Here's a piece my brother, Tom, wrote
Jazz (the patio piano)
People who enjoy jazz are said to make up less than one percent of the commercial music market. This is easy to verify when you’re traveling. For every jazz radio station you might pick up, there are a thousand rock, soul or country stations.
Sales bear this out. The gold standard in pop, rock or country music is a million units, and top acts routinely eclipse that tenfold. By most accounts, the top-selling pop release of all time is Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” clocking in at 110 million units sold worldwide.
By contrast, the entire hundred-year history of recorded jazz has kicked out only three million-sellers: Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” Dave Brubeck’s “Time Out” and Herbie Hancock’s 1973 fusion experiment “Headhunters.”
In other words, jazz seems to be a taste not widely sought or acquired. Yet I acquired it early in childhood and have been hooked ever since. When I ask other “jazz people” how they got into this obscure music, many say they heard it around the house as kids.
The jazz source at our house was a battered upright piano of my dad’s that resided on various seaside patios. The piano joined our family in Waikiki on the shores of Leahi volcano (Diamond Head), lived for a time in suburban Kahala and Aina Haina, then spent its dotage at Portlock, on the shore of another volcano (Koko Head). My dad Bill must have foreseen these moves, for the piano was a compact, solid model equipped with small teak wheels. That’s how it started out, anyway.
The instrument must have been manufactured in the late 1940s or early 1950s. It had “two-tone” decor like many cars of that period. The body and legs were chestnut-colored hardwood, but affixed to the frame were decorative patches of some tough beige naugahyde material. With its “desert camo” color scheme, the piano looked as sturdy as a hiking boot. It had a standard 88-key “ebony and ivory” keyboard and three pedals.
The patio piano was the island successor to instruments Bill had known during a Depression-era childhood in the Midwest. Back then, many homes still had a living room adjunct called a parlor. In the parlor dwelt an upright piano, a spinet, a pump organ, or in a few cases, a baby grand. Someone in the household was expected to be able to play, and the others would gather around to sing. This was “parlor music,” a quaint 19th century custom doomed when the first TV set clicked on.
My dad’s mother Irene was an iron-willed schoolmarm married to a postman, but she had loftier aspirations for her three sons. She sat them each down at the piano and taught them the rudiments. She fully expected them to parlay their keyboard skills into popularity and social success once they got to college. She may have watched one too many Rudy Vallee movies.
The regimen actually worked on one son. My dad’s brother Dave took his piano lessons to heart, went off to college, starred in campus musicals, charmed the coeds, and decided to make music his career.
Equipped with a straw boater, a cane, and a seersucker suit, Uncle Dave became a vaudeville-style “song and dance man.” Alas, his chops were better than his timing: the vaudeville era died as he arrived. He stuck with music, though. After World War Two, Uncle Dave married a doctor and started directing barbershop choruses in San Francisco. Later he would work for SPEBSQSA, the national barbershop music society, criss-crossing the country in a station wagon stuffed with sheet music. Sometime in the late fifties his San Francisco Barbershop group won the "International Barbershop Championship". In SF barbershop quartet circles, he has been canonized for this feat.
My dad cast a wary eye on all of this. He didn’t want to marry a doctor --- he wanted to be one. Being of independent mind, he also resented his mother’s insistence that he study piano. The breaking point came one day when he refused to sit for his lesson because his friends were calling him outside for football. Furious, Irene marched him down to the cellar and threw his football into the furnace.
The piano lessons – and to a certain extent, the relationship -- ended there. But enough piano had crept into my dad that he was able to “get around” on the keyboard thereafter. He was no Horowitz, but he had a good ear for intervals and could play jazz chord progressions in an energetic, percussive “locked hands” style.
In music as in other aspects of his life, my dad eschewed anything “square.” He liked odd time signatures, off-beat keys, and discordant voicings. He had heard Oscar Peterson in Toronto and Art Tatum in Chicago, but those fleet-fingered keyboard geniuses defied imitation. My dad found his true metier the first time he heard Dave Brubeck.
