by CHRIS BARRY

He’s back, ladies and gentlemen. That’s right, Irving Fields, the ace pianist who unleashed the 1959 smash hit multi-platinum LP Bagels and Bongos upon the world, has been enjoying a popular resurgence of sorts lately, now that the classic Jewish-Latin fusion LP has been re-released in digital format.

Truth is, Fields never went away—although if you haven’t been making the NYC hotel lounge/piano bar circuit lately, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. At the ripe old age of 91, our man Irving is actively writing and recording new LPs, has a steady six-nights-a-week/three-sets-a-night lounge gig at Nino’s restaurant on the Upper East Side, and even heads out on the road every now and again to bring his groundbreaking Jewish-Latin fusion sounds to the great unwashed.

Born in New York’s Lower East Side in 1915, Irving Fields has been in the music business for almost 80 years, having picked up his first pro lounge gig at the tender age of 13. “The labour unions used to watch these things very carefully back then,” he recalls. “You weren’t allowed to work any gigs until you were 18 years old. So to fool these union people, I’d wear a homburg and draw a moustache on my upper lip with eyebrow pencil. When they’d go, ‘Hey kid, how old are you anyway?’ I’d lower my voice and tell ’em I was 18-and-a-half. They bought it every time.

“I was kind of a society pianist then, playing all the Cole Porter things, the Gershwin things, but also Chopin, Mozart, Bach. I loved all music. I am a pianist of many roads. And I continue, even in my present concerts, to play a variety of music, from Chopin to Gershwin to Thelonius Monk or to…whatever. And, of course, I still incorporate Latin sounds—Latin is one of my favourite musics.”

The cha-cha, the rumba, the mambo

At 17, Fields started working his first major gig as the resident pianist for a local cruise-ship line bound for Cuba and Puerto Rico. “Havana was wide open in those days,” remembers Fields. “I just fell in love with all of these magnificent rhythms: the mambo, the cha-cha, the rhumba, oh, just so many different, wonderful rhythms. I’d sit in with the bands in Havana, and these guys would always be so shocked that I had such feeling for this music, they honestly thought I was Latin. I remember Xavier Cugat coming up one night after a performance and speaking to me in Spanish, and, of course, I didn’t understand a word of it. But they didn’t believe me, they all thought I was a Cuban. I just loved the music so much.”

“When I got back to America, I took all these magnificent Latin rhythms and music that I’d heard and started playing them at this restaurant I was working in New York City called the Crest Room [in the Waldorf-Astoria]. Suddenly, the place was packed every night. Ava Gardner would come in, she’d be there three, four nights a week dancing to my music. It became a celebrity hang-out.”

Soon signed to RCA Victor, Fields shortly thereafter hit the big time with his first Jewish-Latin fusion hit, “Miami Beach Rumba,” in 1946. “‘Miami Beach Rumba’ went on to sell two million records,” Fields reports proudly, “and it’s still selling. It’s an international standard now, thank goodness.”

More bagels and bongos

And so, with the success of “Miami Beach Rumba,” the formula was set. Essentially, Fields’s recipe for pumping out hit records involved taking recognizable Jewish melodies and furnishing them with a Latin beat. And the kids dug it. By the time his smash Bagels and Bongos came out in ’59, Fields was working only the most prestigious venues around the world. “We played everywhere: Carnegie Hall, the Imperial hotel in Japan, the Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay, the London Palladium, all over the world. It was wonderful,” he recalls.

“You see, I am the pioneer of fusing Latin rhythms with ethnic music,” Fields states, no doubt quite correctly. “Bagels and Bongos was Jewish music with Latin rhythms, and the wonderful thing about this music, this unique idea, was that it had no language barrier. Jewish music is very lovely, and with this assortment of rhythms and tempos and feelings, well, it was romantic, exciting. Bagels and Bongos was so successful my record company said I had to do another LP. So we did More Bagels and Bongos. And then I started thinking, “Why not do this with other countries?” So I went and did Champagne and Bongos for France, Pizzas and Bongos for Italy and Bikinis and Bongos for Hawaii. They all did very well.”

Thanks for the Memories

Eventually, the fusion hits stopped coming as frequently, and as the 1960s rolled on, Irving found himself spending more time on the lounge/cocktail circuit, where he was—and is—celebrated for his ability to “play any request” an audience might want to throw at him. “I know thousands and thousands and thousands of songs,” he says. “And I like the steady work.”

Fields has been happily working the New York lounge circuit pretty well ever since. “And I’m writing a lot these days,” he says, as coherent and on the ball as any 91-year-old could ever hope to be. “I’m just about finished what I think must be the 90th CD of my career. It’s going to be a very, very important thing. It’s called Memories of Havana and it’s the music I was making back in 1948 when I was there. It captures the style, the mood and the feeling of the way Havana used to be—like Paris with palm trees, the greatest food, the greatest music. I think this could be a very commercial, marketable type of record,” he offers up enthusiastically. “A lot of young people are curious about the way Havana used to be. They’ve never been there because it’s closed to Americans, but who knows, maybe that will change soon with all that’s been happening lately. But I’m very excited about it. All the selections are taken from Cuban expressions and places. Like I have songs called ‘Tropicana,’ ‘Cuba Libre,’ another called ‘Mojito.’ I’m very, very excited about it.”

In the meantime, he’s enjoying the attention the re-release of the original Bagels and Bongos on Reboot Stereophonic Records has been garnering since it came out last summer, and is absolutely delighted to be working his regular piano lounge gig at Nino’s.

“I feel wonderful,” Fields states. “I keep thinking maybe there’s a mistake in my birth certificate because I really don’t feel my age. People say I look 20 years younger, and it’s true, I feel great!”

With Socalled, Elaine “Boom Boom” Hoffman Watts, Beyond the Pale, 4 FrÈres, Michael Wex, the Montreal Yiddish Theatre, Shtreiml and Michael Alpert as part of Klezkanada dans la ville at le National on Saturday, Aug. 19, 9 p.m., $15

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