As I write in Chapter 25 of my novel, The Musician, “No matter how episodic and desultory their lives, there is one constant for most musicians: their instruments. Notwithstanding a horn or drum set pawned to resolve some economic crisis, the relationship between musician and musical instrument is more steadfast than most marriages, their marriages at least.”
Except for pianist and piano. When a job involves performing on a piano owned and maintained by the location, especially if the location is not a high-end performance venue, the piano can be troubling, in particular the tuning. Even some jazz clubs thought of as premier performance venues have bad pianos that don’t hold a tune.
Of course you do what you can upfront, which typically involves a call to check in on the condition of the instrument. As I go on to explain in Chapter 25, “The promise of a quality instrument recently tuned, if not a lie, is typically perfunctory. It is a persistent professional annoyance for which there is no known solution. Booked where you haven’t been, and can’t get there beforehand to check it out, you can only pray the keys will not stick, the hammers will attack the strings with some degree of accuracy, and the strings will vibrate according to their designated frequencies.” The chapter proceeds with the telling of a “bad piano” horror story.
The more common occurrence is that the piano you will be faced with will be a marginal instrument, maybe a little bit abused—that is, not in tune or can’t hold a tune for long. An out-of-tune piano is a painful experience, even though it might be limited to the pianist and other band members. Many people don’t hear the instrument as out of tune, so the pianist is sentenced to a lonely night of sour sounds and in some cases devoting time to trying to avoid playing the particularly out-of-tune keys.
Bad pianos are a too-frequent encounter and one more reason for audiences to be particularly kind to the person sitting behind the keyboard, to heed the plea so oft repeated in old westerns: “Don’t shoot the piano player.”