline")

The Alpert CD (Pearl 9201) is the first of a projected seven, showcasing performances by pianists, largely classically trained, whose careers flourished in the pop arena during the 1920's and 30's. They include "novelty piano" stylists like Alpert, Zez Confrey, Rube Bloom, Victor Arden and Phil Ohman as well as crossover composers like Dana Suesse, whom The New Yorker termed "the girl Gershwin." "These people fell in the cracks," said Ms. Wodehouse, who also supervised "Gershwin Plays Gershwin,'' the best-selling Nonesuch reissue, and its recent successor. "George Gershwin: The Piano Rolls," Volume 2 (Nonesuch 79370-2; CD). "They were neither classical nor pop, and when music started bifurcating into its many areas of specialization after World War II, they just vanished. What bin did they fit in?"

Indeed, novelty piano is a zany amalgam of Tin Pan Alley tunes and 19th-century, Lisztian salon music; it incorporates the syncopated rhythms of ragtime and the stride piano of jazz. It originated in 1921, when ragtime was on the wane, with the publication of Confrey's "Kitten on the Keys," which sold a million copies during its first year in print.

The 27 short keyboard solos on the Pearl disk, recorded by Alpert in the 40's, are characteristic of the genre. As Alex Hassan, a collector and performer of novelty piano, notes in informative liner notes, the music is improvised but highly arranged with the principal melody subjected to all kinds of flashy embellishments.

Ms. Alpert's arrangements are typically hyperkinetic and mercurial, segueing seamlessly from one musical idiom to the next, with frequent classical and pop interpolations. It is a pity they are unavailable in sheet-music form.

"Glow Worm," for example, begins with a quotation from "The Night They Invented Champagne,'' moves into the "Glow Worm" melody in a straightforward manner that dissolves into tango rhythms, and ultimately recapitulates the theme in block chords followed by glissandos up the keyboard. "Where or When," the Rodgers and Hart standard, starts with the opening chords of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. By contrast, Rimsky-Korsakov's "Song of India," a popular entry in classical anthologies of "piano favorites," is rendered with madcap rhythm, including a chugging, choo-choo beat in the left hand. Although the quality of the selections sags toward the end of the disk's 72 minutes, most of the music is delightful.

Through it all, Alpert shines. Hers is a keyboard persona of virtuosity, playfulness and verve. A native New Yorker born around 1900, she studied at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. At the height of her career, she performed in revues, made more than 50 piano rolls, appeared on national radio broadcasts and played at the White House three times. She wrote at least six short piano solos, three of which are included here. "Dream of a Doll," for one, is a wistful, bluesy piece, slight but charming.

For greater compositional and expressive depth, listeners will have to await Volume 2 of the Pearl series. Scheduled for release in February, it presents Suesse performing her own music. Her career encompassed pop hits like "You Oughta Be in Pictures" and concert music like the Jazz Concerto in D for Combo and Orchestra. She studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the matron saint of American composers.

In addition to Confrey, the best known of the novelty pianists, future disks will be devoted to Roy Bargy, Felix Arndt, John Green and a surprising number of women, including the composers Muriel Pollock and Vee Lawnhurst, and the pianist Constance Mering. But all of these "keyboard wizards" were ultimately eclipsed by the formidable Gershwin himself, an injustice Ms. Wodehouse hopes to redress.

"Confrey, by virtue of the wide distribution of his numerous piano rolls, initiated a whole style of piano playing that influenced Gershwin and others," she said. "Gershwin conceded that in the introduction to his 'Songbook.'"

nother reason these pianists dropped out of sight is that many developed tragic illnesses. Arndt died at around 29 in a flue epidemic. Mering retired prematurely after contracting tuberculosis. Confrey suffered from epilepsy. Alpert virtually disappeared after the 1950's. By 1978, when Amica, an organization of piano roll collectors, invited her to perform at a convention, she was hunched over and unable to walk without crutches. Yet by all accounts, she played with pizzazz.

"They all faded," Ms. Wodehouse said. "That really fuels me, because it's a shame. But hey, it's not going to be a shame anymore."

