'You can always work in a piano bar': Finalist recalls teacher's taunt in an APA Jazz Kitchen tease

Good teachers sometimes have a stock way of bringing errant pupils up short. For Michael Davidman , he Michael Davidman was also a 2021 finalist. told a capacity audience at the Jazz Kitchen Wednesday night, when he ran athwart a particular teacher's expectations at a lesson, it ran like this: "You can always work in a piano bar." The finalist (for the seccond time) in the American Piano Awards was kidding about the venue, of course. Like his four colleagus, he seemed happy to be there playing short pieces from their repertoires as the 2025 competition approaches its conclusion this weekend. That applied even to Sasha Kasman Laude , the next-to-last pianist whose set was marred by tornado warnings on dozens of i-Phones, though she gamely finished her program of excerpts from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet." Also inconvenienced by the prudent interruption of the concert was the final player, Angie Zhang , whose i-Pad was missing for a while before she broug...