FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: How To Play Piano

Question:
Does anyone play piano in a restaurant or bar? I'm UK based, and used to play (jazz) piano a lot. I've always toyed with the idea of playing dinner jazz in a restaurant as a sideline - both for the joy of entertaining and hopefully to bring in a few extra pennies. Can anyone give any tips on the idea of playing piano in a restaurant. I need to know everything really: Can you turn up with your own set of songs? How many songs should I realistically have before I start looking around for gigs? Do venues get you to work every night, or could I do one or two nights a month? Does it pay well? What's a good rate to ask for? Will people get offended if I say I don't know how to play their favourite song? If anyone would care to post their own story of how they started out then I'd be most grateful! On style - can anyone give any advice on their own playing styles? Most of my playing used to be comping in a rhythm section, so only limited soloing. Dinner jazz would be a very much different affair as I'd have to hold the melody all the time. I'm finding this strange as I'm used to just doing bass with LH and chords with RH. Fitting the melody in as well is proving hard! The only possible get-out I can see would be stride piano but I guess you can't get away with that all the time.

Answer:
I used to, but it didn't pay enough. I will still sub for folks. Have a word with someone who is doing it already - your nearest Pizza Express may well have a once-a-week gig, and the people who do these Pizza Express jobs are usually great, and always friendly. I first played the piano in restaurants and the like when I was at college, and learned very quickly that unless you were very lucky the best audience was always going to be yourself. I also learned that telling a drunk dressed in a Hawaiian shirt in the Chinese restaurant where I was playing, and to which he had taken his wife for her once-a-year-night-out on her birthday, that I didn't much care for Happy Birthday and didn't feel like playing it, was probably the most dangerous thing I had ever done in my life. So when a bloke with a face that looks like it has been in a thousand fights, with a wife who looks like she can take care of herself just as well, asks you to play something you don't like or have never heard of, just say yes and play anything in the most avant-garde style you can fake. And if he tells you afterwards that he thought it was crap, tell him that you improvised the arrangement specially. As to what you get paid - get the job first and talk about remuneration second. At the very least you'll have fun and you'll be fed and watered. People-watching from behind a piano in a bar or restaurant is an entertaining anthropological research exercise in its own right.