Keys to joy: Fast fingers, fast mind
Uslan improvising new career as master of old-time piano playing
The Charlotte Observer
Lawrence ToppmanYou will cry at his unspoken command.
You will laugh when he chooses.
You will scarcely notice him as you stare at the screen, watching silent images from 80 years ago. But there, in the semi-darkness, Ethan Uslan will have you in his power.
Tear your eyes from Buster Keaton's Civil War antics in "The General" on Monday night at ImaginOn, and you'll find him at the piano bench under a small lamp, sprinting through a Rossini overture at the keyboard as Keaton tries to handle a recalcitrant cannon. Maybe he'll be wearing the broad-pinstripe suit that was in fashion when "The General" opened.
Listen closely, and you'll hear the fleet-fingered technique of a man with a classical music degree from Indiana University, mixed with the ragtime/stride/Tin Pan Alley feel of Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and George Gershwin.
He'll be having the time of his 28-year-old life. Because with an 11-month-old baby in the house and no guarantee of work, Ethan Uslan walked away from his librarian's job in February to devote himself to music born about the same time as his grandfather.
"I always wanted to play music professionally, but I didn't want to admit that to myself," he says, sitting in the east Charlotte home he shares with wife Kate and son Benjamin. "I didn't want to let that become a reality, in case I didn't achieve it.
"Before my son was born, I used to come home from work and play a little piano. Then I was coming home and doing daddy stuff, which was great, but I wasn't playing enough to be happy. Piano needed to be part of my work; I couldn't just be a wage slave and come home."
That decision had been brewing for at least a decade. Uslan grew up in South Orange, N.J., listening to "what the cool kids listened to -- I was a big Nirvana fan." A neighbor sold the Uslans a Wurlitzer spinet when Ethan was 9; by high school, he was soloing on Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" with his high school jazz band and Bach's D Minor keyboard concerto with its orchestra. Off he went to IU, but ...
"Professional-grade pianists were a dime a dozen. Everywhere I looked, people were playing flawless Beethoven concertos, so I determined to be better than they were at something. I genuinely liked stride piano, so I decided to work hard at that."
The Uslans moved to Charlotte three years ago, when he got a librarian's job at Johnson C. Smith University. Then he was Eytan Uslan, using the name his Israeli-born mother gave him.
He began to get gigs at retirement centers and country clubs. He entered the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest in Peoria, Ill., where the ivory-ticklers wear straw hats, suspenders and knee pants. (He won first place this summer.)
Uslan cut an album, "Carolina Moon," with songs ranging from "Daisy Bell" -- also known as "Bicycle Built for Two" -- to his own sprightly "Carolina Chickadee." (Visit
www.uslanmusic.com to learn more.) He became famous enough to get flown to private parties up north and solo in the recent "Prairie Home Companion" show at Ovens Auditorium.
And he met Sam Shapiro.
Shapiro, who programs film series for the Public Library, says his audiences are never as enthusiastic as when Uslan performs.
"We drew almost 100 people for `Safety Last,' and everyone stayed to give him a standing ovation," says Shapiro. "For `Our Hospitality' we had 150 people, the highest for any showing in a library series since 1993. So I hired him to do `Tol'able David' (last month) and `The General.'
"He knows the films cold -- no flying by the seat of his pants. Everything is timed perfectly and perfectly suited to the mood. People come from as far away as Rock Hill and Raleigh (for him)."
Uslan studies silent movies on a laptop perched atop his upright piano. He calls his work "a combination of compiling and improvising. If there's five minutes of despair, it's good to pick a piece; Beethoven wrote better despair music than I could improvise. But if a prevailing emotion hasn't set in yet, then I can improvise.
"In `Our Hospitality,' Buster Keaton would walk around daintily and goofily with his dog, so I'd play `The Whistler and His Dog.' In `The General,' Union soldiers are the bad guys, so I'll play `Battle Hymn of the Republic' in a minor key. I'll work in `Johnny Get Your Gun' when Buster's about to enlist."
He'll do tasteful "mickey-mousing," the term pianists use when they match action exactly -- a guy falls down, the piano goes "boom" -- but he mostly wants his music to augment emotions.
The only thing he can never do at a silent film, he says, is rest:
"You have to find some music that's appropriate in every scene and play 100 minutes without stopping. At the end of `Tol'able David,' I was a sweaty mess."
