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Everyone knows that most of the active jazz musicians, at least those who make a living at the trade, are closely linked with a handful of metropolitan centers. At the same time, there have always been a few exceptional musicians to be found in lesser cities, and Washington, D.C. is such a city. I arrived there in 1963, and my first thought was that if the government buildings were removed, this sleepy southern town would be about equal to the sleepy northern town I’d just left behind, where there were no remarkable local players at all.
But Washington did have the government, and it also had some exceptional musicians. In the mid 1960s, there were enough to put together one world-class band. It would have been a quintet; Tommy Gwaltney, clarinet; Steve Jordan, guitar; Keter Betts, bass; John Eaton, piano; and, if he was having a good day, which in those days he mostly didn’t, Eddie Phyfe on drums. Charlie Byrd could have done his own thing as a soloist, and, if he could get off from the paint store, Walter “Slide” Harris might have contributed a trombone specialty number. Shirley Horn, though a bit illusive, should be added to the list of exceptional players, but I never heard her once during my years in Washington, nor did I see her advertised.
Of course, this never happened. These musicians never got together, at least I don’t know of any time it happened; they all had something else to do. Tommy and Steve were at Blues Alley, Keter was on the road with Ella, Eddie often didn’t know where he was, and Charlie was running his own club. John Eaton was usually just going about his business, as the most original, reliable and best pianist in town.
I didn’t hear John until I’d been in town a couple of years. He was in demand, highly regarded, and played in places I couldn’t afford, but when he began to play with Tommy Gwaltney and become part of the Blues Alley scene, I was impressed with what I heard. At the same time, he was often hired to be part of the mix and match bands programmed at the local Manassas Jazz Festival. He always stood out, but it was sometimes difficult to tell what was really going on because half the musicians in a given band were amateurs, or semi-professional at best. Since I was rarely in Washington after 1967, except at that yearly festival, I rarely got to hear John under optimum conditions,
In early 1971, Johnson McRee, the producer of the Manassas festival, said he wanted to make a recording with Wild Bill Davison, and asked if would I help. I agreed, but there were some conditions. No amateurs in the band, Wild Bill had to pick the sidemen, and, no vocals, unless Bill wanted to sing, and I knew he didn’t. The guys Bill picked for the date were two of his pals, Cliff Leeman on drums and Jack Lesberg on bass. The Washington contingent was Steve Jordan on guitar and John Eaton holding down the Steinway. It was a terrific recording session and a fine album, Lady of the Evening was the result, one of the finest to appear on Johnson’s label, Fat Cat’s Jazz.
Various discographies claim Lady of the Evening was made in New York City on April 11, 1971. It wasn’t, and I have about thirty photographs to prove it. It may have been on April 11, but it was in Manassas, Virginia, at the local high school auditorium. Even if it was made in a high school auditorium, it is still a good record and worth a listen, if only because it got Wild Bill out of the Dixieland bag.
It was at this recording session that I finally had a chance to listen carefully to John Eaton and decided on the spot he was a marvelous artist, one who fell into the category of talent deserving wider recognition, but he wasn’t sufficiently well known to even make it into that category. There was no category for “Talent looking for any recognition at all.”
It took me a few years to work it out, but finally, in January and February 1975, John took the train to New York about half a dozen times on a Sunday morning, and worked all afternoon and early evening to make what would be his first solo recording. The liner notes for the album were written by the foremost jazz radio personality in Washington at the time, Felix Grant, and at the end he said, This collection was recorded with care, and that is almost an understatement. Anytime it takes six long sessions to get a dozen tunes, you know it is serious work. When it was finished, John had produced a minor masterpiece that astounded critics; Nat Hentoff singled it out for particular praise, it sold a few copies and pleased everyone who heard it. It remains the only record I ever released that contains Old McDonald and Dixie, both of which are simply marvelous.
In August and September 1977 we did it again, with roughly the same kind of schedule. We took our time and, once again, the mix of tunes was eclectic, ranging from Django to If to Cole Porter to Suicide Is Painless. One thing that made John second release better and than the first was the liner copy, written by his good friend, Dick Wellstood. Since Dick is somewhat more skilled in writing about pianists that I, here are his comments, in their entirety.
John Eaton is a difficult man to figure out. For instance, in spite of his having played the piano in saloons for many years, he doesn’t look like a piano player. Neither do I, and that makes me an expert in what piano players look like: when I say he doesn’t, he doesn’t. We played on the same concert bill a few years ago and I wore a blue blazer and slacks from Brooks Brothers and was told I looked spiffy. Eaton wore a pin-striped something that made me feel as through I had bought my blazer in the Englishtown Farmer’s Market. To describe him in greater detail would force me into a sort of social stereotyping that is odious to me, but Eaton really does look like one of them, if you know what I mean.
