The comedian Fred Allen dubbed Pauline Alpert "The Young Lady Who Sounds Like Two Pianos."
Radio stations promoted her as the Whirlwind Pianist. But the most bizarre nickname for Alpert, one of a dozen or so artists to be featured in "Keyboard Wizards of the Gershwin Era," a new reissue project from Pearl Records, was Flying Pianist, in a 1920s vaudeville show."They called her the Lindbergh of the piano," said Artis Wodehouse, a historian of music performance, who is producing "Keyboard Wizards." "Alpert and her piano were coated with phosphorescent paint, attached to ropes and pulleys and hoisted above a darkened stage, where she played while circling above the dancers." (After a pulley snapped and Alpert narrowly avoided an accident, the story goes, she wrote a piano solo entitled "Perils of Pauline.")
The Alpert CD (Pearl 9201) is the first of a projected seven, showcasing performances by pianists, largely classically trained, whose careers flourished in the pop arena during the 1920s and 30s. They include "novelty piano" stylists like Alpert, Zez Confrey, Rube Bloom, Victor Arden and Phil Ohman as well as crossover composers like Dana Suesse, whom The New Yorker termed "the girl Gershwin."
"These people fell in the cracks," said Wodehouse, who also supervised "Gershwin Plays Gershwin," the best-selling Nonesuch reissue, and its recent successor, "George Gershwin: The Piano Rolls," Volume 2 (Nonesuch 79370-2; CD). "They were neither classical nor pop, and when music started bifurcating into its many areas of specialization after World War II, they just vanished. What bin did they fit in?"
Indeed, novelty piano is a zany amalgam of Tin Pan Alley tunes and 19th-century, Lisztian salon music; it incorporates the syncopated rhythms of ragtime and the stride piano of jazz.
It originated in 1921, when ragtime was on the wane, with the publication of Confrey's "Kitten on the Keys," which sold a million copies during its first year in print.
The 27 short keyboard solos on the Pearl disk, recorded by Alpert in the '40s, are characteristic of the genre. As Alex Hassan, a collector and performer of novelty piano, notes in informative liner notes, the music is improvised but highly arranged, with the principal melody subjected to all kinds of flashy embellishments.
Alpert's arrangements are typically hyperkinetic and mercurial, segueing seamlessly from one musical idiom to the next, with frequent classical and pop interpolations. It is a pity they are unavailable in sheet-music form.
"Glow Worm," for example, begins with a quotation from "The Night They Invented Champagne," moves into the "Glow Worm" melody in a straightforward manner that dissolves into tango rhythms, and ultimately recapitulates the theme in block chords followed by glissandos up the keyboard.
"Where or When," the Rodgers and Hart standard, starts with the opening chords of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. By contrast, Rimsky-Korsakov's "Song of India," a popular entry in classical anthologies of "piano favorites," is rendered with madcap rhythms, including a chugging, choo-choo beat in the left hand.
Although the quality of the selections sags toward the end of the disk's 72 minutes, most of the music is delightful.
Through it all, Alpert shines. Hers is a keyboard persona of virtuosity, playfulness and verve. A native New Yorker born around 1900, she studied at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. At the height of her career, she performed in revues, made more than 50 piano rolls, appeared on national radio broadcasts and played at the White House three times.
She wrote at least six short piano solos, three of which are included here. "Dream of a Doll," for one, is a wistful, bluesy piece, slight but charming.
For greater compositional and expressive depth, listeners will have to await Volume 2 of the Pearl series. Scheduled for release in February, it presents Suesse performing her own music.
Her career encompassed pop hits like "You Oughta Be in Pictures" and concert music like the Jazz Concerto in D for Combo and Orchestra. She studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the matron saint of American composers.
In addition to Confrey, the best known of the novelty pianists, future disks will be devoted to Roy Bargy, Felix Arndt, John Green and a surprising number of women, including the composers Muriel Pollack and Vee Lawnhurst, and the pianist Constance Mering. But all of these "keyboard wizards" were ultimately eclipsed by the formidable Gershwin himself, an injustice Wodehouse hopes to redress.
"Confrey, by virtue of the wide distribution of his numerous piano rolls, initiated a whole style of piano playing that influenced Gershwin and others," she said. "Gershwin conceded that in the introduction to his `Songbook.' "
Another reason these pianists dropped out of sight is that many developed tragic illnesses. Arndt died at around 29 in a flu epidemic. Mering retired prematurely after contracting tuberculosis. Confrey suffered from epilepsy.
Alpert virtually disappeared after the 1950s. By 1978, when Amica, an organization of piano roll collectors, invited her to perform at a convention, she was hunched over and unable to walk without crutches. Yet by all accounts, she played with pizazz.
"They all faded," Wodehouse said. "That really fuels me, because it's a shame. But hey, it's not going to be a shame anymore."