Jane Jarvis, Player of Jazz and Mets Music, Dies at 94....

By PETER KEEPNEWS - Published: January 30, 2010
Jane Jarvis, who brought a jazz sensibility to unlikely places as an organist for the New York Mets and a programmer for Muzak, died on Monday at the Lillian Booth Actors’ Home in Englewood, N.J. She was 94. Her death was confirmed by her son, Brian. She had lived at the actors’ home since shortly after being forced out of her East Side apartment, the result of an adjacent building’s destruction in a crane collapse in 2008. Ms. Jarvis’s career was bracketed by jazz, which she considered her first love: she formed a jazz band in her native Indiana as a teenager, and she worked steadily as a jazz pianist, mostly in New York, from her mid-60s into her 90s. But for more than two decades she was best known as a ballpark organist.

After eight years playing for the Braves at County Stadium in Milwaukee, she was a fixture at Shea Stadium from 1964 to 1979, performing a repertory that mixed jazz staples like Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From the Apple” with more conventional fare like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and “Meet the Mets.” Few Mets fans knew that Ms. Jarvis had begun her career as a jazz pianist. Even fewer knew that she had a day job with the Muzak Corporation. Muzak was synonymous with soothing background sounds piped into elevators when Ms. Jarvis was hired for a clerical job there in 1963, not long after she moved to New York and roughly a year before she joined the Mets. She worked her way up to vice president in charge of programming and recording; when she began supervising sessions, she hired Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry and other jazz musicians. The result was canned music considerably more swinging than the Muzak norm, much of which the musicians, including Ms. Jarvis, composed themselves.

Nearing retirement age and wanting to engage the public more directly, Ms. Jarvis left her job at Muzak in 1978 and the Mets a year later (she was not replaced) and, at 64, began looking for work as a jazz pianist. By the mid-1980s she was a fixture at the West Village nightclub and restaurant Zinno, where she worked with Milt Hinton and other top-tier jazz bassists. She recorded her first album as a leader in 1985, the year she turned 70. Luella Jane Nossett was born in Vincennes, Ind., on Oct. 31, 1915, the only child of Charles and Luella Nossett. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a schoolteacher; they were both killed in a road accident when she was 13.

She began picking out melodies on the piano at 4, and a year later her parents, impressed, arranged for her to study classical piano at Vincennes University. She went on to study at several conservatories in Chicago. Ms. Jarvis was married and divorced three times. In addition to her son, she is survived by a daughter, Jeanne, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She began her professional career at 11 on a radio show in Gary, Ind., that featured child entertainers. Within two years she was the house pianist at a radio station in Chicago, accompanying nationally known performers like Ethel Waters and Sophie Tucker.

In 1954 Ms. Jarvis was playing piano and organ in nightclubs and on television in Milwaukee when she was approached by the Braves, newly transplanted after a half-century in Boston, and offered the job of organist. “I wasn’t a sports fan, and I was uncertain about doing it,” she told The New York Times in 1984. “But money overcame my worries.” By the time she began her long tenure with the Mets, 10 years later, she had become a knowledgeable and enthusiastic baseball devotee.

Despite health problems, Ms. Jarvis continued to perform and record into the 21st century, both as a bandleader and with the Statesmen of Jazz, an ensemble consisting mostly of musicians over 65. She was the only woman in the group. “I figure I’ve got another 25 years,” she told The Indianapolis Star in 1999. “At least I’ve got 25 years booked out.”
photo by Brownie Harris
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/arts/31jarvis.html


A visual poem rather than a documentary or music video, "Before the Crane" presents a brief period in the life of two senior musicians. It mourns the the passage of time and the challenges life presents.
Featuring Benny Powell and Jane Jarvis noodling around on "The Nearness of You"