Kimball baby grand piano history
Well you can’t compare the Dylan of the past and the Dylan of today, I said. I was there with a long time friend, and later during the show he asked me how this show compared to when I’d seen Dylan in 1974. Bob Dylan got dressed up on this night for this crowd. This isn’t gonna be Chuck Berry doing just another gig. And you know what, Dylan dressing up the way he does each night, sends the audience a message before he even sings a note. No way, he was here in a grand old theater and he had dressed the part. He wasn’t showing up in his streetwear - jeans and a hoodie. The flat-brimmed white hat, something a Spanish Don wore in the ’20s perhaps. Whatever my pre-show worries, as soon as the band kicked off with “Things Have Changed” I relaxed.ĭylan came onto the stage, a character out of one of his more surreal songs. And no guitar, ’cause he doesn’t play guitar anymore. There’s a wisdom that sometimes comes with age.īut Dylan? With his ragged frog of a voice.
And I saw Muddy Waters when he was 65, and he was damn good too. What would that be like? I’d seen John Lee Hooker perform at the Sweetwater when he was past 80 and he was fantastic. Frankly, it was a shadow of the show I saw in 1974 when Dylan and The Band played the Oakland Coliseum and tore the place up. I last saw him live at the Greek Theater in Berkeley in June of 1986, and it wasn’t the best show. Those lines made sense when he wrote them, when he was in his early 20s. “Ah, but I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now,” he once sang, though not on this night.Īnd it was good he didn’t. How could he compare to the Dylan of old? Was I excited, yeah baby! Yet I was worried too.
The clang of an ancient gong announced that Bob Dylan was in the house, and that his first set for the final night of a three-night gig (October 30, 2014) at the beautifully restored Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, CA, had begun. The original matching bench is included.Paramount Theater, Oakland – October 30, 2014 Wood is what resonates to make a pianos tone quality how do you think plastic and particle board sounds?Ĭomputerized player mechanisms can be installed if desired. A vintage baby grand piano like this one is made of top quality REAL wood, no plastic or particle board. We see these cheap new pianos suffering severe deterioration after only a few years due to the lack of quality materials and workmanship. You get particle board cabinets, plastic action parts, acrylic veneer, and green unseasoned wood. You can buy a new Asian imported baby grand piano for well under $10,000, but you get what you pay for.
Modern manufacturers count on people buying small pianos for aesthetics rather than for function, so they are able to make small new pianos of lesser quality that sell. Today, modern piano manufacturers tend to put their better quality, materials, and workmanship in their larger, more expensive pianos. It is made of elegantly carved Circassian walnut wood, and is of the French Provincial style. This little piano was built by the Whitney Piano Company, one of the subsidiaries of the famous Kimball Piano Company of Chicago. This is a lovely apartment size baby grand from the golden era of piano building.