Listen Here - "In the Key of Live"
Area keyboardist Adrian Cohen uses his varied musical and nonmusical experiences to nurture a new performance space in downtown Albany
By John Rodat for Metroland Magazine July 2001

Strains of jazz piano tumble in resonant clusters down the stairs of the darkened barroom, beckoning the listener upward. In the upstairs lounge, a lone musician sits playing, facing the sunlit windows, his back to the room of empty tables. After a moment, he acknowledges that he is no longer alone and, with a smile but still somewhat hesitantly, discontinues the solo serenade.

"I don't get the chance to do this that often," says Adrian Cohen, stepping away from the piano, and leading the way out of the performance space of the Larkin Restaurant back down the stairs to the first floor. As the co-manager and booking agent of the newly renovated Lark Street establishment, Cohen's time is at a premium, and his music must, for the moment, wait.

As must the interview, briefly: Before the tape can roll, Cohen is faced with the questions of an inquisitive passerby found standing just within the front door. Though the restaurant is closed, empty and dark on this day, a patron has dropped in to check on the live-music schedule, and to express his appreciation for the "great job" the new staff has done revitalizing the Larkin. Cohen chats easily with the well-wisher, thanking him for his praise, and encouraging the man to spread the word. "Bring your whole family," Cohen advises, as the man departs. The visitor gone, Cohen laughs with mock exhaustion, "I've got to remember to lock that door."

It's an interesting quirk of fate that 32-year-old Cohen, known in the local musical community as one of the most versatile and busiest keyboardists and teachers around, now finds himself in a position where he's scrambling to grab time at the piano. Stranger still is the fact that it was the Berklee-trained musician's request for a regular Thursday night gig at this same establishmentÑa request that was granted that put him in this position.

"Well, you could look at it as a blossoming or as some kind of evil cellular mitosis," Cohen jokes as he relates the story behind his recruitment into the Larkin fold. Alerted by a friend, who happened to be a Larkin regular, that the owners were looking for some way to spur flagging business, Cohen offered his jazz quartet's services. Further discussions with the owner revealed that an ambitious plans for an overhaul of the restaurant had been entertained, but never acted upon. "The owner had always wanted to do something with the upstairs, but didn't have the time," Cohen explains. "So, I just said, 'Let's do it. Let's renovate it.' Within a week, we had started renovations that was in late February."

Cohen entered into the arrangement enthusiastically, but, he acknowledges, with little understanding of what he was getting himself into. "I knew that I was going to be managing the renovation, but I wasn't quite sure the extent to which I was going to be involved beyond that," he says. "I had no idea how much work it was going to be." Fortunately, Cohen's varied, almost patchwork, nonmusical professional experience had prepared him for the full array of his new responsibilities. Like many working musicians, Cohen has supplemented his income over the years with work in a number of fields, all of which retail sales, carpentry, food-service coincidentally combined to put him in solid standing as nightclub-restaurant management. Cohen still marvels at the haphazard, or synchronous, nature of his vocational training. "I started out working in a small restaurant, a soup/salad/sandwich place, in Boston, and I didn't know the difference between corned beef and roast beef," he recalls. "I didn't know anything about food. I walked in off the street. I was so inexperienced, I walked in right in the middle of rush hour, lunch on Friday. Just completely stupid. So, I waited in line. I wasn't going to order anything, but when I got up to the counter, I was like, "Hi, I want a job." The guy goes, 'Oh, well, we need this delivered now. Take this, come back, and we'll give you lunch and talk about giving you a job.' I just said, "OK." A few months later, Cohen was a shift supervisor. His musical experience, he says, also benefited him in his present position, and in some unexpected ways. For example, as keyboardist for the popular party band the Burners U.K. (a job that Cohen recently relinquished), he learned a lot about what makes a venue successful from the standpoint of a touring musician.

"The Burners thing has been an incredibly helpful experience for this," he says, "because it's a highly professional band. So I learned a lot about going into different venues like when we'd go somewhere and the power would be a complete mess. Luckily, we had a couple of guys in the band who were electrical engineers, so we'd show up [to gigs] and [when things would be a mess electrically] it would be like Star Trek. Somehow they would always make it work. So that gave me a lot of experience in winging it." Cohen drew upon these experiences during the renovation, and continues to do so in hopes that the Larkin will provide something special for audience and performers alike. "I just wanted to create a really warm vibe," he says. "I wanted to create a candlelit environment that was really intimate. So, we don't have chairs that don't face the stage; everyone is encouraged to face the music. And we noticed, when we reopened two months ago, that people really listened. We'd created a really good listening environment. That's one thing that we do that you don't get in a lot of other places: We really care about the level of the audience participation in terms of listening."

Cohen takes his new role of impresario seriously, and, though he may occasionally pine for more time onstage, it is obvious that he finds the work rewarding. "This is my whole life now, getting this going," he says. "I'm working about 80 hours a week now, between this and teaching piano, I'm sure my friends are sick of hearing me say it. But I like it. For the first time in a really long time, even though it's crazy and I have a lot of stress because of it, it feels right, it feels good. I feel like all of my skills are coming together in this one endeavor. It feels great."

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