Indeed, the rediscovery process is under way, spurred initially by the 1970's revival of ragtime. In 1985. Ronald Riddle published the first major study of novelty piano in an anthology on ragtime, asserting that its devices can be heard not only in Gershwin but also in Ravel's Piano Concerto in G (1931) and Martinu's Eight Preludes (1929).

Folkways has issued perhaps the greatest number of novelty pianist recordings, and Sights and Sounds, a small company in Malverne, L.I., reissued a disk of Confrey performances last winter. Current artists have also tackled this repertory, including the jazz pianist Dick Hyman, in "Kitten on the Keys" on RCA, and the contemporary-music specialist Alan Feinberg, in "Fascinatin' Rhythm" on Argo.

As producer of "Keyboard Wizards," Ms. Wodehouse's mandate was to find the best music and the best recorded examples available. That meant functioning as a musical sleuth, contacting artists' relatives, estate executors, collectors and scholars, with one source typically leading to another. Among the treasures uncovered during her four-year search were two of Alpert's scrapbooks, which had been passed down to the daughter of a friend and stashed in a closet. Another was an old trunk belonging to Paul Confrey, Zez Confrey's son, which contained some 1940's acetate promotional disks on which Confrey performs his music, occasionally singing in a slight, cracked voice.

Pearl hired Seth B. Winner, an engineer specializing in reissues, to transfer the original recordings to digital tape, cleaning up the sound as much as possible. It was a daunting task. Some selections were available only on early, acoustic recordings; others on worn 78-r.p.m. disks or radio broadcast acetates.

Moat of the Alpert selections were taken from recordings made for Associated Program Service-Muzak and are clear as a bell. But a half dozen recordings transferred from Victor and Sonora 78's have a fair amount of surface scratch.

s. Wodehouse interest in the piano music of the 20's and 30's grew out of her research into Gershwin. While working as a freelance pianist in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1980's, she stumbled on a 1920's recording of Gershwin performing his "Rhapsody in Blue." "I realized that his playing didn't sound like that of the classical performers I had heard," she said. "it wasn't shapely in the nuanced, refined manner we associate with classical music. It's tighter, more visceral, more lowdown, more up-tempo and heavily accented, like dance music."

She spend some 1,500 hours transcribing Gershwin piano improvisations, many of which had never been notated, from Columbia 78's and published the results in 1987. After investigating Gershwin's piano rolls and the novelty piano style, she became involved in Nonesuch's Gershwin project, which used modern technology to transfer the fragile, punched-out paper rolls to compact disk. Gershwin's "reproducing rolls," made for expensive player pianos that automatically executed the notes and dynamics, were converted to floppy-disk format for playback using a Yamaha Disklavier, a grand piano equipped with optic sensors and a computer. Ms. Wodehouse activated Gershwin's less expensive, "88-note rolls" using foot pumps on a 1911 Aeolian pianola, a bulky device with expression levers and felt-tipped fingers. The results were recorded by the Disklavier in a spooky, "performerless" recording session, the keys moving up and down like those of an old player piano.

Because the newer Gershwin disk contains more selections realized with the aid of foot pumping, it has greater variation in tempo than the earlier one. Purists may object to Ms. Wodehouse's intervention in these historic performances, but most of the original rolls were themselves overdubbed and enhanced. To my ears, the subtle tempo fluctuations and dynamic nuances accomplished by Ms Wodehouse's energetic foot-pumping add measurable to the music.

Among the ingratiating selections on Volume 2 is "Waitin' for Me," a wonderfully appealing piece by Maceo Pinkard, a black composer best known for "Sweet Georgia Brown." Many of these tunes have been recorded by other pianists, but Gershwin's performances of music from the golden age of Tin Pan Alley have not previously been available to the public.

Ms. Wodehouse's next Nonesuch project, recording piano rolls of Jelly Roll Morton, also has good commercial prospects. The success of "Gershwin Plays Gershwin," which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies, enabled her to undertake the Pearl recordings.

"I lost money on the Pearl series," she said, "but I make so much money with 'Gershwin Plays Gershwin' that I really felt I should put it back in the field. These pianists had been forgotten, but they were there, too, and I felt, hey, it's a little bit of a rescue-fantasy type thing."