Keyboardist Brian Turner has more than 60 pianos in his West Asheville studio — quite an accomplishment, considering that the studio is a converted one-car garage tucked behind his house.
One of the pianos is his 61/2-foot Yamaha Grand — the one he’s used to record three successful solo albums in pop, jazz, and classical idioms. The rest of the pianos reside on the shelves of a corner cupboard, some with keyboards no longer than an inch-and-a-half: hardly concert ready. They reflect family history as much as professional passion.
The miniature-piano collection, says the 30-something Turner, “has been growing since I was nine years old. That was when I first started studying piano, and my parents gave me a toy piano as a birthday present.” (He comes from a “very musical” family: “Mom plays piano, and my dad’s a trumpet player.”)
Soon, a toy piano appeared for Christmas, and others for other special occasions. It’s been going on for so long that neither Turner nor his mother can remember which piano is the collection’s progenitor, the one that spawned all the others.
“She’s still doing it,” says Turner. “She finds them at yard sales and antique stores and online.” The collection moved with him when he settled in Asheville after leaving his native Ohio, where he earned his performance degree at Ohio University.
The most recent addition, though, came not from his mother but from his wife, Carrie, a photographer. Last Christmas, she gave him a Lego-like toy piano he had to assemble from even tinier components: a testament to the precision Brian brings not only to his playing, but also to his skill as a composer.
Along with plastic, the various little pianos are made from porcelain, metal, and wood. There’s a coin-bank piano, a notepad piano with the protruding end of the pad forming the keyboard, a Snoopy piano, an alarm-clock piano (the tiny keys move when the alarm goes off), a Muppet piano, and a delicate filigree silver piano that somehow brings Liberace to mind.
A few of the pianos are trinket boxes with removable covers. Others are music boxes, including the largest one: too big to fit on the cupboard shelves, it’s housed in lonely splendor on a nearby table.
When it comes to toy-piano collecting, the top name is Schoenhut. In business since 1872, the Florida-based company makes not only tiny collectable pianos but also child-sized pianos for the playroom. There’s a website dedicated to toy pianos (minipianos.com) and blogs about toy pianos. Toy pianos can even boast a certain cultural pedigree. In 1948, avant-garde composer John Cage — arguably the most famous alumnus of Black Mountain College — wrote and performed “Suite For Toy Piano” (although his required playable instrument would dwarf any of Turner’s).
None of Turner’s collectibles are Schoenhuts. In fact, few of his toy pianos are worth much at all, given that the going price for one on eBay is about $10. But the value is in the personal and not the pecuniary.
For the moment, he’s too busy to devote much time to collecting. Besides an active recording and teaching schedule, Turner serves as bandleader and keyboardist for the Asheville party band Orange Krush. He tours frequently and has appeared with such arena-filling names as Michael Bolton, Clay Aiken, and Bobby McFerrin.
Turner has even formed a band with the Asheville-born American Idol star Caleb Johnson; they’ll appear this spring at Harrah’s Casino in Cherokee.
Little wonder that Turner’s studio serves as a kind of sanctuary — somewhere he likes to retreat late at night to work on his music, in the soft light of the candelabra on his Yamaha.
The toy pianos provide a kind of comfort, too: reminders of his musical education growing up in Ohio and the nurturing provided by his musical parents. “I guess I’ll have to start adding to the collection myself,” says Turner. “It’s a family tradition.”
Visit brianturnerpiano.com.