Day 341: The Piano Shop On the Left Bank

Less than a week later a knock sounded on our door at the appointed time, loud and insistent, as if someone could not be bothered to use the bell. When I opened the door there stood before me an older man of about my height but with fully twice my mass in his upper body. His torso was the size and shape of a bass drum; he seemed to be all chest. Behind him, almost hidden by his bulk, lurked a slender young man with a narrow mustache and a nervous look on his face. The large man addressed me in a gruff voice. “You’re expecting a piano.”

“That’s right.”

“Where do you want me to put it?”

“Please come in and I’ll show you.”

We live on what in France is called the premier étage, one up from ground level. Our front door opens from a small, plant-filled courtyard onto a straight staircase that leads directly up to our apartment. He took this in as we ascended and he grunted approvingly: “No spiral staircase, that’s good.”

I thought of all the tiny twisting staircases that are so common in Paris and wondered what contortions must sometimes be necessary to deliver pianos. When I indicated the corner of the main room where I wanted the piano, he nodded. “No interior doors or hallways; this will be quick.”

“Will you and your crew need anything special for the assembly?” I assumed that there were at least three or four other men in a truck at the curb, waiting with the piano.

“What crew?”

“I mean . . . Well, how will you get the piano up here? Do you put a ramp on the staircase or something?”

“We’ll bring it up the same way we always do. Trust me; we’ve done this before.”

With that, he and the skinny young man marched down the stairs, leaving the front door wide open. Less than two minutes later I heard a chuffing noise out in the courtyard. I looked out the window and saw a huge black mass—our legless piano—making its way across the cobblestones, borne sideways on the shoulder of the barrel-chested man. The assistant trailed behind, his hand on the tail of the piano but apparently bearing none of its enormous weight.

At the open front door they paused and set the back tip of the piano on the doormat. I raced down the stairs, utterly amazed at what I had just seen and unsure how they proposed to come up the staircase. The older man stood before me, the piano strapped to his back with wide brown leather straps blackened and shiny from years of sweat. They ran diagonally over his shoulders and under his arms and looped around the piano so that the side curve of the cabinet hooked across his right shoulder, its snub tail resting on the ground. He was breathing heavily.

“Surely it’s not just the two of you! Can I help somehow?”

“Monsieur,” he stammered as he gasped for air, “I’ll tell you what I tell all our clients. Just stand clear and let us do our work.”

I ran up the stairs, baffled by how such a huge weight and massive bulk could be moved up the staircase by these two. Suddenly from below came a hoarse and rhythmic shout:

“Un, deux, trois: allez!”

The older man leaned into his straps and tilted forward so the full weight of the piano—nearly six hundred pounds—rested once again on his back. He then headed up the stairs, slowly but methodically. I watched, horrified but fascinated, powerless to help. The piano bowed him low and the straps disappeared into his flesh, pressing deep furrows through his shirt into the muscle and bone below. The younger man followed behind, carrying nothing but holding the tip of the piano and pushing it forward. I thought of the dragging tail wheel on an old airplane whose sole function is to stabilize.

About a third of the way up the stairs the man paused and stood partly up from his stoop. There was a precarious wobble as the mass of the piano swayed lightly and I had a vision of a singular disaster on our staircase; if the piano went, this man went, too. He was literally strapped to his load.

He exhaled hugely, like a draft animal at maximum exertion, and straightened a little. Then, with a quick intake of air through his clenched teeth, he leaned back into the straps and continued up the steps. This pause was repeated once more before the top, all the more terrifying for being higher on the staircase. The young man’s position was almost comically dangerous, as in a cartoon; if the piano slipped he would be crushed instantly.

At last the summit was achieved and the tail of the piano set down once again. The man before me had been transfigured into a red-faced mass of sweating muscle and bulging veins. As if to pause too long would break some strange spell that gave him power, after only a few seconds he once again hefted the entire cabinet and crossed the room, each footstep shaking the apartment mightily. He set it down in the corner on its side. At once the younger man attached two of the legs to the exposed underside. Then the older man lifted the piano to the horizontal while his assistant scurried underneath and attached the third leg.

