The fundamental things still apply

HE has survived all the moods of music’s changing interests, from doo-wop to rap, head down, attention focused on a piano keyboard, singing the smoky kinds of tunes that make you want to return to a place in memory where love was new and the summer nights were twilight-soft.

Good music ought to create meaningful images, not rattle your brain, which is why Page Cavanaugh has existed for so long. At 84, he makes the lyrics a part of the melody, and together they embrace the fading day like a sunset over the ocean. He doesn’t demand that you listen. He offers.

I met him at the Tower Bar one night on Sunset Boulevard. He was playing “Laura,” about the vapory dream love that lyricist/poet Johnny Mercer saw as “the face in the misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall....”

When I heard that the singer/pianist was Page Cavanaugh, it was like a trip back through time. I’ve heard his music for years, the Page Cavanaugh trio, on radio and record, standing on its own or playing for singers such as Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. Through eras of swing, doo-wop, jazz, folk rock, heavy metal and bubblegum ballads, there was always Page Cavanaugh.

The Tower Bar, a part of the elegant old Sunset Tower Hotel, before that the Argyle, is perfect for Cavanaugh. The Art Deco building, born in 1929, has a history of its own, having housed the likes of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and the notorious Bugsy Siegel when the Strip was the center of the world.

You can look out over the Westside from the mellow environment of a lounge never intended for guys in tank tops who clink their beer bottles. The elegant maitre d’ Dimitri Dimitrov sets the mood at the door with a manner that’s right out of a world that doesn’t exist anymore, full of style and graciousness. Then there’s Cavanaugh.

He’s a small man at 145 pounds, maybe 5 feet 8, long white hair trailing back over the collar of his dark suit, a thin mustache, a blue bowtie, shoes polished to a glow, large gold cufflinks flashing in the soft light.

When I walked over, he was playing “Angel Eyes” for a guy at the bar who asked if he knew it. “Of course I do,” Cavanaugh said in a mildly dismissive tone, humming a few bars and then segueing into the tune in a voice that one critic said was “so fine it’s often no more than a tremble.” There aren’t many songs he doesn’t know.

Cavanaugh learned to play music between farm chores on a 200-acre spread owned by his family in Cherokee, Kan. He was milking cows at 6 and taking piano lessons at 9, sometimes listening to his father pumping out ragtime tunes on the family 88. Young Page preferred classical music, but learned it all in a career that spanned more than half a century. He calls what he plays “cocktail jazz.”

He hit the road with a trio after a stint in the Army at the close of the Second World War, building a reputation as a master of the “standards,” those tunes that somehow never seem to grow old. There was no time for marriage in the life he pursued, playing gigs across the country, performing in movies, appearing on radio shows and cutting records. “Two old broads were chasing me,” he says, “but one died and the other’s a pain.” He laughs and shakes his head and begins playing “As Times Goes By.”

You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh ...

At his age, he’s seen a lot of singers and songwriters die. He calls Sinatra “one of the nicest people I ever worked with,” denying the spoiled brat image that haunted old blue eyes to the end. