Word: pianists
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Sellers' father, Bill, was a mild, ineffectual man, a pianist whose love for Peg drew him into this demimonde, though he had once been a cathedral organist in his native Yorkshire. That he was Protestant and Peg Jewish may have contributed, some friends have speculated, to their child's confusion and detachment. Surely, Bill's shyness and Peg's aggressiveness helped to create the split in Sellers. The private man is anonymously dressed ("If you see me when I'm not making a film, you would never know I was in the business"), hiding behind a variety of tinted glasses...
...highly unlikely and unwitting patrons: Arthur Godfrey and an unmusical Greenwich Village landlord. It was Godfrey's ukulele playing that first prompted Jaffee, a furrier's son, to begin strumming the guitar as a boy in Brooklyn. Later, while studying musicology at N.Y.U., he met Kay, a pianist whose landlord had forbidden her to practice in her apartment. She took up the recorder as a consolation, and Michael experimented with accompanying her on the lute. Inspired by Noah Greenberg's pioneering New York Pro Musica, they "roped in a few friends," and the Waverly Consort-named...
DIED. Henry Roeland Byrd, 61, legendary blues pianist also known as "Professor Longhair," whose recordings of the '40s and early '50s laid the groundwork for rock 'n' roll; of a heart attack; in New Orleans. Born in Bogalusa, La., Byrd taught himself to play the piano, imitating such barrelhouse blues players as Kid Stormy Weather. His Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Big Chief combined elements of blues, New Orleans marching music and Caribbean rhythms. Though he never matched the success of Fats Domino and others who popularized the Byrd piano style, recognition finally came...
...musically but seeks his advice on buying gentlemanly accouterments. His great rival, Vladimir Horowitz, hangs about Rubinstein's Paris home, accepting free meals and fussing over his encores. After they fall out, ostensibly because of a broken lunch date, Rubinstein delivers a left-handed salute: "The greatest pianist, but not a great musician...
...Composer Igor Stravinsky, Rubinstein shows him how to make more money (go on tour as a pianist and conductor of his own works) and how to cure his impotence (have a good dinner and visit a brothel). What he cannot do is persuade Stravinsky to write lyrically for the piano instead of percussively. The Russian was a master of his métier, Rubinstein concludes, but he lacked "an original melodic invention...