Cy Walter: The Art Tatum of Cocktail Pianists

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib. And this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, a listener’s story from Mark Walter about his father, whom he knew only a short time but dedicated his life to. During this piece, she’ll be hearing the music of his father, Cy Walter. Let’s get into the story.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: I was 11 years old when my father died of cancer in 1968, and he was only 52 and had had cancer for some 15 years, but I wasn’t aware of that. I was a child, and my mother and father made the difficult choice not to tell us children of his illness. And he worked what were late-night, nocturnal hours, and they decided that it would be better for him to live separately from us, and he moved into an apartment on 73rd Street between Second and Third. This was in Manhattan on the Upper East Side, and it allowed him to sleep late because he would be working from 6:00 in the evening until 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. And it also allowed him the privacy and ability to deal with being ill. So, my relationship with my father was a very loving parent. While as I grew older and he lived apart from us, I would visit him frequently, remember very happy times doing so, getting my hair cut with him, wandering through the neighborhood where everyone seemed to know him. He was very much a beloved figure in that sense, and he was very kind. And I’ll give you a wonderful memory about that. My mother and father came and said had a rule that I was not to ride my bike from 87th Street to 73rd Street. I was about eight years old at the time, and it was a rational rule because New York City traffic was dangerous, obviously. But I was a rebellious kid and one day did exactly that, but unfortunately got a flat tire just before reaching my father’s apartment. And I was so standing on the streets staring at my broken bike, wondering what to do, fearful of my father’s reaction, expecting justified and condign punishment for breaking his rule. And as I was befuddled there, a young Black kid I’d never met came up and generously offered to help. He and I, my newfound friend, dragged the bike to my father’s doorstep. And when my father opened the door, I introduced my new friend, and he never said a word about the bike, never brought it up, just took it inside, invited us in, and explained what had happened. He turned to my my friend and said, ‘Well, you know, I’d really like to thank you for helping Mark.’ And he brought us to the piano, sat us down, and proceeded to play ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ for us.

00:03:11
Speaker 3: Every once in a while there comes along one of those infuriating melodies which is so beautiful and yet so perfectly simple that every other tune writer is disgusted with himself for not having written it, such as ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’.

00:03:55
Speaker 2: It was just a magical gift on his part. I remember that moment for the kindness of it. But he also was very humble and modest, and I knew he was a pianist, and I knew that he was a respected pianist. I was not aware, however, as a child, of his stature. He was an acknowledged virtuoso, and his contemporaries on so many levels revered his talent. My father was very much a star; his career spanned—well, his career spanned what was the halcyon days of the Great American Songbook, too, in 1968 when he passed. He knew all the greats, and he knew all the titans and bold-faced names of society as well, because they were his audience. My father kept a mailing list, I mean, just a few of them. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Marlon Brando, Carol Channing, Judy Holliday—a very dear, dear friend of my mother’s. She actually nursed him, nursed her sadly through her last illness. A couple of musicians that were really family were Alec Wilder and Mabel Mercer. Mabel Mercer was an amazing chanteuse who hailed from Britain and came to America in 1938, and my father was the first pianist to accompany her. She was also my godmother. And around 2004, my mother pulled out a Timberland boot box that I still have that was filled with my father’s published sheet music and unpublished scores that he had written. She handed this box to me, and she said, ‘About a decade ago, I had a conversation with Michael Feinstein, amazing performer and talent who is also passionate about preserving the American Popular Songbook.’ And as Cam explained to me then, she had gotten a call from Michael around, I guess, 1995 or so, asking her what she still had of Si’s artistic legacy. And when she told him that she had this sheet music, Michael said, ‘Well, you should get it into the Library of Congress because if you just keep it in your closet, nobody’s benefiting from it.’ And she didn’t do anything at that point. You know, other pressures of life interceded, I’m sure, but she did pull it out in 2004 and asked me to do it. My jaw dropped because I didn’t even know at that point that Si was a composer. I had no idea of my father’s stature. I was a rock-and-roll kid growing up during the seventies, and my mother really didn’t proselytize the music. So I decided to take an early retirement, which would allow me to do that. But it all goes back to the fact that my mother, God bless her, out of love for my father and out of love for his artistry, retained everything.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Mark Walter tell the story of his father, Si. Father was only 52 when he died, a world-class musician, a first-rate talent. When we come back, more of Mark Walter’s story, the story of his father, Si, here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we do it all from the heart of the South: Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to OurAmericanStories.com. Give a little, give a lot. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we’re back with Our American Stories. In Mark Walter’s story about his father, Si. When we last left off, Mark was telling us about how he knew that his father was a pianist but didn’t know that he was a virtuoso of the American Songbook. Let’s continue with the story. Here again is Mark Walter.

