Getting in tune

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This article was published 08/07/2017 (3028 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Play us a song, you’re the piano man.

Joe Coté is the owner of Joe Coté Piano Tuning and Repair. In order to make ends meet while his one-man venture was getting off the ground four years ago, Coté, a talented musician in his own right, got a part-time position tickling the ivories at the downtown Metropolitan Entertainment Centre.

“After the Met reopened, they had a cabaret licence, which meant they had to provide live music from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., each night of the week,” says Coté, smartly dressed in dark pants, a charcoal-grey shirt and matching grey bowtie. “My sets consisted primarily of Sinatra and Nat King Cole, with a bit of Elton John thrown in for fun, but it never failed; by the end of my shift somebody was almost always calling out for AC/DC.”

Coté, 30, is kept hopping nowadays but after founding his home-based operation in 2013, there were occasions when he went a week or two between appointments — a set of circumstances he chalked up in part to his birth certificate.

“People seemed to expect piano tuners to be these wise, old gentlemen, to the point that there was almost this reverse ageism going on,” he says, noting due to his youthful appearance, he still gets “ID’ed” whenever he pops into a beer vendor or liquor store. “There were even people who came right out and said I looked too young to be in this line of work, when I got to their front door. The only way I could bridge that, I figured, was by being confident in my abilities, and demonstrating that I knew what I was doing.”

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Coté was born and raised in Sudbury, Ont., where his mother taught piano out of their family’s home. His initial encounter with the piano was memorable; at age 4, he learned how to play “that tequila song” (we think he means Tequila, the 1958 smash hit by the Champs) by ear, after hearing the catchy, Latin-flavoured tune featured in the 1990 flick Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He studied piano while he was growing up but by the time he enrolled in Laurentian University, where he majored in music, he was more interested in percussion.

“There was a two- or three-year stretch where I hardly touched a piano,” he says, mentioning he was also heavily involved in the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets when he was a teenager, and for a while dreamed about a life at sea. “I didn’t really get back into it until my early 20s when I started singing jazz. At the time, a friend of mine was accompanying me (on piano) but when he moved away and I needed to replace him, I decided to do it myself.”

Coté moved to Winnipeg in 2009 to pursue a music career. To supplement his income, he landed a job at a Portage Avenue music retailer. His primary responsibility was renting instruments to high school band students but whenever he had some spare time, he slipped upstairs to the store’s piano section to play a tune or two. Eventually, he was transferred to that department full-time, which was when he began interacting with piano tuners on a regular basis.

Soon, he began hearing the same thing over and over: because the majority of professional tuners in Winnipeg were approaching retirement age, there was going to be a shortage of people who know what they are doing in the not-too-distant future. (In a recent magazine article, piano tuners were lumped in with blacksmiths, switchboard operators and newspaper journalists, when it comes to occupations that are currently on life-support. The writer cited South Africa, where “only about 50 aging piano tuners” ply their trade among a population of 56 million.)

“The way I understand it, (piano tuning) was seen as a dying business in the 1980s and ‘90s, so nobody went into it for a good 20 years,” says Coté, pinning the blame on synthesized dance music. Because electronic keyboards don’t require tuning, and because consumer demand for those instruments far outstripped demand for traditional pianos in the wake of synth-heavy acts such as Duran Duran and the Human League, many piano manufacturers that once offered apprenticeship programs for tuners ended up axing those exercises altogether, he says.

“To make a long story short, I took some lessons, ordered some tools and after about 18 months of poring through technician’s manuals and picking other tuners’ brains, I decided to start my own business in September 2013.”

To date, Coté has tuned pianos in such far-off locales as Flin Flon, where he spent a few days bringing a 115-year-old Steinway back to life, and Thompson, where he was enlisted to assist in a week-long, recording project. His services have also been put to good use at Interstellar Rodeo, as well as the Winnipeg Folk Festival. If you want to see his face light up, ask him about the time he “met” one of his idols at Birds Hill Park.

As singer-songwriter Ben Harper completed his sound check a few hours before his scheduled mainstage performance at the 2014 Folk Fest, Coté stood in the wings, waiting to tune Harper’s piano as soon as the three-time-Grammy-Award winner was through. Seconds after Harper announced he was good to go, Coté bounded onstage, at which point Harper nodded hello in his general direction.

“I was like, ‘Ben Harper just nodded at me.’ So I gave him this goofy nod back, which I’m sure made me look like some deer in the headlights,” he says with a chuckle. “Here I’d told myself I wasn’t going to be one of ‘those’ people who gets all star-struck but sure enough, I definitely was.”

Coté, who continues to play piano professionally from time to time (on July 9, he’ll be performing in the Hotel Fort Garry’s Palm Lounge from 8 p.m. to 11:45 p.m.), doesn’t hesitate when asked what he enjoys most about his chosen career.

“I love problem-solving,” he says. “There are times when you begin working on a piano that has a creak, squeak or buzz, or something isn’t working properly. Sure it can be frustrating trying to track down the source of the noises, but it’s really gratifying when you finally locate and fix them.

“Second, I love exploring the inner workings of countless instruments, and then getting to play them,” he goes on, citing Gordon Lightfoot’s Softly as his go-to number when he’s demonstrating to customers that their piano is in tune, after he’s finished working on it. “I have played some beautiful pianos over the last few years: some were big, expensive grands in concert halls, built to be capable of translating musicians’ most subtle emotions into something fantastic. Others were century-old uprights that have so much soul to them that you can’t help but get emotional playing them.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca