Two jazz pianists come to mind when talk turns to children. The first and best known is Vince Guaraldi, the pianist and composer of songs and incidental music for the Charlie Brown TV specials. Guaraldi died in 1976. The second keyboard player is Johnny Costa, the musical director and keyboard player on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood from 1968 until his death in 1996.
Costa was born in Arnold, Pa., about a half hour from Pittsburgh. He began studying piano when he was 10 after learning to play the accordion. After World War II, he attended college and graduated with two degrees—one in music and the other in teaching. The second was an insurance policy, in case his piano-playing career went flat.
Costa's first job in 1951 was as a staff musician on KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh. He then recorded a handful of superb piano albums for Coral in the 1950s, including Johnny Costa Plays Piano Solos (1955), Johnny Costa Plays for the Most Beautiful Girl in the World (1955), Costa Living (1955), A Gallery of Gershwin (1958) and In My Own Quiet Way (1959). In the late 1950s, Costa was briefly the musical director of Mike Douglas's weekly TV show in Philadelphia.
But the demands of studio work and touring to promote albums pulled Costa away from his wife and two children. So at the dawn of the '60s, Costa decided to stick closer to home. He played regularly at a Pittsburgh club and appeared on KDKA. Then in 1963, Costa met Fred Rogers through a mutual friend. Rogers was enchanted by Costa's gentle piano wizardry. There was child-like delight in his playing. In 1968, when public broadcaster WQED gave Rogers the green light to move forward with the first 100 episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers offered Costa the job as musical director. Smartly, he let Costa play whatever he wished, as if he were a permanent guest on the show. All of the music would be live. [Photo above, from left, of Johnny Costa and Fred Rogers]
Though many of the songs were written by Rogers as musical teaching lessons (Rogers had a degree in music composition), Costa harmonized the songs with him and arranged the melodies to give them life.
In the early 1990s, Costa recorded four albums for Hank O'Neal's Chiaroscuro label—Classic Costa (1992), Flying Fingers (1992), A Portrait of George Gershwin (1994), and Dream (1996), a Johnny Mercer tribute album.
What Fred Rogers heard in Costa's playing in the early 1960s was childlike surprise combined with an Art Tatum-like mastery of the music, a powerful sense of where Costa wanted to go on each song and, most of all, kindness. To Fred Rogers, Johnny Costa was really a story-teller who used notes instead of words to educate the show's little viewers.
Johnny Costa died in 1996.
JazzWax note: For more on Johnny Costa's career, visit the blog Old Mon Music here.
JazzWax tracks: Johnny Costa's four albums for Chiaroscuro are available at Amazon and at Spotify.
Perhaps my favorite Costa album is Johnny Costa Plays Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1984), which is long out of print. His early albums for Coral are impossible to find as well.
JazzWax clips: Here's the full album Johnny Costa Plays Mister Rogers' Neighborhood...
Here's Costa's complete 1955 Piano Solos album for Coral...
Here's a marvelous brief bio on Johnny Costa...
And here's Costa when he and guitarist Joe Negri were on organist Ken Griffin's 67 Melody Lane in 1954...
A special thanks to Dennis Galloway.
