• Photo courtesy of David Drazin

David Drazin has been playing piano at silent-film screenings in Chicago for almost 30 years. If you’ve seen a silent movie in the city (outside of the Music Box, that is, where Dennis Scott is the house accompanist), chances are you’ve heard Drazin play. I can hardly estimate how many screenings I’ve attended where he was providing the soundtrack—at some point I began to take for granted that if I went to a silent-film revival he’d probably be there. Yet accompanying a film requires a lot more than just showing up, so I decided to sit down with Drazin to learn more about the nature of his work. We met a few weeks ago in Evanston, not far from the ballet school where he’s accompanied classes for about as long as he’s accompanied films. In the first part of our conversation, posted below, Drazin explains what led him to play for silent movies and what it’s like to be an accompanist for a living. In the second part, which I’ll post tomorrow, he provides a brief history lesson about music in silent cinema and reflects on how his knowledge of film history influences his craft.

When did you start accompanying silent films?

That took a while. When I was going to Ohio State, I saw a little ad for [the annual classic film marathon] Cinevent, which I still go to now. It happens every year over Memorial Day weekend. At the beginning, they would show stuff for as long as anyone would stay up to watch. One of the first times I was there, it was like 1:30 in the morning, and the pianist who was usually there—his name’s Stu Oderman; he’s in New York now—he tossed up his hands and said, “I’ve had it! I’m going to sleep.” That’s when I took a chance. I played for a western, but I don’t remember which one it was.

I was a guest pianist three times at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy. I’ve played for the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh-Durham—I’m going there next month—and at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. I’ve got three of the [silent Alfred] Hitchcock restorations coming up [there]. I was supposed to play there last Saturday, but because of the nightmare weather, they decided to reschedule.

The 60s were a crossover period. Some of the old-timers, who were teenagers in the late-silent era, were still around, and they were the people who’d get called whenever a silent movie was shown, since they had actually been there. At the same time the films were starting to be rediscovered by a generation that had no real contact with the silents.

  • Douglas Fairbanks (left) in The Mark of Zorro

In hindsight the 70s seem like the last decade when jazz had a wide mainstream appeal and was still evolving in accordance with popular taste.

  • Alfred Hitchcock’s Champagne