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Irving Fields: Pianist

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Irving Fields got his first break at 16, singing on “Amateur Hour,” the national radio show.  He won first prize: $50 — a lot of money in 1932. “When I got back to our apartment in Brooklyn, my whole family was there, and I threw the money up in the air. Fifty one-dollar bills blowing in the air, a thrill for me,” he recalls.

Irving’s older sister Peppy, who had married to a man named Rosenfields and launched a singing career, hired her brother fresh out of high school as her accompanist. “She was a blues singer, shortened her name from Rosenfields to Fields, and became very successful,” Irving recounted. A beautiful woman, she told him, “Look, these guys hanging around the stage are bothering me. I want them to know that you’re my brother and if they get funny with me—”

Irving finished the sentence: “I’ll crack ‘em in the jaw." Grinning, she proposed that they become a brother and sister team: Peppy and Irving Fields, “and that’s how it happened. Later, when I went on my own, I became known as Irving Fields.”

Fields has made his living in show business ever since. After encountering Latin music in the ‘40s as a concert pianist on a cruise ship that docked in Havana and San Juan, “I went crazy, and I brought I back to America,” he recalls. His fusion of popular Yiddish melodies with Latin rhythms (think ("Mazeltov Merengue") inspired waves of imitators.


“Miami Beach Rumba” and “Managua, Nicaragua” were both on the Hit Parade, establishing Fields as a composer, and an arranger, and pianist.  Since then he’s performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall with his trio to clubs and hotels around the world. You can hear him now, six nights a week, at Nino’s Tuscany on West 58th Street in Manhattan.

There have been good years and leaner ones. As Fields entered his 80s, he’d occasionally masquerade as his own manager when calling around for the next gig. “They’d say, ‘Irving Fields, Oh, he’s been around a long time, yeah I’ve heard him play. Gee, how old is he?'

 'Oh, Mr. Fields, he’s about 65' — 'cause people said I always looked 20 years younger.
       
‘Oh yeah, really? He’s still around?’ I used to hide my age to get a job because I thought they wouldn’t hire me because I’m in my 80s,'" Fields explains. "They’d think, 'Well he can hardly walk, he can hardly play.'  Now that I’m in my 90s I flaunt my age. I tell them how old I am, and I’m proud of it. And I play better than ever and I keep the people happy, and they’re happy with me.”
 

You can see Irving’s picture, and hear him telling this story, at http://www.sowhenareyougoingtoretire.com/?q=node/35



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