As it happened, Brubeck also played a fair amount of “locked hands” piano as he was coming up in the late 1940s, and he was the antithesis of square. He was fascinated by offbeat tempos and exotic tone rows. Before his famous octet and quartet recordings, Brubeck worked briefly as a single. My dad recalled hearing him shortly after the war at a bar called The Zebra Lounge.
That must have been a eureka moment for my dad. Here was Brubeck, playing “locked hands” piano, banging vigorously away at the keyboard, sounding, as one critic later put it, “like a woodsman chopping down redwood trees.” From that day forward, my dad was a Brubeck devotee. Hence, any house we lived in had to have a piano.
My earliest memories of music probably date from about 1948. I remember falling asleep many nights to my dad’s piano playing. The dark, woody chords walked through the house and into my room like jazz footprints. On other nights, the piano vied with the loud talk, charade games and boozy laughter of parties organized by my mother, Eileen, a literary refugee from Montana.
My dad did in fact become a doctor, then a psychiatrist, but the piano parties didn’t kick in until he and Eileen settled in Hawaii in 1948. He had opened his first practice two years earlier in Colorado Springs in a drafty old Tudor house he had bought. The house had three storeys, five fireplaces, a piano in the parlor, and a carriage house out back.
I have only the dimmest memories of the place from a brief residency there when I was six, but I recall seeing photos of some of the rooms. A baby grand stood in what must have been the parlor, but I have no idea if it ever got played. It may have come with the house, which was spacious enough to include a separate suite of rooms for my dad’s medical practice. My mother had painted some of the rooms jade green; others, Chinese red.
After a couple of bitter winters even the red rooms couldn’t thaw, Dad moved the family to a warmer locale he had visited briefly during the war: The Territory of Hawaii. Vowing never to shiver again, he rented out the big house in Colorado Springs and left the baby grand and the five fireplaces behind.
Once in Honolulu, we lived in a series of rentals while my dad established his new practice. I was two when this sojourn began and 10 when we moved into a home of our own. The rolling upright piano accompanied us from place to place.
During this period, my dad was busy ingratiating himself with Honolulu’s smart set, a group he correctly judged would become his client base. There being only three psychiatrists in the Territory at the time, he set out to position himself as the society shrink.
This involved a great deal of partying, which the smart set was doing anyway. Having survived the horrors and privations of the war, they were eager to kick off their shoes, shake up a pitcher of martinis, light up a Lucky and raise hell. The party set included ex-military couples, various “beach boys,” beatniks and university Bohemians, and canny fortune-hunters lured to Hawaii by its entrepreneurial promise. To be in the smart set, it helped to be young, attractive and hip. As a famous Hank Mobley jazz title of the time put it, there was “no room for squares.”
As a set, these new islanders struck the Territory’s “old guard” merchant and missionary families as boorish, greedy and brash. The old families labeled the pushy new arrivals “the beady-eyed group.”
If the beady-eyed group shared something besides the gentry’s derision, it was a love of music, arts and laughter. While the staid old colonial families honored the strict behavioral norms of their Calvinist forebears, the postwar group was ready to bust down the doors.
At nightclubs, restaurants, hotel showrooms, officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs and in their homes, the postwar crowd launched a rolling party that roared on for years. Its pidgin Hawaiian credo was “okole maluna” (bottoms up), and its organizing principle, if it had one, was Cosmopolitanism. This party was wide open.
One of this period’s iconic events was a hipster masquerade dance called the “Beaux Arts Ball.” Held in a boat house beside Waikiki’s Ala Wai Canal, the event celebrated Bohemianism and sensuality. It drew a mélange of artists, dancers, beach boys, GIs, university types, mixed-race couples, and post-war arrivistes that doubtless horrified the Territory’s old guard.
I was far too young to remember any of this, but I do recall seeing black and white snapshots of my dad at the ball. Costumed as Mercury, messenger of the gods, he had attached little wings to his pith helmet and sandals. A cadeusus staff and a short toga completed the ensemble. Asked about the photos years later, he said guests entered and exited the party by crossing a footbridge made of glass. Beneath the glass, a buxom model reclined in the nude.
