I’ve never been to Nino’s Tuscany, the Italian restaurant on New York’s West 58th Street, and now it’s too late.
Well, not too late to dine there but too late to hear Irving Fields on the piano. He played there six nights a week, almost until his death in 2016 at the age of 101. I would have loved to hear him in action.
A performer for 85 years, Fields knew how to give the customers what they wanted. Back in 2010 when he’d been resident pianist at Nino’s for six years, he told the New York Post how he worked up his repertoire for the night.
“I’ll get here at six and have something to eat. Then before I start playing, I’ll walk up to each table and ask what they’d like to hear. I’ll tell you, if you name any song, there’s a 90 percent chance I’ll know it. So I can play for anyone anywhere.”
One customer with a group of friends asked Fields if he could play Fly Me to the Moon, which of course he could. “Well, I played it for him and then I found that this guy had actually flown to the moon.”
He was the astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
Fields never saw himself as the star of the show, more as somebody who enhanced the general atmosphere: “For the first hour, I try to keep the music romantic, because this is a place people come to chat and be intimate. In the second hour I’ll mix it up more. I’ll do a little ragtime followed by a classical song and then swing into a Latin song. I’ll close with a song I wrote called Miami Beach Rumba”.
His career started won a talent show at the age of ten. Thereafter, highly adaptable, he just kept playing. He played on cruise ships, at resorts, in night clubs on Miami Beach, in Cuba, for US troops in the Second World War, on television shows. He’d recorded around 100 albums, composed hit songs, led his own orchestras.
The piano kept him young, he told the New York Post which described him as “both a musical and medical marvel” who looked 25 years younger than his age.
One of my favourite magazines, The Pianist, once ran a story about older pianists and they were astonishingly good right up to their passing. One lady could hardly make the piano stool despite a helper on each elbow but when she did she proceeded to give an impressive version of a Chopin prelude, all without the music. Another hardly knew where she was and had to be reminded she was going to play the piano. But the moment she sat down, she ripped into several rousing numbers including O Canada! The keys just seemed to trigger something in her mind.
Long before we started studying longevity (see earlier articles in BadAss Ageing), Fields developed his own simple principles for a long life.
“The secret to my longevity is to have a sense of humour, watch what you eat and do something you love”, he said. “With each note I play I get a day younger.”
I’ve been a pianist since the age of six and it’s people like Fields who keep me practising.
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