Happy Birthday Byron Janis as you reach 89 years old on March 24

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Byron Janis, world class pianist and legendary musician, turned 89 this week (March 24) and what do you think he did to celebrate, he released his newest classical album of his never before heard live performances.

Now Byron has long denied the many pains and problems of aging and he has personally no clue what retirement might mean.  How many of you spent the weeks before your 89th birthday in the studio editing and mastering an album of your greatest live performances?

Well the Wall Street Journal broke the news of the project in a story on the 22nd that included the following excerpts.

A Classical Maven Who Can Really Swing

By : TERRY TEACHOUT

March 22, 2017 4:57 p.m. ET

Byron Janis, who turns 89 this week, was one of what Gary Graffman, his colleague and contemporary, called the OYAPs—the great generation of “Outstanding Young American Pianists,” as they were customarily described by journalists, who crowded the concert halls of the world in the years immediately following World War II.

Mr. Janis’s musical interests have long ranged beyond the classics. Out Friday, “Byron Janis Live: On Tour” (Janis Eleven Enterprises), a collection of previously unissued live performances of pieces by Chopin, Haydn and Liszt that were recorded between 1979 and 1999, also includes solo-piano arrangements of several of Mr. Janis’ songs, thus reminding us that he is also a highly accomplished popular songwriter who, among other surprising things, has written the score for a musical version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” 

The biggest surprise, however, is the encore, a piano duet called “By and Cy—More Paganini Variations.” On this track, Mr. Janis and Cy Coleman, a classically trained Broadway composer who wrote the score for “Sweet Charity” but started out as a jazz pianist of note, join forces to improvise on Paganini’s A Minor Caprice, the familiar solo-violin piece on which Brahms and Rachmaninoff produced their own sets of variations.

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So if this is how your life started how would you feel?

Born in Pittsburgh, the son of Jewish Russian and Polish immigrants, he became the protégé and first student of perhaps the greatest pianist in the world, some believe in all of history, the great Vladimir Horowitz.

Not a bad start in life for a kid I suspect.  But what was the price tag for such an interesting life? Well, we best give you an overview of the rest of his life before I can tell you the rest of the story.

Byron was one of the greatest concert pianists of the 20th century.

He never got to play his beloved game of baseball.

At age 18 he was the youngest recording artist signed by RCA Victor Records.

At age 20 he made his widely acclaimed Carnegie Hall debut.

He undertook international diplomatic missions for two American presidents.

In fact two presidents asked him to perform in the White House three times (Kennedy twice and Ford).

Unfortunately the Gary Powers U2 incident and Bay of Pigs disrupted the concerts.

Twice he did play for President Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Byron was the last American artist to play in Cuba before the Castro revolution.

He was also the first to play in Cuba at the request of the Castro administration.

His high energy performances in every major concert hall in the world dazzled the audiences.

At the same time he was hiding a serious case of psoriatic arthritis that was first diagnosed in both hands in the middle of his career.

Still his powerful concerts gave a whole new meaning to Chopin, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and all the greatest composers in classical history.

Byron is not just an American legend, nor a world class pianist, he is the embodiment of what happens when the spirit, heart, and soul have merged into the body of one of hardest working, creative, and energetic people walking the Earth.

His life was full of heartache and triumph but he never gave up and to this day never quit. Even after he could no longer meet his concert standards he shifted his interest to composing, teaching, communicating with young talent, and inspiring untold thousands of classical performers throughout the world.  

You owe it to yourself to check out Byron and order his latest album.  You can find him at the web site below. His story is far more extensive, diverse, and compelling than I have hinted but this is really just a birthday card not an autobiography.

Did I mention he married Maria Cooper, the daughter of film icon Gary Cooper?

So....

Happy Birthday Byron and may you never cease to amaze us.

http://byronjanis.com/

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What ever happened to the Great American Hero?

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Babe Ruth greeting beloved kids

Players for the Love of the Game not the Money!

For years, I watched in amazement as one after another of the last of the American heroes died and there was no one left to replace them.  For a long time I wondered why our heroes were disappearing, and where were we turning for inspiration, example, hope, and dreams.

I cannot even imagine growing up in a world today when your heroes might be Avatars or Anime, instead of Gary Cooper or Mickey Mantle.

Actually a few of you may wonder why Cooper is one of my top heroes.

