"You got any tools?" Awadagin Pratt asks in the darkness backstage. Out front, the high-school students in the audience are either fidgeting at the prospect of an hour of classical music or contemplating a midmorning nap. Pratt, who has been sipping coffee from a very tall plastic cup, is not much more awake himself.
The piano lid is up. The spotlights are on. But a screw has come loose in Pratt's custom-made blondwood bench, the one he carries from concert to concert, the one that puts him only 131/2 inches off the floor, the one that lets him go eyeball to ivory like a latter-day Glenn Gould.The high-school administrator and the concert promoter who arranged this appearance at High Point High School in Beltsville, Md., cannot find a screwdriver. Pratt fishes a Swiss Army knife out of a pocket and manages to tighten the wobbly leg enough to last through the hour. Then he lopes onstage, bench in one hand, cup in the other.
Pratt, who is 28 and pronounces his first name ah-wah-DODGE-in, is not your garden-variety, prize-winning young pianist. Besides his low-slung piano bench and his casual-looking clothes, there are his dreadlocks. And there is the thing that makes him a rarity in the mostly white world of classical music: he is black. He sounds as if he is tired of talking about it, as if he has heard the same questions over and over.
"I sort of expect that, in time, all the excess stuff won't be news: the bench, the dreadlocks, the blackness," he says. "Not new news. When I wear T-shirts at a performance, that's what makes me comfortable. A tux, that creates barriers. That's the most considered and plotted aspect of my appearance. I thought it was just silly to wear tails."
And the dreadlocks? "There were people in school who frowned on it, said it was self-destructive," he says. "I just like the hair style." From that, he says, he learned something: "One of the things which became a constant in my life is doing what I think I should be doing without too much concern about what people think."
As a hot young pianist with a big sound and a knack for tackling fast, risky passages, Pratt can talk like an iconoclast - for the moment, anyway. He was catapulted into the concert-hall spotlight when he won the 1992 Naumburg International Piano Competition, whose name always seems to be preceded by the word "prestigious" the way any mention of the House Ways and Means Committee always seems to follow the word "powerful." The award was followed by a recording contract with EMI.
His second album, a Beethoven sonata recital, is to be released in June. His first, "A Long Way From Normal," came out last year. The title is a play on the name of his hometown, Bloomington-Normal, Ill., where his father taught physics and his mother taught social work at Illinois State University. His sister, Menah, grew up to be a lawyer.
He is 5 feet 101/2, though he seems taller. He is in good shape but offstage he walks stealthily, as if he does not want to draw attention to himself. But at 4 or 5 he was running around waving his arms like a conductor. Before long he was not only taking piano lessons, but playing the violin. "It's harder," he says. "But the piano has more repertoire."
He enrolled at the University of Illinois, then transferred to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. He says the New England Conservatory of Music accepted him in violin but not piano, and the Cleveland Institute of Music in piano but not violin. Only at Peabody could he study both.
Once there, Pratt went one better: he added conducting to his course list and became the first person in Peabody's 137-year history to graduate with three areas of concentration. And with his low-slung piano bench, which began life as a lamp table in a furnished apartment he rented while at Peabody.
"I like to sit low," he says. "I've sat low since about 1984, because of my interest in Glenn Gould. A lot of times, the stage manager will be staring at the bench. He'll say: `Why do you want a table on the stage? You're sitting on that?' "
His 131/2-inch bench is actually half an inch lower than its predecessor in Pratt's knapsack, the lamp table. Giving up the lamp table was not easy. After gluing its legs back together, Pratt lugged it out on stage one last time, for a concert in Columbus, Ohio, "to say goodbye so it wouldn't feel jilted." He hopes someday to have an adjustable bench of koa wood, which Hawaiians use for canoes and surfboards.
Thanks to the Naumburg prize, Pratt now finds himself on the road a lot, jetting from concert to concert, although he says he does not much like flying. But it is not clear from a conversation what he dislikes most: the droning engines, the stale airplane air or the slights he has had to endure. He describes flight attendants who told him he did not belong in first class and a North Carolina hotel clerk who could not seem to find a fax his manager had sent, and tried to have Pratt thrown out when he complained.
Pratt brings all of this up only after the "informance" at the high school. It turns out that an informance is a kind of one-man "Young People's Concert" without the klieg lights, cameras or high-voltage energy of Leonard Bernstein.
He does informances to be a role model for black teenagers, to demystify classical music and to prove that professional sports are not the only path to fame. "Parents have to see it's possible for one of us, so to speak, to do it, to encourage their kids," he says. "People told me, `It's just an hour of your time, 70 or 80 percent of a solo recital.' But you can't just kick back. You have to be very engaging with the audience."