Live, again

With his revolutionary technology, a North Raleigh man re-creates the works of past music greats

Doc Hanley left Durham to fight in World War I and afterward settled in Harlem, where he opened a nightclub that for decades drew the greatest jazz musicians ever. This weekend, Hanley reminisced about those acts while the greatest of them all, Art Tatum, played piano in a ghostlike return to the club.

The scene happened at the Apollo Theater in New York City in a one-man play that turned reality topsy-turvy. Hanley was fictional, but Tatum, who died 52 years ago, was real -- or at least his music was real, "re-performed" on a digital player piano using revolutionary technology developed by John Q. Walker of Raleigh.

"This is the first one-man show about a deceased jazz great in which the jazz great appears live on stage," says Eric Hirsh, supervising producer of the play and one of Walker's employees.

Over the past four years, Walker and a staff of five -- collectively known as Zenph Studios -- have been working on the technology in his North Raleigh home.

They have been re-creating famous piano performances in precise nuance by painstakingly translating notes into digital form and plugging them into a piano.

The results have received national attention and critical praise.

In 2007, he released a CD of the famous 1955 recording of Glenn Gould playing Bach's "Goldberg Variations."

Earlier this month, Zenph released its second disc, Tatum's "Piano Starts Here," which was originally recorded live in 1949 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

In September, the new technology was displayed for an audience at the Shrine. On stage, in the spot where Tatum had played, sat a piano, its keys flying wildly with songs such as "Tiger Rag" and "Tea for Two."

Zenph has a contract with Sony BMG Masterworks to release 16 additional CDs from its extensive library, and it hopes to extend the play, "Art Tatum: Piano Starts Here," to other cities after this weekend's premiere in Harlem.

The Zenph crew is tinkering with more ways to apply the technology to the history of recorded music. They're working on a project that sets Tatum as the frontman for a 17-member orchestra -- in a performance that never happened.

"You want to put Paul McCartney in your band? We can do that," says Jeff McIntyre, a former TV network marketing executive who now works for Walker. (He wrote the one-man play, which stars veteran stage, film and TV actor Paul Butler.) "This is Guitar Hero for grown-ups."

Hirsh is a 2006 UNC-Chapel Hill graduate who majored in physics and music and has won national awards for young jazz composers. He has been working on duplicating the standup bass.

He is working from a classic jazz album, "The Sound of the Trio," with Oscar Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums. The task involves separating the bass parts and enhancing them to make them more lifelike -- you can hear the fingerpads and fingernails on the strings -- and he recorded it with himself playing piano, just for fun.

McIntyre says the technology is as revolutionary as what Pixar did for animation.

"They learned to hang flesh from bones. We've done the same for audio."

The pursuit of technical perfection raises a question: When science mimics art, does it still have a soul?

The reviews of the Bach CD said it has artistic merit, and the folks at Zenph say that's what it's all about. Most of them are musicians who are doing this to get as close to the original performance as possible.

"This is less a novelty entertainment," says Hirsh, "more like the ultimate preservation tool."

"We were trapped in antique technology," McIntyre adds. "This is like how it was as the artist heard it. The performances always stay valid."