The Piano Man

Juilliard-trained pianist and composer Adrian Carr performs – and more – in the North Country

Story and photos by Sally Hale

Adrian Carr is closing his eyes.

Throwing back his head of silver hair, he sways slightly as his fingertips expertly glide across the keyboard in a well-synchronized dance between flesh and ivory. For a moment, he lifts his chin in the air, throws his shoulders back, and turns his head ever so slowly while a slight smile animates his face. Then, as suddenly as a page turn, he hunches towards the piano, his Juilliard-trained hands and eyes focused solely on the instrument before him.

Roughly twenty-five years separate the pianist from the two years he spent composing and rehearsing, four to five hours daily, in Juilliard’s practice rooms. On Sept. 15, the Buffalo native performed a concert for about 80 people at Plattsburgh’s North Country Cultural Arts Center, the same scene as his now impromptu performance for one. Tucked in a corner and previously hidden under a navy-blue blanket, the grand piano is the only instrument in the cream-colored, high-ceilinged room, a space that becomes an echo chamber of sound as Carr continues to play.

The late September sun, spilling from the surrounding windows, bathes the pianist in a soft glow; his mass of pepper-colored hair appears to turn white while a wedding ring, placed on his left hand in 2005, glints, a wink of gold shimmering across the piano’s vanilla-colored keys. The Montreal resident is outfitted entirely in black, with the words adriancarrpiano.com, written in silver across the front of his T-shirt, quietly advertising his website of four years. The piece, it is obvious, is being performed from memory - no sheets of music hover above the keyboard.

Turning on the polished black bench, Carr abruptly drops his hands into his lap.

“That song’s called ‘Finding Charlotte,’” says Carr. “It’s the name of my (upcoming) third CD. I had to literally find Charlotte before I could write it. I wasn’t very nice to her in high school, and so I felt I had to find her.”

As if reading a rest symbol on a page of music, the pianist pauses.

“You just have to move forward,” he adds thoughtfully.

Yet looking back, it was a series of events that were about four decades in the making which have led to Carr’s sitting on this glossy piano bench today. Indeed, Carr, who has played since roughly kindergarten (“My feet,” he says, “couldn’t touch the pedals”) has had a musical career that has included two CDs, two Grammy-entrance nominations, and the founding of two sound engineering studios. Yet his earliest audiences sat not in the Weill Auditorium at Carnegie Hall, as they did for the launching of his second CD, “Days of the Year,” but at Frank’s Anchor Bar in his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y.

"If a piano was in a restaurant, my father was always saying, ‘Why don’t you play?' "

“We had a piano around the house, and I was encouraged by my mother and father to take lessons, like so many other people are,” says Carr, who practiced daily as a child. “If a piano was in a restaurant, my father was always saying, ‘Why don’t you play?’ At Frank’s Anchor Bar – which is where Buffalo chicken wings were invented, by the way – there was a baby grand piano, and I remember getting up there, playing, several times. The way the restaurant was set up, all the tables were placed around the stage, and there was a jazz quartet. I must have been in Third grade, and I had to perform the pieces from memory – I never knew when I would be asked to play.”

In high school, Carr, who claims he was “lucky” to have maintained an interest in piano during his adolescent years, was still at the piano bench. However, the then-teenager traded in the ivory keys for a Fender Rhodes Electric piano and went from playing Ferelis to using a MiniMoog – yes, MiniMoog – synthesizer as a member of “Troubadour,” his first high school rock band. After the group of two years broke up, Carr became a member of a second band, called “BOS.” This subsequent group, which Carr described as playing “classic, progressive rock,” performed several local shows in Buffalo before the inevitable high school graduation and flurry of college applications ensued.

"It’s hard to categorize your self. My music is a combination of my classical background mixed with rock roots."

“During the teen years, you use your music to express your emotions,” Carr says. “It’s important: you go from taking lessons to then getting emotionally involved in what you’re doing – it’s entirely different.  It’s hard to categorize yourself. My music is a combination of my classical background mixed with rock roots. I call it ‘New Age,’ but it’s not ‘sleepy’ music – it covers a wide emotional range.”

Indeed, it was a range that was honed at Juilliard by way of SUNY Buffalo. In around February or March of his senior year in high school, the then eighteen-year-old Carr auditioned for the state school’s music department. Although he transferred after two years, it was at the university that Carr met a man who would become his mentor - an individual who, he says, was unlike anyone he had ever encountered before.

“I met pianist and compositionist Yvar Mikhashoff, who was a teacher (at SUNY Buffalo,)” Carr says. “After I auditioned, he took me as a student immediately. I told him that I would like to start studying in high school, and he started to teach me. He had played all over the world – I had never met anyone like that. He influenced my composition even more. He had such knowledge, he knew things I had never heard of before. He gave me stacks of books and records, and would say, ‘Go home and listen.’ He encouraged me to learn as much as I could, and to always keep my mind open.”

Consequently, feeling like it was “time to see something else,” the SUNY Buffalo sophomore auditioned for three music schools. In the end, however, the choice came down to one.

