Bryan Cather wrote in 990401 MMDigest:

> I'm considering moving my Hardman Duo to the tea room of a local
> antique mall and providing music on weekends for the diners.  ...
> Can anyone make recommendations of particular genres of music that
> might go over better with the tea room crowd?

The Friends of the Pianola Institute spent about four years demon-
strating the foot-worked player, in the form of a 65/88-note pushup
attached to the resident grand piano in the food courts of two malls
local to me.  (The pianos were there and I was willing to do the
legwork setting it all up, plus sneaking in to tune the pianos the
night before.  Never trust a mall on tuning, whatever they claim).

From doing lobby demos in such places as the National Theatre, the
Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican in central London, we already
had a pretty good idea of what goes down well with the public.  But
when playing for a whole day you get to refine the choice, because
significant minorities like unusual things.  The best system is to mix
the styles, but not change style too dramatically as you work through
the roll boxes, so that if you capture someone's interest they're kept
around long enough to want to come up and ask questions.

1920s dinner music, in England at least, is maybe Choice No 2 these
days.  Choice 1 will be a more modern cocktail-lounge treatment of
well-known more recent numbers from shows like "Annie".  Malcolm
Robinson has done us a great service here by recording the playing of
some of the pianists on the sea front at Southport.  My only grumble
is that he didn't do more titles than he did.  What he did do, you can
get on the "Southport" label from Frances Broadway at the "Post Bid
Enterprise" roll auction address.

Choice 3 is the easier-listening variety of piano jazz : Billy Mayerl,
Zez Confrey, many of John Farrell's arrangements, and especially John's
and Robbie Rhodes' rolls of Robin Frost numbers really have people
looking up from their tea and gathering round the piano.

The Autoplayer company in Slough had a Steinway B grand in their shop
which they converted to a recording piano in the middle 1970s and they
recorded a number of outstanding medleys by pianists such as Laurie
Holliday, whose masters Mike Boyd now has (but his perforator is
sulking right now).  Traditional jazz -- Jelly Roll and Fats Waller --
is also popular, but just very slightly less so.

The few rolls available of modern jazz (meaning, Art Tatum transcrip-
tions from the 1950s!) appeal to a small but intensely interested
minority.  I just wish some roll cutter took Erroll Garner more
seriously.  Good treatments of well-known old standards such as Max
Kortlander did in the 1930s on QRS bridge the gap between Choices 1 &
2, and can be fed back into the chain again and again if you run out
of rolls.  Play them soulfully with plenty of space.

If we put blues on, or a bit of the slower Rachmaninov, people go into
trance and stop buying things in the stores within earshot, and there
are complaints from the management.  But this doesn't stop us playing
them entirely.

Just very occasionally, to signal a change of mood, we put on some
tuneful Chopin or even some of the outstanding salon music by Pierne'
or Schutt on Animatic rolls.  This is another minority taste that
always excites the piano students who know the pieces and can
appreciate what we're doing with the rolls.

Finally, as dark draws in and custom in the food court thins out,
we're not going to offend too many people by playing what we really
like playing, and we'll have the whole of the Rachmaninov Paganini
Rhapsody or his Second Suite for Two Pianos (both cut by Rex Lawson
on "Perforetur") or a Chopin Scherzo or one of the Schumann sonatas
on Aeolian Themodist rolls.  These gather people from all over the
shopping mall, even though the music is not at all what daytime diners
want to hear, and they'll lean over the balconies above, enjoying what
is, after all, a pretty rare occurrence.

But that's food courts.  In a noisy pub you have to stick to Elvis
Presley (rather strangely put out on a whole series of rolls by the
British firm Artona when he was popular), or what in England is called
"Chas and Dave" -- raucous boogie-woogie -- played as loud as possible,
for the simple reason that folk at the back won't hear a note other-
wise.  When you run out of these, then Fats has to stand in at double
volume.  It's pretty tiring.

And you can still get things wrong.  I played food-court music on the
Thames pleasure boat the 1995 AMICA Convention had on their first night
in London, and was mortified to find I had with me almost nothing of
what the reproducing-piano owners amongst them most wanted: 1930s
strict tempo dance music.  They'd all learnt ballroom dancing to their
own pianos, why couldn't London oblige ?  Ouch !

In the end we stopped doing the demos, ostensibly because the propa-
ganda value for the player-piano was low; the self-imposed mandate of
the Pianola Institute is to correct the adverse 1920s press the player
got amongst the culture vultures, and shopping malls aren't, for the
most part, where such people congregate.  I was sorry, because 99% of
ordinary people have never seen a player these days, never mind one
being played well, and I thought it was worth doing and fun.  If I had
a one-man forklift for my own pushup for getting it in and out of vans
and up and down stairs, I'd go on doing it solo.

Funnily, where the management of the mall is local to the same build-
ing, they've always been enthusiastic and supportive.  With remote
management, the only people who took notice were the food court
franchisees -- they loved it and ended up giving us meals for nothing,
because of the way we were stretching everyone's visits to double
helpings.

The mall in Tunbridge Wells had a really good "Reid & Sohn" (rebadged
top line Samick) grand which almost never got played except on our one
day a year.  Suddenly they demanded a fee.  A _fee_ ?  You _pay_
pianists, don't you ?

Seemingly the mall was becoming infested with buskers and this was the
way the remote management proposed to deal with musicians of any
colour.  I would have arranged with the food court folk to pay the fee
for us, but so be it; we had already decided to stop going.  A year
later the piano had been sold.  I call that sad in the extreme.

Dan Wilson, London