Over the five fascinating years I’ve been interviewing jazz musicians, a curious trend has emerged. It has interested, confounded and occasionally annoyed me—the last probably due to a (misguided) sense that my musical passions and practices are being slighted by implication. I’m talking about the tendency for pro musicians to begin their journey with piano lessons, before switching the instrument out for another one that eventually makes them famous—be it brass, woodwind, strings or their own voice.
Sometimes the player keeps up piano as a secondary interest: clarinetist Ewan Bleach (of Frog and Henry, Tuba Skinny, and more) learned keys before making woodwind his professional focus. But he never lost his love of tickling the ivories, telling me last year: “When I learn a song, I always learn it on the piano.” He performs solo gigs playing keys with one hand and licorice stick with the other, while his website describes him as “a clarinetist, saxophonist, pianist, singer, bandleader [and] composer.”
But pride in one’s piano-playing roots seems rare amongst pro jazz musicians, most of whom seem to drop the instrument—and any mention of it in their curriculum musicae—sooner or later. Of the folks I’ve spoken to, the following all began on piano before becoming noted pros on some other instrument: Hailey Brinnel (now known for her trombone playing), Corina Kwami (vocals), Michael Gamble (double bass), Aaron Hawthorne (organ), Keenan McKenzie (saxophone), Isobel Gathercole (vocals), Giacomo “Kansas Smitty” Smith (clarinet), Caity Gyorgy (vocals), Nicola Farnon (double bass), Sweet Megg (vocals) and Steve Coombe (trumpet).
The careers of the jazz greats also show this tendency to begin with piano before moving on: Artie Shaw began piano lessons at age nine, switching to clarinet after three years; Benny Goodman started on the keys aged eight, swapping them for clarinet as a teen; Gene Krupa played piano from age seven to age 11, when he took up the drums; and both Harry James and Roy Eldridge picked up a trumpet in their teenage years, after starting on piano aged five.
And this is just sticking within the ST’s remit of pre-bebop players—fast forward and the trend continues: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Benny Golson, and Sonny Rollins all learned the piano as well as the instruments which made them famous (sax, sax, trumpet, sax, trumpet, sax, sax, and sax, respectively). Evidently, according to my own archives, it’s a pattern which continues to this day.
Some I’ve interviewed began their journey with the piano and stuck with it: Joplin Parnell, Michael Gamble, Andrew Oliver… actually, I think that might be it. It’s rare that I get to interview fellow pianists—perhaps because they generally aren’t bandleaders. Amongst famous historical bandleading pianists, the instrument was generally their lifelong passion: Duke Ellington took after his parents by learning piano from age seven; Fats Waller began aged six and honed his skills at his father’s church; Erroll Garner began aged three and never looked back.
Mary Lou Williams picked out her first tunes on the family piano aged two, and had been dubbed “The Little Piano Girl” by the age of seven. Lil Hardin Armstrong received her first piano instruction in third grade—going on to achieve a diploma in the instrument from Fisk University in Nashville, TN—and Una Mae Carlisle had been playing for years when Fats Waller discovered the talented teenager in Cincinnati, OH. The long-forgotten but highly influential Dolly Adams learned the keys from a young age, despite both her parents being brass players—but then there are historic reasons why women were encouraged to play piano in particular, as jazz musicologist Sherrie Tucker has explained.
To date, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who went the other way, starting on some other instrument before deciding that piano was their thing. It does happen: Count Basie, who caught piano fever from his mother, was briefly obsessed with drums before returning to the keyboard aged 15, put off percussion by the prodigious talents of his neighbor Sonny Greer; Earl Hines planned to be a cornetist like his father, but found that blowing a horn hurt his head; Oscar Peterson flirted with the trumpet, alongside the piano, but tuberculosis forced him to focus on the former; and Art Tatum—the jazz pianist’s jazz pianist, often called the greatest of all time—didn’t commit until age 13, after first learning the violin.
But these few are seemingly rare exceptions—why? Do most jazz musicians see the instrument as an accessible introduction to music, but ultimately just a stepping stone to more interesting instruments? Is it because they were made to learn piano, and switching to another instrument was an expression of their growing musical agency? As I write this piece, I’m listening to a collection of Willie “The Lion” Smith’s best recordings. I defy anyone to listen to “Concentratin’,” “Passionette,” or his “Stormy Weather” and tell me that what he did was any less complex or thrilling than what Louis Armstrong, Stephanne Grapelli, or Django Reinhardt accomplished. And that’s to say nothing of what Scott Joplin, Eubie Blake, or Jelly Roll Morton (all keyboard devotees from day one) turned out.
