Instruments Piano Albums A Pair of Pianos Genres Jazz | Role Jazz Pianist Name John Mehegan | |
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Born June 6, 1916
Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. ( 1916-06-06 ) Occupation(s) Musician, lecturer, music critic Died April 3, 1984, New Canaan, Connecticut, United States Similar People Kippie Moeketsi, The Jazz Epistles, Eddie Costa, Charles Mingus, Vinnie Burke | ||
John mehegan casual affair with a song in my heart
John Mehegan (June 6, 1916 – April 3, 1984) was an American jazz pianist, lecturer and critic.
Contents
- John mehegan casual affair with a song in my heart
- John mehegan jazz prelude no2
- Partial discography
- Techniques studies etudes for piano
- Original compositions for piano
- References
Mehegan was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and began playing the piano at the age of five. He taught himself to play by matching his fingers to the notes played on a neighborhood player piano. His mother gave him violin lessons, but he preferred piano.
In 1941 he arrived in Manhattan where he lived with his first wife, Doris, and their two children, Carey and Gretchen. He had the opportunity to play at the legendary Marie's Crisis bohemian club in Greenwich Village. In 1945, he became teaching assistant to pianist Teddy Wilson in the jazz department at the Metropolitan Music School in New York City. He wrote the incidental music for A Streetcar Named Desire which he performed on Broadway for two years. In the early 1950s he played a honky-tonk saloon piano player on The Gabby Hayes Show television series. Mehegan was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was an uncooperative witness, and this had a negative effect on his career, limiting some career possibilities for about a decade. Also during the 1950s Mehegan was a regular attendee at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts. He later held posts at the Juilliard School of Music and Yale University. He was the jazz critic for the New York Herald Tribune from 1957 to 1960.
Mehegan played solo piano for many years at the Composer's Lounge, Ambassador Grill and Lounge and the Drake Room in New York City, as well as the River Cafe in Brooklyn. He also played at numerous clubs in southwest Connecticut, where he lived with his third wife and three children.
He wote numerous books on jazz, including the Jazz Improvisation series, which sets out the basic principles of jazz. These are published in seventeen languages and sold around the world.
The American composer Leonard Bernstein dedicated a piano composition to Mehegan in his 1948 collection, Four Anniversaries; marked agitato: scherzando, the piece, For Johnny Mehegan, commemorates Mehegan's birthday, June 6, but gives the wrong year – 1920.