Greatness May Be Anywhere

Boston Herald

NORFOLK, Va. - His name is Charlie Wiseman and he plays piano in a small bar in Norfolk. His name's not on the door or in lights or anywhere except on his card, which he'll give you if you ask.

He plays Friday and Saturday nights and he plays other places other nights and glasses clink and patrons laugh and there is conversation and men tell jokes while he makes the piano sing.

He wrings the blues out of old songs and the piano nearly weeps he's so good. He plays "Try a Little Tenderness," and it's new, suddenly. He plays "Rhapsody in Blue" and it's as if you never heard it before.

And you think, why is he here?  What is a guy like this doing in a place where people aren't even paying attention? He should be in a concert hall wearing a tux playing a Steinway, playing for people who wouldn't think of clearing their throats during his performance.  He should be headlining somewhere.

You don't pay to listen to him. There's no cover or minimum. You can sit on a stool around the piano and drink water if you want. You can watch his fingers on the keys turn sound into soul and soul into art, all for free.

At the end of the night, you thank him. You tell him he's great and you ask where he learned to play and to sing, where he went to school and he says he didn't go to school, he learned from his parents who were entertainers. "Osmosis," he says, smiling. "I'm not all that great. I'm just a bar-room piano man."

And the word "just" stings like a whip because it is so wrong, because it takes what he's done, what he does well, and diminishes it.

And you want to tell him that great isn't dependent on school, that great simply is. You want to tell him that he's great not just because he brings music to people who may never set foot in a concert hall, but because he makes music so good it's not always played there.

And it strikes you then that great isn't dependent on where either, that you were making the same kind of judgment: What is he doing here, as if here isn't good enough, as if great belongs only where there are chandeliers.

Why do we do this? Why do we equate great with rich, with status, with the number of people who say something's great, with popularity?

Great has nothing to do with the size of an audience or a marquee. Great is like a sunset, beautiful even if no one watches. When you see it, you know it and when you hear it, it resonates and makes everything else disappear.

I met an artist a few months ago at a hotel in Hawaii. I forget her nameI suppose that's appropriate, for it was her art that stopped me. There I was in the middle of a real paradise, yet her invented one made me pause.

She was selling note cards and colorful prints of animals she'd painted and her work was bright and compelling and inventive.

She didn't start painting until she was 40, she said. She'd been doing it 12 years but she wasn't a real artist, not yet. If she could just get her note cards picked up by a big company, and she was working on this, then she'd have it made. Then she'd be recognized and she wouldn't be selling her work only in hotels.

"Only in hotels."

"I'm just a bar-room piano man."

Why do we think that art has to be a big financial success to be art, that a musician has to be a superstar, that a play has to make it on Broadway, that a book has to win a Pulitzer Prize, that there has to be a prize for the prize that is talent and hard work?

Flowers don't get standing ovations; they just bloom.  A day dawns, and trumpets don't sound.

Great surrounds us, not just in nature but in all kinds of people doing what they love and doing it as well as they can.