By, Francisca Bond.
The pianist Howard Goldman does not currently work at the Hyatt Regency hotel. He seems like he does.
On a recent afternoon, Goldman wore a suit and thick, prescription Ray-Bans with tiny cameras above the lenses. He looked like hotel security and, waving and grinning at passersby from across the lobby, also the concierge. Goldman chose to meet at the Hyatt Regency for an interview because one of its locked rooms is his “favorite room in the world.” He would like to be in that room again. He tears up just thinking about it.
In a way, he has wanted to be in that room since he was a 7-year-old taking piano lessons. A piano could make a star out of a man with enough practice and nerve. Goldman always wanted to be a star. At 70, he still does.
Goldman describes the room – half-sunken beneath the hotel and dark, even when it was open – as being the mountain's peak of his life.The room is the piano lounge within the Hyatt Regency’s subterranean steakhouse. It has everything Goldman could want. It’s historic and downtown. It straddles the bar and dining room, which is ideal for his brand of old-school, interactive piano.
Most of all, it was his mentor Jackie Jocko’s piano room.
Do our mentor’s achievements ever lose their allure? From the mid-1990s until 2016, Jocko entertained hotel guests, diners and his legion of fans from the restaurant piano. Jocko had talent; he was a star.
He also had nerve. Jocko's many fans loved his offbeat Jocko-ness. His astrological musings. His suit, tie and fourth-wall-breaking banter. His commitment to a style of piano performance that hasn't been mainstream since the 1950s and his refusal to treat it like a fad. The magnetism of someone who is entirely himself.
Jocko retired and left the room in 2016. The restaurant, E.B. Green’s Steakhouse, closed the following year. Jocko died two years later.
Two steakhouses have since tried and failed to resurrect the magic and business of the Jocko-era E.B. Green’s.
The room still has Jocko’s piano. Jocko’s handwritten notes are still taped above the keys.
“I just checked. It’s still in there,” Goldman said. “I can just see the (piano) wheel.”
Goldman, dedicated to continuing Jocko’s legacy, still wears Jocko’s ties most days.
Saving a historic hotel is a weird way to book your first piano gig, but Goldman revels in weirdness.
In the 2000s, when Goldman finally felt ready to command his own piano room after years of performing to friends at home, the Hyatt Regency was not an option. Jocko was still there.
The closed, broke and blighted Statler Hotel, however, would make a dazzling piano bar, he thought.
He fantasized about saving the Statler from ruin. Then fantasy turned into action. Goldman volunteered as the hotel’s “Hello Dolly”-esque matchmaker. He built a website to advertise the building. He met potential buyers from across the country.
He daydreamed about the grand hotel’s reopening day. Maybe this would make him a star. Money didn’t motivate him. All of this was done on a volunteer basis. He wanted recognition, but mostly he wanted to be the marquee piano act of a storied room, just like Jocko.
On a snowy day in 2011 developer Mark Croce, Goldman’s friend, signed the deal to buy the Statler. In the Statler lobby, while Croce shone in front of reporters and spectators, Goldman was off to the side.
He was softly playing the piano.
Goldman spent around a decade as the Statler’s lobby piano man, until renovations closed the lobby and forced him to leave. The Statler’s new owner, Douglas Jemal, presented another of his buildings to Goldman: the Hyatt Regency lobby. It was a no-brainer.
“I’m closer to the restaurant, which is where I really wanted to be some day,” Goldman said.
Goldman had a “blast” in the Hyatt Regency’s airy lobby. Hotel guests ambled by his piano. He enjoyed creative freedom for his quirky, weekly, Jocko-inspired piano performance.
“It was kind of like a lounge,” he said.
Then, in 2024, “somebody took interest in the restaurant,” Goldman said. Restaurateur Chris Harter planned to open a new steakhouse, Johnny D’s.
“And I was like, ‘Oh man, this is going to turn my life upside down no matter what,’ because he’s either going to have piano or he’s not. I’m going to be obsessed with this,” Goldman said. “I’m happy here, but if it opens up, it’s like I have to do it. This is what Jocko trained me for. This is what I worked (for) every day for years and years.”
