Bar room pianist

Live At Maybeck Recital Hall, Volume Two; Dave McKenna, jazz pianist

When I worked on the Crown Odyssey in 1991, there was a solo pianist who worked in the lounge close to the casino where she alternated sets with a harpist. It made for a nice atmosphere. The pianist’s name was P. McKenna. Being American on a ship with Greek crew and with virtually no women her age on the staff (she was in her early 40’s), she would spend her spare time hanging out with members of the band. When I first met her, she made a quick casual reference to some mystery person named Dave McKenna and moved on to something else. Then a few weeks later she mentioned his name again, claiming that she met him one time in a bar where he was playing piano. In her story, she sauntered over to the piano and said that she was a pianist, too, that her name also was McKenna and that maybe they were related. She said that he looked up at her, smiled, winked and said, “Yeah. Cousins.” And kept right on playing. I smiled at her and asked her if that really happened. She said, “Yes.”

About a month later she mentioned his name again and I had to stop her and say - I’m sorry, but I don’t know who Dave McKenna is. She laughed at me and asked, “How can you claim to be any sort of jazz pianist and not have ever heard or heard of Dave McKenna?” Three days later, we were in – you guessed it – Nice, France, at my favorite CD haunt. If Dave McKenna was the uber-pianist she claimed him to be, well, then, he should be represented well in the jazz section. He was.

Live At Maybeck Recital Hall, Vol. 2, features Dave McKenna. This series of forty-two live recordings was taped in front of an audience at the Maybeck Studio for Performing Arts in Berkeley, CA, with each recital featuring a different jazz pianist. Volume ten has Marian McPartland manhandling – uh, - womanhandling the piano. The entire collection was recorded between 1989 and 1995. The Maybeck hall has been purchased since then, and though concerts continue to occur, they are now by invitation only.

Mr. McKenna, known all over the world, was mostly a fixture of the Northeast part of the US. He was born in Rhode Island and played mostly in hotel bars in the Greater Boston area, capping his career with a decade long run at the bar in the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. A loyal Boston Red Sox fan, it was common for him to wear an ear plug from a transistor radio while he performed so that he could listen to the games.

Dave McKenna probably served me more as an unwitting mentor than any other recording artist. My abilities and tastes at the piano come closest to matching his. And I won’t deny that certain musical tricks or traits of his piano persona have invaded my own style of playing. Mr. McKenna would usually choose to downplay his status as a jazz pianist, preferring, instead, the more down-to-earth designation of bar room pianist – or, more accurately, JUST a bar room pianist. Yet, he receives accolades from his jazz colleagues the world over for his contribution to the development of jazz piano as a solo artist. Art Tatum, arguably the greatest soloist in jazz piano history, praised Mr. McKenna as a complete musician.

Dave McKenna passed away last year on October 18 at the age of seventy-eight. On Thanksgiving Day, a few weeks later, after church, I was driving to my cousin’s home near Philadelphia for the holiday. I turned my Sirius XM radio station to NPR to find that Terry Gross from Fresh Air was dedicating her show on that day to the life of Dave McKenna. She interviewed his sister, played several tracks from his numerous CD’s, and inserted clips from a previous show where she had interviewed Mr. McKenna. The show helped me to imagine a real person and I was able to relate to him in a way other than through his music.

On this Thanksgiving Day, I’m thankful that God made us the expressive people that we are, that our joys and sorrows can be shared in ways that engender closer fellowship with each other, that our kinships and friendships are not based on any single dimension but on the myriad of bits and pieces of self that chronicle and detail the life of a Child of God. I am thankful for music. And I am thankful for you. Thank you for reading my blog.

Credits: To P McKenna and people like her, who introduce me to other people, artists, musicians who expressive themselves in unique ways, so that my biography might not become stale, but teem with the life that the Lord intended. Thank you.