When music makes magic

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

He takes you back to a night you thought you'd forgotten, when there was laughter and champagne and glasses clinking and young people laughing, and you were one of the young people, dressed to kill, out for an evening, out on the town.

He whisks you to Broadway, and ushers you to a front-row seat where you heard, maybe for the first time, Judy Garland, John Raitt, Mary Martin.

He flies you to the moon, puts you on the Atchinson, Topeka & Santa Fe, creates April in Paris and autumn in New York and he does all this magically and quietly, every Friday and Saturday night.

Gerry Gottschalk is a piano player. "Music for all occasions," says his business card. But it doesn't say he's also a sorcerer, a keeper of dreams, a human gateway to the past and a storehouse of musical history.

He knows all the tunes, the words, who wrote what and when, and what play or movie a song is from. Hum a tune, any tune, and he can name it.

Once, not that long ago, when live music was the only music, there were lots of piano players making their living in clubs. But now it's all DJs and CDs, what we listen to no different from what we look at, more of everything, bigger and louder and flashier, but all of it the same.

Gottschalk is a diamond in a world of zirconia, real fingers making music on a real piano. At Christo's in Brockton where he plays weekly, people sing along with him. They yell out, "Gerry, do you know this?" and hum a few notes and Gerry knows it and plays it.

He's been doing this since he was 15.

"There was a guy who owned a shoe store and a club in Brockton. My mother went in to buy shoes. 'I hear your son plays piano,' he said. 'Send him up Friday night.' "

That was in 1947. Gottschalk went into the Ward One Club and played everything he knew. What he didn't know, he learned on the spot. The shoe man offered him a permanent job. He got $ 8 a week. He loved what he did. "I never wanted to do anything else."

Word spread. Gottschalk was good. He didn't just make music, he made memories.

In the '50s, he taught himself how to play bass, joined Jack Richards and the Marksmen and set out on the road. The band won a talent contest on "Chance of a Lifetime," worked at the Latin Quarter in New York and sang the National Anthem at the first game the old Boston Braves played in Milwaukee.

But in 1956, with a wife and two children at home, Gottschalk returned to Brockton and to the piano to team up with bassist Tony DeFazio. For 13 years, the duo entertained in clubs in and around Boston. They cut a record. They had a sound and a following.

When DeFazio retired, Gottschalk went out on his own. He never missed a beat, not on the piano, not in his life. For 28 years he's been Mr. Piano Man, turning notes into feelings and lyrics into dreams.

He's retired now. That's what he says. But he's still making music, at Christo's and at private parties every chance he gets. He doesn't consider what he does work. He never has. It's fun, art. It's who he is.

Listen, he's talking to the crowd: " 'Time Heals Everything.' Now that's a beautiful song. Robert Preston sang it to Bernadette Peters in 'Mack and Mabel,' one of Jerry Herman's few flops. But the song is magnificent."

And it is, when Gerry Gottschalk plays it.