Harter saw Goldman’s piano performance in the lobby. He heard the tales of the restaurant’s thriving Jocko days. He told a media outlet that he planned to revive piano in the restaurant.
“He says, ‘You think this is enough, annually?’ “ Goldman’s face suddenly looks impressed. “What city are you from, man?” (Goldman had been playing the lobby for free, hoping this exact scenario would happen.)
A couple of months before moving into the restaurant, Goldman, talk-singing the answers to my questions at his piano, said he considered himself to be a “preservationist.”
“Just like preservationists help preserve the buildings, we keep the old music alive and this old culture alive,” Goldman said. “This is a great American institution.”
Unfortunately, neither piano bars nor downtown are in their prime.
Downtown, drained of office workers, is losing its restaurants. The piano lounge is facing “extinction,” Goldman said.
For a couple of years immediately after the pandemic, it looked like piano bars would make a comeback. Three piano bars were open at once within a mile-and-a-half radius: Goldman at the Hyatt Regency, Bittersweet Piano Lounge in the Hotel Lafayette and Days Park Tavern in Allentown.
None of them are still around. Pianists still play background jazz for diners at restaurants such as The Terrace at Delaware Park, said Tony Zambito, executive director at JazzBuffalo, but even that is rare.
The last man standing, Hyatt Regency’s Johnny D’s, closed in January. Goldman’s last performance was Jan. 16. He sang for four hours under the low, chandelier-lit ceilings.
“I found a dream that I could speak to, a dream that I could call my own,” Goldman sang, borrowing the lyrics from the song Etta James made legendary, “At Last.”
He announced the guests by their name and job titles as they arrived.
“It’s really a celebrity-packed audience tonight,” he said.
Elbows and wine bottles rested on the piano’s glossy top. “Very sexy song!” said a curly, white-haired woman who arrived in a spotted fur coat. In a livestream chat, “lounge cadets,” as Goldman’s fans are called, wrote greetings from Florida and France.
“Did we do ‘Beautiful Friendship,’ Barbara? This is the end of a beautiful friendship?” Goldman asked the curly haired lounge cadet. She responded: “Do it again!”
Goldman “loved every minute” of the year and a half he spent in the Hyatt Regency restaurant.
He would like to be back there, but he has a more pressing problem. His weekly piano act, LOUNGEAcademy, needs a new home. This is the longest break he has taken in 15 years.
Goldman and his wife, the pianist and former Buffalo News music critic Mary Kunz Goldman, are piano “lounge shopping.” They’ve visited and blogged about several contenders.
“We go under the assumption that there’s no barriers to entry. We’re discounting any possibility that they would not want LOUNGEAcademy to be there every Friday forever,” Goldman said in a livestream to his lounge cadets. “That’s just part of the discipline. It’s always worked in the past.”
His philosophy is very Jocko.
“Expect a miracle,” said Jocko in 1972. “Don’t just hope for a miracle. Expect one. Every day.”
“But what if you find one of these places, and then somebody great opens up (in the Hyatt Regency restaurant) and they’re like, ‘We want you back?’ ” I asked.
Goldman’s face reddened. His eyes welled.
“It would be like running back to the wife,” Goldman said. “I’m in love with that room. If I had a different room and then that became available, I mean, I’m moistening up thinking about it. But, you know, I would just have to see what happens. That’s all.”
Back in the Hyatt Regency lobby, Goldman smiled and waved at another man, “the big guy, the general manager.”
“See if he invites me to work here,” said Goldman under his breath as general manager Steve Jarmuz strode over.
“When are we going to get you back in the lobby here?” Jarmuz said.
“I’m the only guy entertainer to get interviewed because I lost a gig,” Goldman said.
“I wouldn’t say lost, just a furlough,” Jarmuz said. “We’re excited to get you back.”
Goldman and Jarmuz agree they would like to see an established restaurant with name recognition take over the hotel restaurant next.
“Would you have a piano lounge?” I asked.
“We would have the piano up in the bar area, kind of where Jocko had it,” Jarmuz said. “I think everyone kind of wants to relive that.”
After Jarmuz leaves, Goldman is ecstatic. He slams his fist on the bar.
“See? Just let it happen,” Goldman said. “It unfolds.”
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