The whole undertaking from the bottom of the stairs had taken perhaps three minutes, but I felt as if we had shared some major life experience. I had just witnessed the single most extraordinary feat of human strength that I could imagine.

~~The Piano Shop On the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion In a Paris Atelier -by- Thad Carhart

Day 262:The Jazz Exiles

As the war raged on in Europe, a musical revolution, spearheaded by the standard-bearers of bebop, was taking place on New York's 52nd Street. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk led a brigade of experimenters who sought to free themselves from the confines of the big swing bands and into the more adventuresome harmonic and rhythmic complexities of what would become known as bebop. In Europe, the boom in traditional jazz continued, but even in America the new developments in jazz were obscured by an additional factor.

A recording ban, which went into effect on August 1, 1942, and lasted until the fall of 1944, prevented anything like a mass audience from hearing the bands of Earl "Fatha" Hines, singer-trumpeter Billy Eckstineboth of whom employed a number of bebop musiciansor the small groups of Gillespie and Parker.
   
By 1945, bebop was firmly entrenched, and its effects were already causing reverberations in the big dance bands that had been the mainstay of the swing era. The bebop innovators injected their own ideas into the big band format and forged an entirely new music. In addition to Gillespie, Parker, and Miles Davis, pianists Bud Powell and George Wallington, bassist Oscar Pettiford, and drummers Max Roach and Kenny Clarke all sought and found new outlets for a new music. Pianist Tadd Dameron would emerge as the most important arranger of this period. Of these key musicians, four would become exiles.   

Although there were a number of holdouts from the more traditional forms of jazz, many of the leading swing players found themselves working alongside the beboppers in the clubs that dotted 52nd Street. Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young were two such musicians, but it was tenor saxophonist Don Byas who was regarded as the best to bridge the gap between swing and bebop. For Byas, 52nd Street proved to be only a brief stopover on the road to Europe, where he would become the first important modern exile. Byas had come to New York with Eddie Mallory's band in 1937. He remained for eighteen months before brief stints with Don Redman, Lucky Millinder, and Andy Kirk. In 1941, Byas joined the Count Basie Band. When he got off the bus in 1943, he began to work with Gillespie, a number of all-star groups, and several small bands under his own name.

Byas's playing was much in the vein of Coleman Hawkins, and the early records with Gillespie clearly show Byas was at home with the demands of the new music. His already melodic lines were further enriched by the influence of Parker and his disciples. With the lifting of the recording ban, Byas recorded for several of the new, small jazz labels that were springing up everywhere. He even had a minor hit with his own version of "Laura" in 1946. The same year, he garnered first place honors in the Esquire jazz poll. But Byas was restless, and when Don Redman formed another band, Byas joined him for an extended European tour. When the tour ended, Byas stayed on in Europe to have a look around. He was still looking around a quarter of a century later. He was not seen or heard in the State again until 1970 when he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. His Newport appearance was to be the final scene in a documentary film on his life in jazz, produced by a Dutch production company.
   
As the first of the postwar exiles, Byas became a guiding figure in the careers of the many musicians who would follow in his footsteps. Living first in France, Byas later settled permanently in Holland and was regularly featured at jazz festivals throughout Europe as a soloist with visiting bands such as Duke Ellington, or with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic tours with Coleman Hawkins and Stan Getz.

While in Europe, Byas took up skin diving and deep-sea fishing and became something of a physical fitness buff. He had left a drinking problem behind, which was one of the principal reasons he had left the States, but eventually encountered the hazards many of the exiles experienced. His stay in Europe was so lengthy that he began to be taken for granted and was considered a "local" by many promoters and club owners. The mushrooming number of exiles that followed Byas's lead made working conditions difficult and bruised his fierce ego. He began to drink heavily again and his physical condition deteriorated. Finally, he became almost inactive, playing only sporadically, but often losing jobs to other Americans who ironically had come to Europe after him.

At one point, Byas considered going home. "I may do that," he said. "One more trip, one grand tour. I'll make some money, come back, and then I'll lie down and die." He returned to the States for the 1970 Newport appearance and toured Japan with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1971. He returned to Holland the following year and at age fifty-nine died of cancer.

~~The Jazz Exiles : American Musicians Abroad -by- Bill Moody