When I was a kid baseball was still America's sport.  By the 1950's America had survived two world wars and the greatest depression in history, all in less than 40 years.  It was a time for the Golden Years when dreams came true and the American Dream could be realized.

By the way, whoever suggested the American dream was owning your own home in the suburbs with a brand new car in the driveway was nuts.

I was a Midwestern Hayseed and our dreams were of being really good at something so others might look up to you.  No one I knew was motivated by the desire for money and material possessions.  We wanted to excel at something and earn the respect from others for what we might achieve.

For the most part, setting new standards, breaking barriers, working harder, and sacrificing more served as an inspiration to others.  Many of our (the guys) heroes were baseball players and back then they played for the love of the game, not the love of the money, a monumental difference from today.

Ruth & Gehrig with kids

Then they used their fame to help inspire others, mostly kids, to do the same.

Thus began the start of my keen interest in actor Gary Cooper.  In the 1950's the two most popular baseball movies were the stories of the two most popular Yankees of all time and the two players whose careers epitomized the best and worst of baseball, Gehrig and Ruth.

The Yankees Babe Ruth, the Bronx Bomber, and Lou Gehrig, the Ironman of baseball, both had helped build the New York Yankees into the most popular and powerful franchise in sports history, including today.

Gehrig's story was first on film in 1942 called The Pride of the Yankees, released just a year after his unexpected death before his 38th birthday.  In America it was too early, too young, and too wrong for a genuine American hero to die that way.

Actor Gary Cooper played the role and had the benefit of the real Yankees and Babe Ruth who played with Lou Gehrig, to help him with the role. More than that, his Oscar winning talent was up to the task and his personal humility captured the essence of Lou Gehrig,  The film was magical and no one left the theater with a dry eye.

In 1948 William Bendix played the Babe in the movie The Babe Ruth Story about the life of the other twin pillar of Yankee history.  The beloved hero of all kids in America, raised in an orphanage in Baltimore, had a hard life struggling with the dark side but never wavered in his efforts to inspire kids.

Bendix, a Manhattan native, had once been bat boy for the New York Yankees and was in the dugout with the Babe as he hit over 100 home runs in Yankee stadium.  The Cooper and Bendix performances were exceptional and the movies remain among the top movies of all time to this day.

Maria Cooper Janis - Gary Cooper's daughter

My second experience with Gary Cooper came over 30 years later when I met a quite gifted woman in New York City trying to generate interest in quality films and documentaries.  At the time I had been working on National Geographic Television projects and was introduced to Maria Cooper Janis, the wife of world famous Classical Pianist Byron Janis.

Maria was Gary Cooper's only child and in the few conversations we were able to have about her father, one of my heroes who also played one if my heroes, I learned a lot more about her father.  Of course I remembered him for winning Oscars in Sergeant York and High Noon and his role as Lou Gehrig.

Father & daughter

But Maria's stories of growing up surrounded by Hollywood legends and listening to her dad's friends like Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, and Rosemary Clooney sing in her father's home on his grand piano must have been, well, amazing.

Maria and I shared a common interest in American Indians as did her father, and his reverence for the Indians extended to their values and practices.  At the time I was working with Indian nations from throughout North and South America and the world but especially with the Hopi of Arizona.

Gary Cooper was a hero, and many of the film roles he played captured the persona of heroes Americans loved.  His best friends included hero actor James Stewart and writer Ernest Hemingway, and among his co-stars were other heroines like Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlene Dietrich.

The question is, where have the heroes all gone?

The song Where Have All the Flowers Gone was written by Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson and performed by Marlene Dietrich, a friend and co-star of Cooper.

Marlene Dietrich performed this song in English, French and German. The song was first performed in French (as "Qui peut dire où vont les fleurs?") by Marlene in 1962 at a UNICEF concert. She also recorded the song in English and in German, the latter titled "Sag' mir, wo die Blumen sind", with lyrics translated by Max Colpet.  She performed the German version on a tour of Israel, where she was warmly received; she was the first person to break the taboo of using German publicly in Israel since WWII.

So you see, heroes can influence heroes, like Ruth, Gehrig and Cooper, but where have they all gone? Perhaps in time we can recapture those values and characteristics out of our past and rekindle them in our future or America may never again have genuine heroes.

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