If you ever ate at Big Shoulders Cafe, the restaurant that used to occupy a bay-windowed corner of the Chicago History Museum, you’ve probably heard Roberta Brown play the piano, because that used to be her gig. When she reminded me of it, I remembered how intense the music was there, how the sound reverberated off all the hard surfaces. She says she got that job after she walked in one day to pick up a couple of Latin School kids for their private lessons and couldn’t resist the unoccupied piano.
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Even though the museum eventually opened the North & Clark Cafe in the same space, the Collard & Collard concert grand remains parked with a friend who has a roomier apartment than hers. But you can still hear Brown play. Her new venue is the Walnut Room at Macy’s, which is where I introduced myself to Brown. I’ve pretty successfully avoided Macy’s since it ousted Marshall Field’s in 2005, but on a recent Sunday afternoon I had my favorite nine-year-old in tow, and a nine-year-old’s December only comes around once.
The woman at the keys looked like somebody’s granny, or maybe Mrs. Claus, her long white hair topped with a sequined visor and her belongings—coat, shopping bags—stashed nearby, as if she’d just come in off the street. A tip jar was perched prominently on the piano’s lid. “Is that a customer?” I asked our server, who told us this story in response: There used to be a piano dealer in the store who loaned the shiny grand to the Walnut Room for special events. Then the store was sold and the dealer left, but the piano was still there. The staff thought the dealer had forgotten it, and called to remind him. That’s when they learned to their surprise that Brown had purchased it to give to the store. “She bought it for the Walnut Room,” said the server, “and we let her play it whenever she wants.”
It couldn’t have hurt that she’s never worked for anyone but herself, and that the only work she does is what she loves: teaching the piano and playing it, along with a little fashion design, garments in her own glitzy style made for her, she says, by “artists” in India or Italy that she sells to people she knows. Never interested in becoming a concert pianist (“They have to practice 14 hours a day. It’s a very introverted life,” she says), she plays weddings and parties in the city’s private clubs and homes; among the most memorable, she says, was the 80th birthday of former CSO conductor Georg Solti. Her adult students have included the likes of John Marshall Law School professor Ronald Smith, who says he told her up front that he wanted to play Scott Joplin and then they set out on a decade of Czerny and Bach.
