Jim Bianco

Jim Bianco

My first musical memory was of my mother, Jane, a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, playing Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" on a tinny old Baldwin upright piano. The performance was far from perfect, but I will say, and this isn't just because she's my mother, that what her playing lacked in technique, it made up for in heart. On the contrary, my father, a Sicilian weight-lifting fanatic, couldn't carry a tune on a flatbed truck. He was responsible for getting that old piano into our lives, though. In 1979 my uncle traded it to him for two 35lb dumbbells and a bench press. We moved from Brooklyn to Long Island. It was there ...