DONATE! Watch This Salonline 7:30 pm Previous Salonlines
Sunday March 26, 2022
Emerson Avenue Salonlines Proudly Presents
a Live YouTube Broadcast
– A “hybrid” concert –
Alex Hassan
piano
The Magic of Alex Hassan
SOOOOO, I thought I would take a few months break from the streamed piano concerts. Lots going on here in Richmond, what with our Tudor style house restoration (wait’ll ya’ see what a couple of genius artisan handymen have wrought on our slice of paradise–), the Ebay sheet musical business, family stuff, the inevitable procrastinated IRS. So, ’twas agreed with my Emerson Avenue Salons hosts that I’d return early July to my synco-noodlings.
HAH!
Got a call this afternoon from said friends in McLean, VA (100 or so miles north of Richmond), with a last minute entreaty: Could I take over this coming Sunday night’s performance slot, as a result of a cancellation? That’s really only 2 days to come up with a program–a PERFORMABLE program! Jackie and Bill suggested, since I’ve been a regular on their virtual salon series the duration of the pandemic, that I revisit a few titles from earlier shows.
Went into the files and, yes, muscle memory will allow me to perform a few pandemic oldies. Lothar Perl, Billy Mayerl, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Harry Warren, Eubie Blake, et al, will once again emanate from your speakers. If I can, there may be a coupla new numbers as well, but lemme see how the next 2 days ensue. I don’t wanna see the digits worn out prior to performance. OY!
Sara lucked out this time. She hears me practicing the same stuff for only 2 days, before I head north. It’s usually 2 MONTHS.
“See” y’all soon, if nuttin’ better to do Sunday night! 
Biography
Alex Hassan has been in total immersion 1920s/30s Tin Pan Alley Popular Piano Styles therapy for over 40 years. A pupil of a pupil of a pupil of a pupil of Franz Liszt (well…it SOUNDS impressive?!), he has been a torchbearer for the melodies of between-the-wars Broadway and Hollywood (and European equivalents), devoting himself more specifically to collecting and resurrecting the great “late Romantic with a beat” popular songs that really never had a chance.
His archival collection of [mostly] popular piano solo and vocal sheet music numbers around 45,000 titles, entirely 1920s/30s. It is a tribute to those heady musical times that there is still so much left to find.
Alex has performed internationally at such venues as England’s Aldeburgh Festival, Husum (2007 & 2015–“Piano Rarities Festival”), Washington DC’s Kennedy Center, the Coolidge Auditorium (Library of Congress), various Manhattan/Baltimore/Washington night spots, and national ragtime festivals. He has recorded prolifically for England’s SHELLWOOD PRODUCTIONS, Los Angeleno label OPERETTA ARCHIVES, and Pennsylvania’s STOMP OFF, and has produced/annotated several reissues of the virtuoso popular pianists of the 78RPM period, for both Shellwood and the Pittsburgh company, RIVERMONT (for which he has also recorded, along with two brilliant singing friends).
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