The piano is demonstrably not just a tool for beginners, nor is it in any way limiting in its musical potential. Indeed, it’s surely possible for a soloist to achieve much richer harmonies using up ten fingers than it is for any other musician limited to using just a couple at once. It is also the ideal big band arranger’s instrument, allowing them to work out harmonies before assigning each note to a different instrument or section—Keenan McKenzie told me so. So why do so many players begin with it, then ditch it? I’m treating this as one question, but it should perhaps be approached as two: “Why start with piano?” and “Why give it up?”
I have a theory which runs thus: The mechanics of playing the piano are simple—find key, press key—compared with developing the embouchure of a trumpeter, or the calluses of a guitarist. The keys are all laid out in front of the player, rather than requiring them to learn arcane hand positions for each note as a violinist or double bassist would. In short, easy to pick up—particularly for a child. But playing piano well—as in, Art Tatum’s slow-down-for-Pete’s-sake-my-brain-hurts 1953 “Love for Sale” side well—is incredibly difficult. Harder than other instruments, I’d wager.
But that’s just my take, so I referred to my erstwhile interviewees. Michael Gamble actually told me three years ago why he switched to bass after attaining a degree in jazz piano. College burnout put him off playing anything for months—if he was going to resume a music career, it had to be a fresh start. So he bought a bass from a bluegrass player and set about teaching himself. “I feel a personal connection with the bass that I didn’t with piano, because I spent the time and dug up the information,” he explained. The highly formulaic, academic way he learned piano just didn’t appeal any more.
Perhaps that stiff, old-fashioned piano education model puts other budding jazz musos off, eventually—I’ve fired piano teachers who insisted on teaching me Mozart and Chopin after I’d made them promise not to. Corina Kwami was more open-minded. She was inspired to learn piano by her music teacher at the Pennington School, NJ. Ms. Hofreiter was apparently a talented storyteller, too. “I loved how she told stories about everyone from Bach to Gershwin,” wrote Kwami, in response to my recent email. “That, and the piano opened so many doors into not only jazz but classical, choral and pop music.”
Sweet Megg adored classical music. “Piano was my first instrument,” she wrote. “My parents could tell I was musical and they thought I should have a basis in piano first before I chose my instrument.” (There it is again: piano as stepping stone.) “I was obsessed with [classical music],” she added. “I drove my parents crazy practicing with a metronome, starting at 60 bpm and working up click by click until the songs were perfect.” When she found her singing voice, Megg began playing gigs around her hometown, accompanying herself on ukulele.
Portability is a point I hadn’t considered, when asking why one might abandon the piano. When I wanted to take my playing on the road I bought a melodica, but why wouldn’t someone less cowardly start over with valves, a bow, a pick, or a slide? Kwami’s career has since taken her across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia—and a piano doesn’t fit in a suitcase. “[As a student] I spent a year abroad in Morocco where I was on the road a lot,” she told me. “My voice became my instrument of choice, especially with all the travel—it was just more portable, and what I was getting booked for.”
And something else Kwami said might hold the key to why piano is a common gateway into a musical education: because many players are inspired at a young age, by a teacher. According to a 2019 survey by the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM), two-thirds of educators listed piano as their primary instrument while a further one-fifth played it as a secondary. A 2020 survey by online music learning platform TakeLessons confirmed this statistic: more than four-fifths of music teachers play piano, so it stands to reason that’s the instrument curious children are most likely to come into contact with.
The same could be inferred historically—I know this from writing about my “forgotten ladies,” most of whom worked as music teachers and almost all of whom played piano. So what can we infer from this anecdotal, statistically insignificant survey? Not a lot, perhaps—but bear with me while I try, for the sake of wrapping this up. The piano is a common starting place for jazz musicians because it’s versatile, simple to pick up and something most music teachers can already play. It’s frequently dropped in favor of other instruments because it’s not portable, difficult to master, and teaching is often heavy on the etudes, preludes, and waltzes.
Add to these facts that there are a hundred other instruments out there to tickle the fancy, and another question arises: Why should anyone stick with the piano? After all, I reckon jazz would be pretty dull if it was all solo piano—despite what you might infer from my album reviews. Perhaps I should just stop worrying, keep doing my own thing, and shut up about it. So I shall.
Corina Kwami actually still plays piano and, at the time of writing, has a short residency at London’s Brasserie Zedel. You can find out what she’s up to and where she’s playing next at www.corinakwami.com/calendar. Sweet Megg plays all over the US—find out where on her website or her Facebook page. I’m grateful to both for taking the time to answer my email survey.
