Bach to Jazz

In Manhattan's jazz-filled Embers nightclub last week, a newcomer was dazzling the customers with his flashing piano pyrotechnics. He started out a month ago as an unknown with a brief trial booking, created such a stir that he was immediately re-engaged and signed up for all his New York City appearances for the next three years. His name is Alex Kallao (rhymes with today-oh); he is 21, and has been blind since birth.*

Like many jazz pianists, Pennsylvania-born Alex Kallao uses string bass and drums to give his performance more body and bounce. His arrangements (of such standards as Tea for Two and Bewitched) usually begin with gentle but full-bodied harmonizations of the tune. Then, grinning toward the crowd, he "takes off" for a chorus or two of swift-moving improvisations that feature unerring cascades of notes in the right hand and ear-teasing harmonic changes beneath. His style is not yet so distinctive that a listener could identify him blindfolded, but his razzle-dazzle endings get him a big hand.

Also like his colleagues of the modern school. Pianist Kallao has a fondness for the classics. At the Embers, he slips in something by Chopin or Falla with such an unassuming air that it never seems out of place. He began to learn the classics when he was three. His father, himself a professional pianist, would sit beside him at the keyboard, playing a Beethoven sonata, one hand at a time, while little Alex's fingers followed an octave away. Perhaps because of his blindness, "I always improvised and made up little pieces." so when he began to listen to records of Erroll Garner. Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum, he was ready for jazz.

"Jazz requires a lot of feeling," he says. "Not everyone can do it. I try to build my improvisations on classical patterns, especially Bach, because I think jazz has a lot to do with classical music." His ambition is to give a classical recital in Carnegie Hall, "when I have time to work up a program--and the money."

Chances are the U.S. musical public will hear most of Alex Kallao as a jazzman : when he winds up his Manhattan run. he heads for Chicago arid a circuit of the nation's jazz rooms.

*Other popular blind pianists: Alec Templeton, Art Tatum, George Shearing, Lennie Tristano.

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