Piano stylist Michael Peslikis plays the music of the American experience

By DAVID DUPONT

BG Independent News

Michael Peslikis describes himself as a piano stylist. He likes to play a variety of styles and that fluidity has served him well in his more than six decades as a professional musician.

He played square dances at a dude ranch when he was 15. Played for silent movies, for musicals. He’s played ethnic music, his own Greek, and  Jewish, Irish, Italian, polkas as well as blues and ragtime – the soundtrack of the American melting pot.  He studied classical composition with Walter Piston at Harvard.

This Wednesday Peslikis turns 80 in style. After 65 years as a professional he’s still intent on getting better.

He’s flipped back the pages of time to return to the classical masters he studied as a youngster.

You can still catch him around the area playing jazz and standards at Degage, serving up tunes for a brunch on holidays at the Hilton Garden Inn in Findlay, and jazzing up hymns at a church service on Sunday at St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran in Toledo.

Peslikis started out playing in his native Queens, New York. There was a piano in his home, and his father a Greek immigrant businessman had a few friends over to play some music from their native land. The young Michael bragged he could play that music on the piano. They dismissed him. He was undeterred. “I sat down and played it anyway, and they said ‘give him lessons.’”

Despite this early display of keyboard skill, his early musical success was as a singer. He sang in an all-city choir. Traveling by train weekly for rehearsals. He assumed he would pursue singing, but he ruined his voice by straining to sing high parts after his voice changed. In high school he formed a small band that played dances. At 15 he got his chance for his first union job, a gig at Thousand Acres Dude Ranch in the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

He was actually too young, so he had to get dispensation from American Federation of Musicians strongman James Petrillo. Peslikis got the card, and spent the next summers playing resorts in the Catskills, the so –called Borscht Belt.  A musician had to be flexible and skilled at switching gears. He played Jewish music and the Latin music that the Jewish customers loved. He learned “to cut a show,” playing for visiting performers, maybe an opera singer or a crooner or a comedian.

He also went to Queens College and majored in music and then to Harvard for a year. He worked a musician through the 1950s. Teaching piano and gigging. That included coming out to play with Broadway shows presented under a tent in Detroit and Flint. But when he and his wife, Cindy, had a son, Jason, he decided to take a job teaching music in the New York public schools.

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On the brink of being settled, the family uprooted to travel to Greece. He was “basically a hippie,” Peslikis said.

His roots in the country ran deep. His father, John, was born on the Greek Island of Rhodes to family of peasants who tended an olive orchard. John’s father died young, so after World War I the family mortgaged their land and sent John, then about 20, to the States to earn money. He paid to bring his brother over, and then they worked to establish dowries for their two sisters, so they could get married. That meant John didn’t marry until 1935 when he wed Peslikis’ mother, Helen. John did hard industrial labor, worked in restaurants, and then sold bananas, until he was hired to sell subscriptions, cards and calendars and gather news for a Greek-American newspaper all along the East Coast.

“He became a newspaper man with very little education. He raised two kids, bought a house, sent his kids to college.” He even started writing poetry. Peslikis’ late sister, Irene, was also artistic, a painter. Her work decorates her brother’s Bowling Green home.

Peslikis remembers being able to visit Rhodes during the eight years he, Cindy, and Jason lived abroad from 1965-1973. They spent four years in Greece and four years in Turkey. “Crazy kids, we saved up money in the summer and decided to go to Europe and see what happened.”

At first he tutored students in English. But most of his worked, including music, had to be under the table since he didn’t have work permit.  Then he got a chance to play in an Italian rock ‘n’ roll band, which had work permits, so he became legal.

The band played in a club by the beach that was popular with King Saud, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, who would arrive with his harem and “the princelings.” Through his Harvard roommate, he moved to Istanbul, where his friend put him up in a house. Peslikis got a job at the Turkish-American University Association teaching English as a Second Language and American literature. He was able to rely on the background he gained through the required English courses he took at Queens College. While there, he met and hung out with the great American writer James Baldwin.

A wealthy family whose children he taught in New York City provided a connection to a job teaching music at the American College for Girls. He was the first in Turkey to bring male and female students into a choir as a mixed group. He formed and conducted a small community orchestra, and directed an opera.

After three years there Peslikis moved back to Greece, teaching at the American Community School in Athens. He put together a student jazz group the Jazz Bandwagon that brought jazz to Greek villages.  That’s where he first learned to play for silent movies in a program sponsored by the State Department. He still regularly accompanies silent movies at the Gish Theater on campus.

Then in 1973, as he and his family were preparing to return to the United States to complete his master’s degree when his father-in-law died, and the family flew back to the States and spent a year in Angola, Indiana. There he managed a music store, played a few gigs, and heard about the Popular Culture program at Bowling Green State University. That sounded more appealing to him than having to redo all his graduate work in music.

He was a student in the program from 1974-1976. “It was a fun two years designing my own curriculum,” he said. That included making a couple films.

He and Cindy didn’t plan on settling in Bowling Green. But the country was in the midst of a recession, so with no suitable teaching offers, he took a job at a Grinnell music store. He renewed his teaching license and taught at local public schools and as an adjunct professor in English, the humanities, and pop culture at BGSU and the University of Toledo. He ended his education career teaching music from 1999-2007 in the Toledo public school system.

All through that time he continued to play music. Through saxophonist Candy Johnson, he landed jazz and society jobs. And he’s never stopped, playing whatever the situation has called for. He’s done with rock, he admitted, it’s too loud and he’s getting tired of lugging equipment around.

In 2012, he recorded his only session as a member of the jazz group, sometimes called the Silverbacks. The group with Bob Manley on saxophones and flute, John Johnson on bass, Bob Rex, on drums, and singer Flo Metzger recorded over four nights at Grounds for Thought in Bowling Green. The recording, a vinyl album, had a limited edition release on the shop’s own record label.

Now for pleasure he sits down and plays Chopin, Bach, Schubert and Debussy. “I’d gotten away from it,” he said.

Some of the music has yellowed and gotten brittle, so he has to photocopy it. Still on the eve of being 80, he’s back to practicing every day, just as any dutiful student should. “Since I’ve been getting at it more,” Peslikis said. “I’m finding my technique is improving.”