“I chose Juilliard,” says Carr, who studied piano and composition. “(At Juilliard), there were two auditions: one for piano, one for composition. I played four pieces, and they asked me to stop after awhile – I’m sure I was nervous. Only the top 80 people were allowed to audition, and, out of those 80 people, only one or two were chosen.”

Accepted as a composition major, the student who would one day play in Carnegie Hall could frequently be seen standing outside the music academy’s single building at Lincoln Center, waiting for the doors to be unlocked at 8:00 a.m. Although the undergraduate had class in roughly two hours, Carr had one goal in mind: to get to the fourth floor to practice.

“I was very immersed, as everyone was - everybody, everyone, had the mindset, and passion, to learn."

“I enjoyed practicing, I enjoyed the opportunities I had there, but, at Juilliard, my whole experience, my whole life was music,” Carr says. “I was very immersed, as everyone was - everybody, everyone, had the mindset, and passion, to learn. I was very hungry to learn. I try to continue that every day of my life, still, to this day.”

Indeed, it was that thirst for knowledge that led Carr, who graduated from Juilliard in 1981, to enroll in Princeton to pursue a Master’s Degree in fine arts and music composition, which he received in 1983. And his love affair with New York City endured: beginning in 1978, Carr hopped from location to location in Manhattan, living in Soho, the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, Midtown Eastside, the Flower District, Washington Heights, and Midtown Westside. In 1988, he launched “Adrian Carr Music Designs Recording and Mastering,” a sound engineering studio located in Midtown Manhattan and which, over its 15 year existence, garnered Carr two Grammy-entrance nominations for his sound engineering work on two albums. “Since I was a keyboardist for (the high school band) 'BOS'", sound engineering was a parallel interest,” says Carr, who worked as an assistant recording engineer at SUNY Buffalo.

Yet Carr was not, then or now, confined to the studio. A hiker, Carr has reached the summit of each of the famed 46 peaks of the Adirondacks, those mountains deemed the highest in the Adirondack Park and each of which measure at least a dizzying 4,000 ft. high. And it was while descending Elizabethtown’s Rocky Ridge Trail in September 2003 that Carr, who had again ventured from the concrete canyons of Manhattan to the towering peaks of the Adirondacks, met Deborah – a woman who was the catalyst for his departure, after roughly 25 years, from New York City. 

 “I had done three days of camping and hiking by myself,” says Carr, who was climbing Bald Peak, Rocky Ridge Peak and Giant Mountain. “I met (Deborah), who was about to enter the trail as I was leaving. We started talking, and (later) I would drive up to visit her in Montreal.”

The cross-border commute came to an end, however, in 2005, with - not a break up - but a marriage. Indeed, Carr, who is currently taking French lessons at the Commission de Scolaire Montreal, now permanently resides in Montreal. One year before he “sold everything” and called it quits with New York City, however, he put on a recital at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Auditorium.

"If something goes wrong, you usually can make it right - you can work with it. But nothing really throws me."

“I kind of knew I was leaving New York City, and I decided to organize a concert to launch (the CD) ‘Days of the Year,’” Carr says. “There was a very good attendance. I performed the whole CD, 2 hours, 2 sets, and an intermission. I was a little nervous at the piano bench, but that disappeared once I started playing. The last couple of years, I have had a different take on performing. As soon as you start playing, you realize you’re scaring yourself, because you really are well prepared. If something goes wrong, you usually can make it right - you can work with it. But nothing really throws me. It’s not about mistakes, not about a perfect performance, as long as the focus is on the music you’re creating.”

And the transplant Canadian, who is still “discovering the scene” in his new home, will, he says, “play everywhere.” Booking a gig usually once or twice a month, Carr has played in such local venues as the Christ Cathedral and the Arts Café, both located in Montreal (“I was sold out at the Café,” Carr says), and  Plattsburgh’s North Country Cultural Arts Center. Carr, who describes himself as being “lucky” to have access to both the North Country and Vermont, has had, he says, a very warm reception from the North Country – a sentiment that Lori St. Germain, Marketing and Development Research for the North Country Cultural Arts Center, echoes in her reaction to his Sept. 15th performance at the center.

“Adrian's beautiful music and charismatic personality truly make for an entertaining
performance,” St. Germain says. “Adrian also has hopes of recording a new CD in our gallery, as the acoustics in this building are just wonderful.”

“I’m proud that every day I keep going, that I keep putting music out there"

Carr is also moving from behind the piano keyboard; he has opened a new CD mastering and recording studio in Champlain, N.Y., named, “Adrian Carr Designs Mastering.” “I’m continuing the tradition,” Carr laughs. And the studio, launched in the fall of 2007, has already attracted such clients as Australian violinist Ben Breen and South American pianist Mirian Conti. Yet Carr, who is currently trying to secure a concert at Montreal’s Place des Arts while planning a return to Carnegie Hall to debut his third CD “this year or next,” has no intention of one day abandoning the music world.

“I’m proud that every day I keep going, that I keep putting music out there,” Carr says. “There would be a million things that I would change, but I just look forward. You create your own life - I’ve seen it happen for me.”

Have you seen Adrian perform in concert?