This is an ongoing musical memoir. If you are just wandering onto this page and didn’t see the first four chapters of “Blues, Preludes & Feuds,” please read those first:
Prelude
Part 1:
Chapter 1: Middle C is Not
Chapter 2: Prepare to Wing It
Chapter 3: Drugstore at the End of the World
The six of us—my parents, three siblings, and me—are in the elevator, heading up to my grandparents’ apartment on North State Street. We kids are hopping around, excited. Or at least I am. Amy and David, my older siblings, are trying not to act too excited. Year-and-a-half-old Jane is sucking her thumb, holding her fading blue blankie over her elbow.
“Is Grandma and Grandpa gonna give us a treat?” I ask.
“Peterrrrr.” Amy, the mature one at six, rolls her eyes and shakes her head at my lack of propriety. Well, at least I didn’t say it directly in front of my grandparents. David, the second oldest at five, just snarls and jabs me in the side with his elbow.
“Ow! You stupid pee pee head!”
Jane takes her thumb from her mouth, looks up at David like he’s a giant, then replaces the thumb and looks down.
“Are Grandma and Grandpa—not is,” my mother says. “And we’re not visiting your grandparents for treats. We’re visiting because they’re your grandparents, and they love to see you.”
“Yeah, still,” I say, pouting. I love my grandparents, but have no problem with extracting some loot as a kind of payment for the expression of that love.
As we arrive at their floor and step out of the elevator, my grandparents are already standing in their open doorway, practically pushing each other to get first dibs on their grandchildren.
We tumble into the apartment, getting our bearings. This is my first time here—they’ve just moved in. It’s a jumble of stilted, plastic-covered furniture, abstract Israeli artwork, and the smell of my grandmother’s mushroom-and-barley soup.
In the corner of the foyer, there is this grayish electric organ.
What’s that doing here? I’ve seen keyboards before, but never played one. Even at three-and-a-half, I feel an odd magnetic pull to this symmetrical arrangement of black and white keys, as if they contain some hidden cosmic power.
I walk over to the attached bench and climb up.
“Can I play that?”
“Peter,” my dad says flatly. “Ask first before jumping all over everything.”
“He did ask, Paul,” my grandma says. “And it’s fine. Nobody else is going to play that thing.”
My fingers hover over the keyboard. I notice the pattern of keys, the groupings of two and three black keys, surrounded by a sea of white. I try pressing down a bunch of black keys with my flattened hands. The sound of the notes of the pentatonic scale is pleasing—but clustered together in a chord like that, also a bit jarring. I try playing them one at a time and am thrilled by the logic of the flow of sounds.
With no prior warning that I could do anything of the kind, I start playing the organ.
“That’s very good, Peter,” my dad says, impressed and surprised.
“Well, well, well. The boy can play.” My grandpa pats me on the back. “He’s a little Irving Berlin.”
“Or Mozart!” my grandma adds.
“Oh, come on, Mom,” my mother scoffs. “Don’t overdo it.”
Just a month or two later, this amazing display of genius will inspire them to trade in that barely used organ in my grandparents’ apartment for a new Steinway upright piano in ours.
Six months after that, I would be sitting in our semi-formal living room trying to figure out what to play.
* * *
This would be the founding event of my musical story. And what a story it was. Too bad it’s apparently not true—at least according to my parents.
Not only do they have no memory of the trade-in, but they are quite sure there wasn’t an organ in my grandparents’ apartment to begin with. And why would there be? My maternal grandparents weren’t overtly musical people. They almost never spoke of music. I can’t even recall them ever playing a record.
But I swear—with some embellishments accruing over time—this happened. I just walked in there and started playing. It’s either my first memory or the foundational brick in the building of my self-mythology. Or it’s both.
Both of my grandparents died from Alzheimer’s years ago, so it’s really my memory against my parents’. The thing is, they don’t remember how the piano came to sit in our living room at all. Maybe, they argue, my older sister, Amy, had expressed an interest in playing, and they bought it for her. She did end up starting lessons before me. I could ask Amy, I suppose. Maybe she remembers, but I’m not asking.
