There is only one Buddy Charles, and there he was one night, or early morning, telling me, “I would walk down Randolph Street when it was crowded with clubs and just soak in all the music . . . So many wonderful sounds just pouring out into the night.”
It is impossible to calculate the number of nights and early mornings that I sat near Buddy Charles and listened to him talk and sing and play the piano.
Too young to have caught him at such bygone clubs as the Blue Note, Jazz Limited, the Casino, the Riptide, Curly’s Show Lounge or the Playroom, I was a frequent visitor during the 18 years he held late-night court at the Acorn on Oak, and later, in the more rarefied Coq d’Or in the Drake Hotel. It was there one night or early morning that he told me, “I have not one regret. If they nailed me in the box tomorrow, I could go knowing I got away with everything. I fooled ’em all.”
He is a living encyclopedia of American music. As my colleague, Howard Reich, has written, “Listen to an hour of Charles’ piano and you’ll hear a virtual history of jazz and pop keyboard playing of this century.”
He started early: “I can remember as a child sitting under the piano as my mother [Ruth] played and my hands just kept moving, my tiny fingers flying through the air.” He began taking lessons in the 6th grade, quit for a while after joining the Mt. Carmel High School boxing team and serving for two years in the Army. He started playing again at Loyola University, where he majored in what might be the perfect subjects for a career as a piano man, philosophy and psychology. He toyed with the idea of teaching, but there were so many clubs then, eager for a talented and tireless performer.
Fats Waller was a big influence on his playing, as was jazz great Mugsy Spanier, Charles’ stepfather: “I was there when they met. At Jazz Limited, Mugsy accidentally on purpose knocked my mom’s coat on the floor, brushed it off and in a flash, there I was, the best man at their wedding.”
He is married to Pat, who abandoned a successful New York stage career to marry him more than 50 years ago and who told me, “He is the only man I ever met who I knew I could spend my life with. I have never missed the theater. My life with Buddy and the kids allowed me to discover other facets of life. I’ve had the best of it all. All thanks to this lovely man.”
He is devoted to Pat. But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others who have had satisfying relationships with Buddy. Whether these lasted for just an hour or have continued through the decades (he still plays now and then at Chambers in Niles), he has never let us down.
He knows the secret, and he put it poetically one long-ago night or early morning, when he leaned across the keys of his piano and said, “There is something primitive about being close to live music. What makes it work is that people are inherently eager for intimacy.”
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rkogan@tribune.com
