This is a story about joy. It is also about showmanship, a tiny bit of narcissism and, just maybe, a sprinkling of loneliness.
It is about pianos.
I love the pianos. Maybe you haven’t seen them, but there are nine of them, and they sit every block or so along the 16th Street Mall downtown.
Each is newly repaired and tuned, brightly painted in mostly bright blues and greens, and accompanied by a single metal chair. They dare you to walk up and play.
They are the brainchild of the Downtown Denver Partnership, which started the “Your Keys to the City” pianos-on-the-mall program last winter. The summer program runs through June 18.
They fascinate people. You just have to stand and watch.
Steinways they are not. Partnership staff about a year ago found them on Craigslist.
“It is amazing how so many people have pianos in their basement they just want to give away,” said Sarah Neumann, the partnership’s spokeswoman.
It hired movers to get them, got artists to donate their time painting them and had each one repaired and tuned.
The idea, she said, came from a similar program in London. They first put them out for a month last November for the Christmas season.
Michael Miller, 18, has been playing for two hours now just off Champa Street and says he plans to play for another two hours.
He was in the middle of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” by Journey when I walked up. He is helping out at his dad’s office these days, and when things there get boring, he says, he goes to the mall.
A small crowd has formed around Carl Anderson, 48, of Aurora, who only minutes earlier had for the first time spotted a piano.
The crowd starts clapping as he launches into “Jesus Is Love.”
“I was just walking by,” he explains. “Music, I guess, is like a magnet to me.”
He has been playing piano since he was a kid, he says, and now also plays the saxophone and the drums. He, too, loves having people hear him play.
“Needs some work,” he grunts while describing the upright and before launching into “Truly” by Lionel Richie. He is amazingly good.
“Been playing practically all my life,” Carl Anderson says, smiling at onlookers, “and I never once took a lesson. I can’t read a note.”
Farther up the mall, a young man is toying with the keys of yet another upright. He is pretty much alone.
Play me something, I ask.
His fingers fly across the keys, the rich sound of the notes wafting all around us. He furiously plays, his fingers stretching, his face contorted.
“Interviewer’s Improv One,” Alex Fisher, 19, of Louisville says when I ask the song’s name. “I just made it up.”
This is his third day on the mall pianos in the week since they were set out.
“They should always be here,” he says, starting into another song. “You get to play for free, they are old but nice, and people stop to listen to you.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
