Ain’t life grand? For versatile musician, there are 88 simple keys to happiness By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 27, 2026

Sing us a song, you’re the piano man.

Since 2015, World Piano Day has been celebrated annually on the 88th day of the year, a date chosen to match the number of keys on a standard piano.

For the second year in a row, veteran Winnipeg musician Danny Carroll is taking part in the global proceedings, set for this weekend. In fact, when the grandfather of two steps on stage Saturday night at St. Andrews River Heights United Church, he will be one of only two Canadian artists hosting an event officially sanctioned by World Piano Day organizers in Germany.

During what is expected to be a 90-minute concert, Carroll will intersperse original, neo-classical compositions with anecdotal stories from a professional career spanning six decades.

One of those yarns may revolve around a certain Billy Joel number that Carroll — a Rainbow Stage Wall of Fame inductee who has served as musical director for the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Manitoba Theatre for Young People and Winnipeg Jewish Theatre — has performed more times than he count.

From 2005 to 2022, Carroll was a weekly fixture at the Hotel Fort Garry, where he tickled the ivories in the main-floor Palm Room, offering everything from jazz to Broadway tunes to light pop.

“It eventually reached a point where I’d smile and answer ‘sure, no problem.’ Bizarre but true.”

It never failed. Every night he was there, somebody would request Piano Man, he says, seated in a coffee shop in the Grant Park area, blocks away from where he lives with L’aura, his wife of 46 years.

There were even occasions he’d be halfway through the Joel standard already when a guest who’d presumably had one too many would shout out, “When this song’s over, can you do Piano Man?”

“It eventually reached a point where I’d smile and answer ‘sure, no problem.’ Bizarre but true.”

Carroll, in his early 70s, was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ont. The eldest of four siblings was six years old when his maternal grandmother commanded that he learn an instrument, letting him choose between piano and accordion.

He was slight of build — “Three-feet-two and maybe 48 pounds,” says Carroll, still slim as a rail — so he picked piano, believing he’d never have the physical wherewithal to hoist an accordion.

There was one problem. His family didn’t yet own a piano, so if he needed to rehearse lessons taught by a nun named Sister Immaculata, he knocked on the door of his across-the-street neighbour, to ask if he could use theirs.

Carroll was 15 when he helped form a jazz combo called Sacraf — Sacraf being the flutist’s surname spelled backwards.

When Sacraf wasn’t booked at one coffee house or another, its members were attending shows by the Fabulous Fugitives, an established troupe led by fellow Thunder Bay native Paul Schaffer, who famously went on to become American late-night TV host David Letterman’s bandleader and sidekick.

After completing high school, Carroll took what has come to be known as a gap year.

He landed a job at Chippewa Park on the shore of Lake Superior, a position that, come winter, required him to prepare ice for outdoor skating rinks.

As if it was yesterday, he remembers an especially frigid evening when he lost all feeling in his fingers and toes. That’s it, he declared, as he shivered in the dark, struggling to hold onto his hose. There was no way he was going to do this for the rest of his life, only what options did he have?

His one true passion was music. He talked it over with Sister Immaculata, who had continued to be his piano teacher. At her suggestion, he successfully applied to the School of Music at the University of Manitoba, arriving there in September 1976.

Carroll spent three years at the U of M studying under, among others, Ron Paley, a cornerstone of the local jazz scene since the mid-1970s. Post-graduation, he was hired by a company that ran the MS River Rouge. For two summers in a row, he played piano in a unit that, six hours a day, seven days a week, entertained passengers aboard the popular sightseeing vessel.

He also tried his hand at teaching. Except after a few years of working full-time as a high school band leader, he realized he preferred a stage to a classroom. He switched to part-time, a move that helped pay the bills — by then he and L’aura had two young daughters — but also allowed him to pursue other musical avenues.

(Another amusing story Carroll likes to share revolves around the decade he spent playing piano at the Hollow Mug Dinner Theatre, which shuttered in the early 1990s. One night, an audience member approached him between sets to ask if he could borrow his keyboard to sing Happy Birthday to his mother. Carroll was about to say sorry, that was against the rules, when his bass player leaned over and whispered, “Err, that’s Burton Cummings.”)

Robb Paterson was the RMTC’s associate artistic director from 2004 to 2016. Now retired and living in Ottawa, Paterson was introduced to Carroll in 1992 when Carroll played piano for a Winnipeg Jewish Theatre play he was directing. They got to know each other better the next year, when the two of them were involved with Rainbow Stage’s production of Fiddler on the Roof.

“It reached a point where we were golfing together regularly and one day on the course, Danny said he wanted to take me for lunch to pick my brain about composing for theatrical productions,” Paterson says. “We went to the Sals (Salisbury House) at Pembina and Stafford, and he handed me a cassette of original music. A short time later I was hired to do a show at MTYP — I think it was Pippi Longstocking — and I brought Danny in to put a band together and to compose incidental music, as well.”

“Besides his talents as a musician and musical director, he was also great at building a sense of community.”

Paterson describes Carroll as an “idea machine” who proved invaluable for crowd-pleasers such as RMTC’s It’s A Wonderful Life and Rainbow Stage’s Beauty and the Beast.

“Besides his talents as a musician and musical director, he was also great at building a sense of community by coming up with all these fun contests to keep morale up during the long rehearsal process,” Paterson continues. “Trivia was usually involved and he would reward winners with so-called Danny Bucks, which they could trade in for prizes at the end of a run. And don’t get me started about the puppet shows he did in the pit at curtain call that only the actors could see. Those were always hilarious.”

Carroll was in rehearsals for a new show at RMTC in August 2018 when, returning to his vehicle one afternoon, he collapsed to the ground, clutching his chest. Moments later, after a passerby called 911, a first responder informed him he had suffered a heart attack. He was recovering in hospital when, having recently turned 65, he asked himself what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. The answer: record an album of original songs, something he’d never taken the time to do.

It was a lengthy process — the pandemic was definitely a factor — but in August 2023, Carroll released Keys for Transformation, a 12-track CD one reviewer described as “genre-blurring works (with) elements of classical, new age, jazz and electronica.”

“I can’t tell you what a kick it was to finally have an album of my own,” he says, noting he continues to write music and hopes to head back into the studio to begin work on a followup album in the not too distant future. (No, it won’t include I’m So Lonely — a maudlin ballad he wrote as a 13-year-old that “went on for eight pages of hand-written lyrics that thankfully burned in a garage fire, years ago.”)

These days Carroll stays busy performing at seniors complexes, mixing in songs of his own with well-known selections by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. That has led to other opportunities, including a show in January at The Leaf, where he partnered with vocalist Aaron Hutton.

Additionally, he reserves room on his calendar for a beer-league hockey team, for which he patrols right wing.

“I’ve actually been scoring lately, which is almost as much fun as playing music,” he chuckles, holding up his phone to show off a video of himself in full gear, sporting a black jersey with a crest depicting a helmeted hockey player seated in front of a piano.

The number on his back?

“What else? I wear 88.”

For ticket information on Carroll’s World Piano Day concert, visit www.dannycarroll.ca/events

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