Ron Tanski’s career as a blues piano player began on Christmas at the age of five.
Two things happened that holiday season: his mother got a piano, and Tanski got a record player. He immediately scoured the house for records to play and found a stash of old 45s. He started playing one after another, burning through dozens until one particular record nearly knocked him to the floor. It was the original Sun Records recording of Jerry Lee Lewis playing “Whole Lotta Shakin’.”
“It was like a bomb went off in my head,” Tanski said. “I remember thinking, ‘I want to do that – that is what I like.’ I listened to that record like a million times. I remember I took it to school the next time we had show-and-tell and I told the teacher, ‘Play this song.’ I was like, ‘This is really cool! This is music – it’s got a great beat, you can dance, you can move…’ And they all looked at me like I was from Mars.”
Tanski soon discovered he had a rare gift. He could figure out how to play almost anything he heard on the piano. He took lessons, but steadfastly refused to do what any instructor told him to play. What was the point? He could play whatever he wanted, by ear.
Later, as a teenager, he made another important discovery. His science teacher was giving a lesson about recessive traits in genes and she had the whole class take a little test involving their pinky fingers. As she went around and inspected, she stopped in front of Tanski’s desk. He couldn’t lift that finger.
“It was about Mendel’s peas, recessive traits, all that b.s…..She said, ‘Oh my god, that’s really rare, like one in 13 million – you’ve got this recessive trait’,” Tanski said. “I’m like, “Great. I want to be a famous piano player….’ But, you know, it worked out.”
In fact, his pinky and ring finger have the resultant unusual ability to stick together, making it possible for him to play notes emphatically (with his pinky) that most players can only play somewhat softly. It meant that he had been born into the family of barrelhouse piano players.
Blues piano began around the turn of the last century in saloons and tents that cropped up near lumber and turpentine camps in Louisiana and Texas. These gathering places became known as “barrelhouses” because they had large barrels of beer. Most also had pianos, and itinerant piano players travelled from camp to camp to play at the barrelhouses. These were loud, rowdy places, and the pianos were mostly out of tune – thus a style emerged in which the players pounded the keys hard to rise above the din and played fast to minimize the sound of out-of-tune notes.
This music predated even ragtime, and in a sense blues and jazz grew out of it. Such early players as “Cow Cow” Davenport gave way the famed “boogie woogie” players of the 1920s and 1930s such as Piano Red and Meade Lux Lewis. The musical lineage continued with the jump blues of Count Basie on through Ray Charles and Professor Longhair.
But a strange thing happened as the blues became an institution in American life. It became almost exclusively a guitar-based music — which partly explains why when a 17-year-old Ron Tanski walked into a famous old blues bar called Lindberg’s in Springfield, Missouri and sat down at the piano, people stopped in their tracks. He played age-old blues piano and his voice was some kind of ragged old whiskey-soaked country field hand.
“Here’s this white kid walking in playing blues at that age,” Tanski recalled. “And people were like, ‘My god, your voice – you sound like a 50-year-old black guy.’ I didn’t know. I just kind am the way I am…I’ve always been a blues guy.”
Tanski was the house pianist at Lindberg’s all the way through college at Missouri State. He studied music, and after graduation moved to L.A. He played in rock bands for several years – because he has a somewhat elastic voice, he found himself impersonating Sammy Hagar at one point – and was on the cusp of taking nationally touring gig when he learned that his newlywed wife, Catherine, was pregnant with a “honeymoon baby.”
All rock n’ roll plans were quickly put aside.
“I’ve seen too many episodes of Behind the Music,” Tanski said. “I didn’t want my kid to grow up like that. So I scaled back and went local.”
Tanski, who lives in Torrance, did anything and everything he could think of with his piano to stay local. He wrote scores, he played events, and he took a job as a music teacher at American Martyrs school in Manhattan Beach. He was one of the dueling pianos when Saint Rocke first opened in Hermosa Beach and then took a regular gig at a piano bar called Café Was in Hollywood, where he played for almost four years.
At the café, people began asking for a CD. Tanski had never recorded.
“I had shined that on ages ago,” he said. “So I made one just to sell at shows. People starting buying it, and I sent it as a lark to a friend who was a deejay….Next thing you know, the thing just went viral.”
Dozens of deejays began contacting him for the album, titled Dragged You Down, and it made its way onto the national blues charts. At one point it reached as high as #3, and it has remained in the top 100 in California for more than a year. It’s easy to see why – on his myspace page, Tanski cites several influences, but there are three name checks that actually encompass it all: “Jack Daniel’s, Mozart, and Howlin’ Wolf.” He possesses the grit acquired from Jack, the pure exuberance of Mozart, and the down home blues of the Wolf. It’s a winning combination.
And so Tanski has found his place – it’s behind the piano, in the South Bay, playing blues. He begins a month-long residency at Club 705 next week that is likely to continue in some form throughout the summer. He hopes it’s the beginning of a beautiful affair.
“I’d love to have just a nice place to call home where you can walk in – I guess I may be romantic, but it’s like in the old movies, that piano player in the bar at 2 a.m. playing blues in the corner,” Tanski said. “Not that I want to up at 2 a.m. when everybody is drunk, but I want to be that sound, that comfort, where you sit down and it’s, ‘Alright, I got you now. I’ll play for you. I’ve got you under my wings.”
He continues to teach – and learn from – the kids at American Martyrs.
“I’ve got to tell you, it’s kind of funny – I’m not really fond of grown-ups, but I love children and animals a lot,” he said. “Yeah, being around kids can really wear you out, and there are days where I’m walking the halls at school saying, ‘You know, I hate children.’ They all laugh, because they know I don’t mean it…I love them all dearly, and they are always listening to the newest stuff. ‘Mr. Tanski! You’ve got to hear this!’”
Mainly, Tanski is feeling grateful. He has two kids – Noah and Samantha – and a lot of music in his life. He wrote a song on his record that does something rare. The song, titled “Thank You”, expresses pure gratitude, with a barrelhouse glee.
“That song is a way of saying thanks both to God and my wife Cath and my kids, because I have been in some really bad places and had some not-so-good times and that was saying, you know, you have seen me through all of it, and thank you,” Tanski said. “And wherever I may go, wherever the road may lead, I know you are all there and walking with me.”
Ron Tanski plays Club 705 each Thursday night for the next month. For more info, see www.rontanskimusic.com