As for his background and beliefs, I have heard him refer to himself in public as a Fallen Episcopalian. Now, that is plainly a fatuous statement. Every working pianist knows that an Episcopalian is a pink man with whisky breath and absurd tartan slacks who looms up at the piano and demands that you play a song other than the one you are playing at that moment. It is ridiculous to think of such a creature being capable of anything so dramatic and meaningful as a Fall, and in any event, Eaton does not wear tartan slacks, so that one realizes right away that he is capable of inordinate self-deception.
Moreover, he is issue of Washington, D.C., and that is difficult to figure out in itself. New York was and is the town for pianists, which is one reason that it has always been somewhat more nearly civilized than the rest of the country. In fact, if Washington had had more pianists and fewer lawyers, we would all be better off. But I digress. Eaton attended Yale and Georgetown, facts that are so irrelevant to the existence of this album that I will say no more about them.
The main quality in Eaton’s playing is its naturalness. He is a born pianist. His playing breathes. He loves the instrument, even to the point of occasionally playing a trifling idea with great care and beauty, as if the sound of the instrument itself could atone for an imperfect conception. It can’t, but one does summon up occasional forgiveness in the face of such an elevated intent.
Although he works regularly in, mirabile dictu, a piano bar, there is no trace of piano bar slop in his playing (When Karl Kraus was moved to define sentimental irony as a dog that bays at the moon while it pisses on a grave, he surely must have been spending a good deal of time in the Viennese equivalent of a piano bar). He is not a sentimentalist. His attempts at sentiment result in real emotion, and that is enough to stamp him as an artist.
The pleasure I get from Eaton’s playing can best be illuminated by approaching some of the things he is not. For instance, he is not a Hard Swinger, thank God, and avoids the excesses with which they are fond of inflicting us. He is not an Oscar. Nor is he an Erroll or a Fats or a Bill or an Art or a McCoy (most pianists are, willy-nilly). He is his own man, and is not afraid to tackle even so individualistic a piece as a Willie “The Lion” Smith composition and play it his own way; most pianists, myself included, hammer Willie’s pieces out with a caricature of Willie’s style, but not Eaton.
He plays, in short, like a member of the gentry, a welcome approach to such an inescapably elitist activity as piano playing. He is eclectic, but in the good, modern manner. That is to say, he respects music without regard for its age or style, and gives it all his whole attention. And he plays it all - bop, stride, some blues, the ballads, all well done, all thoroughly appropriate to his needs, and cemented with his own mastery-the ultimate test.
Anyone who would interpolate Mairzy Doats into the middle of Have You Met Miss Jones can’t be all bad, not even a Fallen Episcopalian. And maybe you think Alicia de Larrocha looks like a piano player?
There isn’t much more to say, other than it is now thirty years later, and I’ve made a few more John Eaton recordings. When Chiaroscuro got back on track in the late 1980s, John was almost the first person called for a recording project. The most recent CD was recorded at Steinway Hall, where he’d been invited by the head of that venerable firm to come and play on a new $160,000 special piano, known as The Rhapsody. We thought John’s all Gershwin program worth recording and it was. We pulled the shades and worked late into the night for a couple of evenings in January 2000 and it came out very well.
John continues to play just the way Wellstood described, except now he occasionally sings a song. I don’t think he sings nearly as well as he plays, but I feel the same way about every pianist who sings and plays, with the possible exception of Jay McShann.
He still lives in Washington, D.C., and if my spies are reliable, it would be almost impossible to put together a quintet of exceptional locals who could play at the level of the guys in the 1960s, so he plays solo, but John doesn’t complain about the level of competence of the local musicians. He is, however, always dismayed with each new batch of elected officials. He’s played functions at the White House any number of times, but not during the tone-deaf, treadmill to oblivion administration that live there for the first eight years of this decade.
John continues to play in only the best saloons. The last two times I’ve heard him in New York was at the Yale Club. At a recent elegant soiree in Washington, his elegant way with a piano charmed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who used her persuasive powers in such a way that John was engaged to perform for all nine justices at a special recital at the Supreme Court. This may be a first for a jazz musician; I can think of no other artist so honored. The LP for which Wellstood wrote the liner notes was entitled, It Seems Like Old Times, which a lot of people, including many on the Court, seem to think is just fine. I’m not so sure John thinks this is such a good idea these days, but he’ll let his piano do the talking.
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 John Eaton, East 13th Street, New York City, August 3, 1989
 John Eaton's hands in performance
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Barry Harris, SIR Studios, New York City, October 15, 1986
Laura Foreman, The Monumental Show, Brooklyn, New York, June 20, 1981
Leonard Feather and Dorothy Donegan, Saga Theater, At Sea Aboard the S/S Norway, November 1, 1993
Last of the Whorehouse Piano Players, Gus Johnson, Ralph Sutton, Milt Hinton and Jay McShann, Van Gelder Recording studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, March 28, 1989