The other day someone sent me DVD that contained a kinescope of a 1951 Frank Sinatra television show. I was surprised to see that Joe Bushkin had a featured role. He was right up there in the opening credits, was part of comedy sketches, in which he was very good, and had a solo spot at the piano. Not as part of a band, or behind Sinatra, but a featured spot. He sang I Love A Piano and then played a romping version of the song. It reminded me how very good he was.

Joe became part of the Bunny Berigan/Eddie Condon crowd as a teenager, and was in his very early twenties when he joined Tommy Dorsey in 1940, where, with Tommy Dorsey, he wrote Sinatra’s first big hit with the band, Oh, Look At Me Now. For the next twenty years he recorded extensively and played the best rooms on both coasts; his circumstances were such that he could work when it suited him. In the process, he became a celebrity pianist. In 1951, there were not many jazz pianists who’d get billing on a Frank Sinatra television show.

As years passed, he appeared in public less and less, but when he did he still had his dazzling technique and secure sense of melody, particularly when he dug into the likes of Cole Porter and George Gershwin. I always thought I knew him better than I did because of his close association with Johnny DeVries. In the 1970s, Johnny designed some of my best LP covers, and in those years Johnny’s two best friends were Joe and Helen Hayes. He talked about them constantly, and if Joe was having a horse flown here or there for a competition, Johnny would rattle off all the details. When Joe took one of his rare club engagements in New York, Johnny would write special, updated lyrics for the songs they’d written together. I always had the feeling Joe was cocky and maybe a little abrasive, but at the same time, I had a soft spot for him because I knew he’d paid the bills for Lee Wiley when she became ill and was unable to pay them herself.

In 1983, when we were structuring the first Floating Jazz Festival, Johnny suggested I should ask Joe. I didn’t think he’d be interested, but I gave it a shot. To my amazement, he said he’d be pleased to on be the ship. As it turned out, this was the only time we worked together. He was terrific when he played the Steinway, but sometimes he wanted to play a Fender Rhodes that was onboard, which I didn’t think worked very well, even when he performed with Zoot Sims and Bucky Pizzarelli. He also drove his cabin steward to distraction. He was the only person the steward had ever encountered who paid him to stay out of his room, and my guess is that Joe’s housekeeping abilities were right up there with Dorothy Donegan. But Joe was always charming, good humored, and did the job.

A couple of years later he led a fine band at the St. Regis, the only time I can remember their being a jazz band in the King Cole Room, and he sounded as good as ever. I don’t know how he managed to secure that engagement. We were in touch again when Johnny DeVries died in the early 1990s, but not again until June 2000, when Joe flew in to be part of a special tribute to Milt Hinton. This gave me an opportunity to take some photographs. Once again, he played very well, but I shouldn’t have been surprised, he was only 83, and probably the oldest guy on stage.

When Joe burst on the scene in the mid-1930s he was already an exceptional pianist and had good looks plus a bubbling personality to go along with it. Within a decade, circumstances were such that he knew where he was never going to have to have to look around for lunch. He left a dandy recorded legacy from the 1940s and 1950s, but my guess is that if things had been a little tougher for him, if he’d had to work just a little harder, with a little less celebrity, he could have been a giant of a player. The brilliance of his playing in the old 1951 kinescope proves that. Maybe it was an opportunity missed, but perhaps not. Music isn’t the only thing. He had his share of that, but also had a great time along the way, and in the meantime outlived almost all his contemporaries from the Condon crowd of the 1930s and 1940s. Only Johnny Blowers and Jack Lesburg lasted longer and now there both gone as well.

Joe Bushkin, JVC Jazz Festival, New York City, June 13, 2000