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01/20/2016 07:30 AMIn fact, there are two things you can always count on at the bar of the venerable Gris at that time: the popcorn machine and Ray at the piano next to it.
“Some people have been coming just one or two times a year for many years and when I see them again, I ask myself if another year has really gone by,” Ray says.
His repertoire is drawn from the Great American Songbook, music by composers like Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin. Yet the tune he is asked to play most often, “As Time Goes By,” was written by a far less famous American songwriter, Herman Hupfeld.
“Nothing else is even a close second,” Ray says of the request.
Still, his music isn’t just the same-old, same-old. He constantly learns new songs.
“If you don’t do that, you stagnate,” he explains.
He’s also made a point of learning more about the composers whose music he plays, reading biographies of tunesmiths like Gershwin and Berlin.
“If I learn about them, I play their music better,” he explains.
Ray keeps his iPad on the piano to check the notes of songs he doesn’t know well, but he plays mostly by ear. He doesn’t like to read music.
“I read only under duress,” he admits.
In fact, Ray is an almost entirely self-taught pianist, as well as being a self-taught guitarist and bassist. The formal music lessons he had were long ago, for the saxophone in his elementary school band in Milford where he grew up. He started playing piano on his own when he was 12 years old after his family bought an instrument for his sister to take lessons.
“She never really played it,” Ray recalls.
Once in a while at the Gris someone asks Ray to play a classical tune, but he demurs.
“I can fake a lot of stuff, but not classical,” he says.
The musical moment that Ray says changed his life came in his teens: the first time he heard The Beatles.
“They were the greatest rock and roll band ever,” he says. “The Beatles happened and I was never the same.”
He began to learn bass and guitar on his own, and by high school was playing gigs with bands. Ray left Connecticut for Grinnell College in Iowa with the notion of a pre-med major, but it didn’t take long for him to change his mind.
“One week of organic chemistry and I knew I was no doctor. It was really my father’s dream, not mine. He wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer. That’s a story a lot of people tell,” he says.
Ray’s father was a dentist. Instead of premed, Ray majored in theater and after graduation returned to the East Coast for acting school at the Neighborhood Playhouse, but he didn’t like New York and was happy to move when a friend living in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas told Ray he was starting an improvisational theater group.
“How could I not go?” Ray asks. “I hitchhiked.”
He stayed in Arkansas for 10 years, always playing some kind of music in bands from bluegrass to rock. To support himself, he took a variety of jobs, as a waiter, surveyor, and construction worker. When he returned to Connecticut after a stint working in a friend’s employment agency in the early l980s, he ended up in the technical end of the printing industry. At first his job was done by hand, but as computers took over, Ray retrained to learn the computerized process.
“I reinvented myself,” he says.
He retired from the printing industry two years ago.
Whatever his day job, one thing remained constant. Ray always played music. And it is a good thing he did, because when he was temporarily laid off from a printing job in l989, he telephoned the Griswold Inn to see if they had an opening for a musician. And the rest, as they say, is history.
For some years after starting in Essex, Ray continued to play in rock bands, but he no longer does.
“I’ve sold all my equipment,” he says, referring to the amps and speakers that accompany rock music.
Now, in addition to his two weekly nights at the Gris, he sometimes plays private parties and other club dates.
At the piano, he never eats, but takes occasional sips from a bottle of water. Though he is in the lounge, he never touches alcohol.
“You can’t drink and play the piano; you need to be sober,” he says.
His usual performance uniform is a black T-shirt and jeans. As he plays, he says he scans around the room to see what is happening. He always wants to reach his audience.
“I look to see if people are mouthing the words, if their feet are tapping, that means I’m doing a good job,” he says. “I can see them return my energy. That’s what I play for.”
And that’s what Ray, after more than 20 years, intends to keep right on doing. When asked if he had ever contemplated retirement, his answer was immediate unconditional and monosyllabic: No. Or, as one of his favorite composers George Gershwin might have put it, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”
Ray Kanter plays at the Griswold Inn in Essex on Thursdays from 4 to 7 p.m. and on Fridays from 4 to 7:30 p.m.