Live, from McDonald's, it's the Piano Man

NEW YORK - (LATWP) Consider the piano man. Just listen for a while. From jazz to classical to mambo, from Ellington to Chopin to Puente, just about any kind of music rolls off his nimble fingers. He scats sometimes, too, and croons a bar or two of the blues. He bounces lightly as he plays, as if dancing with the latest in a long line of baby grands he’s partnered all his life.

He’s the piano man of the Golden Arches, the maestro of McDonaldland. He is David George Preudhomme, 66.

Lovers of Latin jazz, if they are of a certain age, will remember the New York-based Joe Panama Sextet he led to some critical acclaim. His music was popular and respected in the 1950s and ’60s.

And after a long journey through the ballrooms, stages, hotel lounges and cafes that are the pianist’s life, "Joe Panama" landed here in 1999, beneath the golden arches. Especially after a recent heart attack, he’s prepared to play wherever there’s a piano and a paycheck.

Because it’s a block from ground zero, many of the McDonald’s customers are firefighters and other workers at the Trade Center site. Sometimes the piano man plays patriotic tunes.

In his long list of many gigs around town, he says, he played several months in 1998 at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the trade center’s north tower. Around the same time, Preudhomme got a job filling in on piano at the McDonald’s, becoming the latest in a line of piano men going back to the restaurant’s opening in 1988.

Preudhomme was never a star. But he had a name back in the 1950s, ’60s, even ’70s. With timbales, vibes, conga, bass, piano and vocalist, the Joe Panama Sextet swirled in the musical ferment that, for a time, built a bridge between black and brown New York. The Latin jazz groups, whose leading lights were the likes of Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez, were all the rage in the ’50s in the Harlem social clubs.

"Oh, I think the highlight of my career," he says wistfully, "was playing opposite Count Basie at the St. Nicholas Arena, with Billie Holiday" on the marquee. "Oh yeah," he says, "that’s a highlight, that’s a highlight."

Preudhomme cut one boogaloo/Latin soul album in 1967, "The Explosive Side of Joe Panama."

"After watching all the greats playing the Ellingtons, the Brubecks, the Oscar Petersons, the Billy Taylors I realized that you can’t play at all compared to them. I still view myself as a student of music."

Sure, deep down, who wouldn’t want to cut another album? But he doesn’t think it’s in the cards. "I’m dreaming," he admits.

So each day, he takes the subway in from Brooklyn. He climbs the stairs to his perch, leaning heavily on the banister. He walks down a long corridor that leads to the front of the restaurant, where his latest dance partner, his latest piano, awaits.