At this party and several others from which photos survived, I got the impression the participants were having what my Uncle Dave used to call “just a hell of a time.” Highballs and cigarettes were omnipresent, and someone could usually be seen banging out tunes on a piano. As the party photos progressed, they showed smoke thickening, empties accumulating, candles burning down, and clothes loosening. The music, in all likelihood, was un-squaring itself.
Bill could play rudimentary piano jazz and enjoyed its rhythmic challenges (one of his Brubeck favorites was the tricky “Unsquare Dance). But Eileen may have been more a “jazz person” at heart. A refugee from an unhappy childhood in northern Montana, she had literary and artistic inclinations that manifested as a lifestyle more than a life’s work. Her art, if she had one, was assembling interesting combinations of people. Her métier was the salon. She would have been right at home in 19th century London or in New York in the 1920s.
Eileen died at 39 of breast cancer, so I have only childhood memories of her, and suspiciously few of those. Part of this may have to do with theories of child bereavement prevalent at the time. The practice when a parent died was to gradually “disappear” that person’s images and artifacts from the household so that grieving children could more easily transition to a new guardian or step parent.
Another possible reason I have so few vivid recollections of my mother is that by the time we moved to Hawaii, she was a chronic alcoholic and a confirmed “night person.” I recall her rich, throaty laughter echoing over the party hubbub after my bedtime, but I don’t remember seeing her very often in the mornings. Once my younger brother Mike was old enough to be “minded,” he and I spent most of the daytime hours under the eye of one housekeeper or another.
When our mother did emerge in the late mornings to read the paper, she usually wore a Chinese bathrobe and had her black hair turbaned atop her head in a towel. An unfiltered cigarette smoldered in her fingertips or in a nearby ashtray. Later she would comb her hair out over one shoulder and don silk lounging pajamas. If she were hosting a party that night, she might pin a hibiscus or gardenia into her hair, add some gaudy bangles and cocktail rings, and settle long strands of costume jewelry around her neck. A fresh pack of cigarettes and a bulky silver tabletop lighter were positioned within reach of her fashionably long, scarlet-painted fingernails.
Mike and I were hustled off to bed before party guests arrived, but we would sometimes tiptoe to some vantage where we could glimpse the proceedings. Thus I have a hazy mental image of Eileen hosting her artists “salon” in the final years of her life. When entertaining, she favored Chinese-style silk pajamas or slinky cheongsams fashioned from the bright, floral rayons popular in postwar Honolulu. In the afternoons, she might wear toreador pants with an oversized “silkie” aloha shirt knotted at the waist.
Cigarette holder in one hand, highball in the other, she would array herself amid bright Chinese pillows on a broad, island-style couch called a “punee” or “hikie.” This was her command post. Guests would join her on the punee or sit nearby in rattan chairs and couches. A rattan service bar along one wall held bottles, cracked ice, highball glasses, drink garnishes, and martini shakers. Jazz and dance music issued from a hi-fi set, or when my dad was in the mood, from the piano on the patio. The sounds of laughter, conversation, dancing, singing, jazz and even poetry formed the lullaby of my early youth.
Eileen conducted these smoky soirees from her sofa, greeting new arrivals, directing the provision of music, drink and edibles, and enlivening the tropic nights with ribald stories and her rich laughter. I was to learn later that her guest lists ran to painters, poets, writers, photographers, Waikiki beach boys and other hard-drinking characters more marginal financially than the upwardly mobile “beady eyed group” my dad was cultivating for his psychiatry practice.
Clients from my mother’s party set who patronized my dad professionally in the early years of his practice tended to pay for treatment by bartering. Thus, at one point, a wire pen full of chickens and rabbits appeared in an alley beside our rental house. An odd gallery of oil portraits, seascapes, and watercolors also lined the walls courtesy of struggling artists who assured my dad they would soon be famous.