00:08:42
Speaker 2: Si had a God-given talent. There’s just no way around it. He was his own unique style, and there’s never been anyone like him, and never since or before. He grew up in Minneapolis, and his parents were both musicians. Raymond was a talented tenor, highly respected in the Twin Cities, and Flossi, as she was nicknamed, Florence Flossi, was a very well-respected and very long-standing piano teacher in Minneapolis. Si was unquestionably her most successful student. He acknowledged that he learned everything. Everything he learned about piano, knew about piano, came from her. But they weren’t wealthy. It was a very sort of middle-class existence. I’m sure. Well, in terms of Si’s learning how to play piano, I had always thought, until a few years back, that he took up the piano after initially learning how to play the cello or the bass because of the liner notes that he wrote to one of his albums, ‘A Dry Martini, Please.’ He wrote there that he took up the piano because it had become clear to him that it was so difficult to transport the cello on the Minneapolis bus system. I remember thinking, ‘Well, you know, it’s probably harder to transport a piano.’ But, however, and this is sort of a story that reflects the amazing journey I have had. My discovery of my father’s music has altered my life in a way that is wonderful. I’m blessed with friends I never would have met. And a perfect example of that is a fellow named Bob Wood Jr., who had found the Sy Walter website, I guess, about four or five years ago, called me up out of the blue, lives on the West Coast, to tell me that his father, Bob Wood Sr., was a dear friend of my father’s. They knew each other in Minneapolis. They grew up together. Bob Wood Sr. was perhaps six years older than Si and had his own orchestra at the time, and at age 19 or so, he was an orchestra leader. He was approached by Si, who was then about 13, wanting to join the orchestra. And Bob Wood Sr. said to Si, ‘I’m sorry, Si, I don’t really need a string instrument. We’ve got plenty of cellists. But, you know, your mother is a wonderful piano teacher. Why don’t you go to her and ask her to teach you the piano, and if, when you learn the piano, you can be part of my orchestra.’ And Si said, ‘Okay, deal!’ When he was ready, he came back and said, ‘I’m ready.’ And Bob Wood Sr. wrote in his memoirs, he was already playing like a virtuoso at that point, and it was only three months. He had learned how to play the piano. In three months, I now understand why people marveled at his abilities. Clearly he had the perfect environment to do it, but he also just had an amazing God-given talent. At one point, I’d found a list of pithy quotes by different musicians over the centuries. One of them was attributed to Art Tatum. I shared it with my mother, and when she read it, she read it aloud. Art was attributed as saying to another pianist, ‘Listen, you come in here tomorrow night, and anything you play with your right hand, I’ll play with my left hand better.’ And the left hand’s considered this a missive; the right hand, the dominant hand, in piano playing. So that was quite a statement. And my mother, after reading that, looked up with pride in her face and said, ‘And Art always acknowledged that Si had a better left hand than he did.’ But he went from Minneapolis to New York in part because of his having a sort of mentorship with American Songbook great, a fellow named Johnny Green, who composed the beautiful standard, ‘Body and Soul.’ Johnny Green was performing in Minneapolis, so Si wiggled his way into the performance backstage and introduced himself. And when he came to Manhattan to New York in 1934, Johnny Green took him under wing and essentially got him a job coaching some aspiring singers initially and helped him meet many of the then stars of the Great American Songbook firmament, people like George and Ira Gershwin. He came to know Vernon Duke. He came to know Richard Rodgers. And as he started playing in different venues, people got to know him. Fred Astaire and Si had been friends, and when Astaire decided to basically sort of retire from the film industry in 1947, he decided to open up his own dance studio. To do that, he created a swing-trot dance that he called the Astaire, that he purposely designed to be accessible to a new dancing student, and he turned aside to create a song to celebrate and publicize the dance and his launch of his new dance studios. Si composed what was also called ‘The Astaire.’ The Drake Room. He didn’t own it in a literal sense. It was part of the Hotel Drake, which was torn down, oh, I guess, about a decade ago now by a developer that built this monstrosity, 432 Park Avenue, in one of the Billionaire skyscrapers. But the Drake Hotel was one of the apartment hotels that was built during the early 20th century, and it was an extraordinarily elegant, classy place that catered to its guests in a way that was truly special. And I’ll give you an example of that. Famous pianist Arthur Rubinstein lived there, and he wanted his own personal grand piano, logically, in his apartment, and as it turned out, it was too large to fit in the Drake Hotel’s elevator. The freight elevator just wouldn’t accommodate it. And in a classic example of going the extra mile, Stanley Turkel and his talented staff arranged for the city to close down Park Avenue and for crane to lift Arthur Rubinstein’s piano up through the window of the 20th story or something, wherever it was. It was that kind of elegant hotel. The Drake Room was opened in 1945 by Walter Riddell, who was a man about town and owned the hotel at that time, and he immediately hired. It was opened essentially for Si because and he were friends, and Si was then and remained the highest paid pianist popular pianist in New York because he was so beloved by his audiences. By others, he was famed for his memory. Somebody could come into the Drake Room that hadn’t been there in years, a patron that had made a request in past years for Si to play a particular song. When that patron came back in, maybe five years later, so I would immediately recognize the person and remember that song and start playing it. He was a marvelous entertainer. I told you the catalyzing event. And that afternoon when I was visiting my mother out in Long Island, where she lived, and she pulled out my father’s sheet music and told me about her conversation with Michael. At that time, I really did not know much about the Great American Songbook or the musical genre that it encompasses. You know, if you had talked to me about Cole Porter, or George Gershwin, or Richard Rodgers, or I would have looked at you largely blankly. So it was for me an enlightenment that again is a gift from my parents. As I went through all these materials and I read the articles about my father, I came to realize that he really was at the heart of a musical era that was very, very special.

00:17:19
Speaker 1: And a special thanks to Mark Walter for sharing his story of his father, who is the preeminent piano accompanist and piano player in New York City at a time when New York City was the center of everything in American music. And also, what a love story of a son pursuing the story of his father all the way down. The story of Cy Walter is told by his son, Mark, here on Our American Stories.