The whole thing may be a dream. I’ve been having musical dreams for years—dreams where I hear music that I can’t yet play or don’t know how to write. Such visions have often acted as inspirations in my development as composer and player. So yes, maybe this was one of those. My foundational musical dream.
Because as I said, my maternal grandparents—Philip and Ethel Klutznick—though exceptionally bright and gifted people, weren’t deeply or even casually cultured. It’s not that they were unmusical—they just didn’t seem to have time for it, period.
He was a brilliant and successful statesman and developer with an expertise in urban development, serving every Democratic president between Roosevelt and Carter. His political work—all non-elected positions—included Federal Housing Commissioner under FDR, Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council under Kennedy, and Secretary of Commerce under Jimmy Carter.
My grandfather and his partners developed what was, in effect, the first affordable postwar suburb for returning GIs, Park Forest, outside of Chicago.
He also was a prominent leader in the global Jewish community, serving as president of both B’nai B’rith and the World Jewish Congress. In 1985, Rabbi Seymour Siegel—an architect of Conservative Jewish theology and a once-director of the US Holocaust Memorial Council—said this of my grandfather: “He is considered by many to be the leading Jew in the US.”
My grandmother wasn’t the proverbial power behind the throne—she had no interest in power, nor a throne. What she had was a sly, and occasionally biting, sense of humor, used like a pin to burst the balloon of my grandfather’s periodic pomposity.
“Listen, Big Shot, you may dine with presidents . . . but I’m not all that impressed. You’re still Phil to me.” She loved to tease him and downplay his brilliance and wealth—all done with humor and love. Now that I think of it, she may have been the one who taught me to marry someone who loves me—not someone who is in awe of me.
Both of my grandparents were smart, funny, and—in spite of their wealth—completely unpretentious people. I loved them. The only time I ever heard them discuss music was in regard to my career.
My grandfather did his best to help me out. He was, in general, very well connected and introduced me to anyone he knew who was even tangentially involved with the music business. He took me to lunch with the great violinist Isaac Stern. And both my grandfather and grandmother took me to dinner with Liberace, his lover, and his manager. Of course, being the kind of artist I was—and am—there was no way any of those people could do a thing for me. And that is both the point . . . and beside the point.
They tried to help, and that’s all that matters. But in the big scheme of things, it wasn’t going to help. They had no sense of what my music was about because they weren’t attuned to my music, let alone any music of our time.
And that brings me back to the organ. Did my grandmother, who would have been in her mid-fifties in 1964, have a mid-life crisis and buy an organ so she could learn some Irving Berlin tunes—the one composer, I would later learn, she and my grandfather loved? I doubt it. But I still don’t think it was a dream . . .
A better explanation would be their youngest son, my Uncle Sam, who would have been 17 at the time and still living at home. He was artistically inclined, later wrote plays, became a big fan of Sondheim, lived in NYC and Paris, and hung out with artsy folks. Perhaps he took up the organ for a while, then gave it up. He was always a bit of a dilettante.
And come to think of it, after reflecting on that fateful day, I can now see Sam sauntering in from his room in the back when he heard me play.
“As far as I’m concerned, Peter can have the organ. I’m bored with it.” He shrugs his shoulders, then indifferently heads back to his room.
Yes, I’m now convinced. It did happen that way. Unfortunately, Sam has passed, so I can’t verify it. Maybe some of his older brothers remember. I could ask them, but they weren’t living at home back then. And the real truth is, I really don’t want to know.
There may be no good reason for that organ to be there, other than my distinct memory of it being there. My need for it to be there. There had to have been some situation where I exhibited enough musical talent to inspire my parents to bring a piano into our home. I mean, neither of them played, nor had any intention of playing.
And I’m not inclined to believe their idle speculation that they may have purchased it for Amy, who ended up being a journalist and editor. That simply doesn’t work as my founding myth.
So the Uncle Sam story will just have to do. People—like religions and nations—need founding myths to help explain and justify (as much to themselves as to others) who they are, where they came from, and why they do what they do.
The organ story is the founding myth of my musical story.
Next chapter: 5. Pax Chicagoa