“When my oldest daughter came home from third grade with a note from teacher saying she had musical aptitude, my wife said, ‘Let’s buy a piano so she can learn to play,’” recalls Michael Schwimmer. “I said, ‘Oh, no. She’ll turn out just like me. She’ll take lessons for a while, quit like I did, and we’ll be stuck with a piano nobody can play.’”
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That “little bit” has turned into a full-time profession for Schwimmer, today nationally recognized as a specialist in the perforated reels of paper that, when unwound through a player piano, mechanically reprodue a live piano performance. At 58, Schwimmer makes a solid living through his Piano Roll Center in Lake Bluff, auctioning antique and contemporary piano rolls by mail. But besides conducting a business that appeals to only a select market of collectors, Schwimmer brings his music to the people regularly, lecturing and demonstrating piano rolls at fairs and festivals around the country. This weekend, Schwimmer will play classic piano rolls for listeners at the Antiques al Fresco show at Port Clinton Square in Highland Park. His program will focus on ragtime–not only the well-known works of Scott Joplin, but music by Joplin’s peers that, because of the inconsistency with which African American music was published early in this century, is unfamiliar to many people.
It was, however, transcribed on paper rolls to be played on nickelodeons–or orchestrions, to use the proper name for the machines that produced music in bars in the days before juke boxes. “In the 1920s, there were lines of what were called race records for black music,” Schwimmer says. “There were never race piano rolls, but there were race nickelodeon rolls. These machines were placed in taverns everywhere, including taverns in black neighborhoods–specifically in Chicago on the south side. But the people there didn’t want to listen to the waltzes and fox trots that were popular in those days, like ‘Margie’ and ‘No, No, Nora.’ So a number of the companies that made these rolls, like the Capitol piano roll company, hired black jazz pianists in Chicago–guys like Clarence Johnson and Jimmy Blythe, who had played on some of the early race records. Capitol not only got them to play some songs, they gave them free rein. They said, ‘We don’t know the first thing about what you people wanna hear. So do whatever you wanna do.’”
“I don’t understand it, I admit,” he says. “But what happens is this. A guy plays music on an electronic keyboard, and what he plays is recorded on a floppy disk. The disk can be played back to operate the keyboard. But it also shows up on the computer screen–it looks like a piano roll sitting on its side. The notes appear as perforations on a roll. This way, you can edit out mistakes, clean things up. Then, thanks to some new software that’s just been developed, the file can be converted to another disk which will punch out paper piano rolls five at a time!” He laughs. “I remember when the inventors of musical high technology were saying, ‘Kiss your paper rolls goodbye. Floppy disks are the wave of the future.’ But people are still buying piano rolls.”
