Photo of pianist Donald Ryan.
This post is a continuation from Cultural Leadership: Part III
Like all of us working musicians, there are times we do what we must to take care of “business.” One night the bar musician, or picking up odd jobs here and there, the next we present on the grandest of stages. We travel through the classes of society in a way that few others experience. We adapt.
When I was about ten or eleven-ish, my mother, her twin sister (wife of Donald Ryan) and I went to a hotel bar in Tulsa, Oklahoma to hear my uncle play on a high gloss baby grand. I recall dressing up and feeling fancy as we joined the black mini-dress patrons, sipping our non-alcoholic beverages and watching Uncle Donald play in his tuxedo. The lighting was low and the space felt very luxurious to me, people huddled in conversation, yet his great talent felt unnoticed in that place. The depth of his playing taken for granted under the talking and laughing, the clinking glasses distracting from his beautiful cadences. I felt angry, “Don’t you know what magnificence is happening over here people!?!?!?!“ Perhaps some might say a pianist at a bar is not a context for deep listening. That may be so. My uncle seemed unshaken and played on magnificently.