Chances are, if you walked along the seawall near Spyglass Place this summer, you heard him: an older gentleman, dark sunglasses shielding his eyes, walker parked practically at his side, pressing ragtime classics and classical music out of the keys of a battered but friendly looking outdoor piano.
The piano sits in the square as part of the seasonal Pianos on the Street program. Paul Peter Fraser sits in the square to share his love of music.
On a sunny day recently, his back turned to the keys as he takes a break to chat, the octogenarian explains that he started taking formal piano lessons in 1949, but his education started earlier, on the family farm growing up in Saskatchewan, under the tutelage of his self-taught and talented sisters. He doesn’t remember the type of piano he first played, but the first piece of music he ever learned was a melodic piece called “The Clock.”
He hums it as he recalls the tune, a smattering of silver rings catching the light as his hands move.
Fraser is a regular at this spot when the pianos are out (he plays at the Ivanhoe Pub open mic on Sundays, as well), making his way down from his nearby apartment – itself stocked with a Korg electric piano and roughly 700 pieces of sheet music – to earn a little money each day for “cigarettes and booze.”
A handful of loonies, toonies and a sole five dollar bill already line his lucky leather hat. There was one day, he says, where he made $60 – but that required him to play for almost eight hours on the street.
As he pats his shirt looking for something to smoke, Fraser explains that he doesn’t practice as much as he used to, but he still regularly buys and reads music.
“I read music because I want to learn new music. The way I look at it, the day you stop learning is the day you die. And I don’t want to die till I’m about 150 years of age,” he says, with a laugh. “I want to keep going.”
In addition to keeping him spry, his fingers stumbling only slightly as he stops to whip off a lively rendition of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” his craft is clearly also keeping him sharp. The 83-year-old pianist easily recites the names and details of old employers, family friends, his stint in the army, evenings at the ANZA Club – another Main Street-area open mic haunt – and his exploits performing on the radio and as a church organist.
Fraser explains that his mother was one of 13 children, and that he’s named after his mother’s favourite brother, Paul – an RCMP officer.
When he comes around to talking about his father, though, he lingers in the memory for a while.
His father, a fireman and former U.S. Marine, died suddenly when Fraser was a teen. He remembers the doctor coming to their house in Burnaby and his dad quickly being transferred to Vancouver General Hospital.
“That night, my mother and his sister – his favourite sister from Saskatchewan, Margaret, was out for a visit – and other people went to visit him in the hospital. And I didn’t go,” he says, remorse making his voice thick. “I stayed home and played music, ’cuz I thought dad would be out the next day.”
The next morning, though, Fraser says the phone rang 21 times. He counted.
“It was the doctor and he said, ‘Your dad died.’ I went back to bed and I went to sleep,” Fraser recalls.
“My dad had realized before he died that I was pretty good at what I did,” he adds, shifting the subject to a happier thought. “At first he thought I was wasting my time [with music], but then he realized. Because my two sisters were extremely good on the piano.”
Fraser and his sister Naydeen both excelled at their Royal Conservatory and London College of Music piano exams. His sister, he brags, once earned the second highest score in Canada. “Second only to Glenn Gould,” he states, proudly.
In fact, Fraser, who struggles with mental illness, seems to be most comfortable extolling the talents and accomplishments of the other people in his world. Most of his stories, told in rapid succession as the sun starts to make its descent over Burrard Inlet, end up being about someone else.
But the music is about him.
“I’m bipolar and I’ve taken every medication under the sun,” he asserts. “And music is the best medication I can take. It gets me in a different mood.”
