Larry Kellogg said:

> I would suggest hiring a real pianist to play in a hotel bar.
> You know, a human being.  It is depressing to see a Disklavier
> playing in hotels and bars.  It is usually cycling on the same
> disk, over and over again.  It is torture for the listener.  It
> might be okay if the hotels and bars invested in a wide selection
> of disks, but they seem too cheap to do that.

I went to a promotion at the Curzon Hotel in London about a year ago, and
in one of the lobbies there was a male shop-window mannequin in a bathing
suit and a topper propped up against the keyboard of a Kawai grand.

Something like a Disklavier was driving this at pianissimo volume, and
just as well too, because the thing was quite excruciatingly out of tune!
No excuse for an almost new piano.  The Curzon is supposed to be a fairly
high-class place too.

The Friends of the Pianola Institute had a series of demo sessions on a
really very nice Samick grand in the food court of a new shopping centre
in Tunbridge Wells.  This piano had a cover over it every time I went
there and eventually we summoned up the courage to go and ask the
management if they would mind us playing it.  They gave us one test
session (when no-one from the management appeared, or at least identified
themselves) and then allowed us an annual go on it with a 65/88n pushup.
They claimed to keep it tuned, but I got to visiting it the previous
evening with my kit to make sure.

After years of this, we now know what goes down well: out of say ten
rolls, six must be well-known tunes, played with a distinct swing, so
choice 1930s QRS standards and Ampico jumbos with dangle-strips over the
tracker bar are ideal.  You can have one really hot number, a John
Farrell arrangement maybe, and then one each of a light classical piece,
a slow ballad and a piece of cocktail-lounge improvisation which is
served up in UK by the Southport label.  If you have too much up-tempo it
makes the seated clientele get shifty, and too much dreamy stuff makes
the nearby stores complain because no one buys anything.  And no one
doing any brain-work must be too close: continuous music is maddening.

In the evening when custom was very thin, we'd indulge ourselves with Rex
Lawson's rolls of the Rachmaninov that escaped the old companies (the
Paganini Rhapsody, the Op 17 two-piano Suite) and a bit of Chopin and
rare Hupfeld salon music from 1922 Leipzig.  Although this stuff isn't so
much to popular taste, I remember Rex drawing people from all over the
centre with his four-hand roll of the first movement of Rachmaninov's 3rd
Concerto.  We'd get the occasional piano student, mesmerised by the music
("Is all that coming out of a paper roll?") and staying on for hours.

Anyway, by the third year we had the food counters serving us free
because of the way people stayed to listen and have something extra to
eat.  In seven hours we never played a roll more than twice.  But that
year we were also told by the management to start paying them, because
our free presence was a source of complaint from the buskers who infested
the place and were now being charged for a licence.  We upped sticks and
left -- and a year later the piano had been sold.  A sad story.

Dan Wilson, London

 [ In some US cities the Musician's Union might have complained that
 [ you were taking away the employment of a real pianist!  -- Robbie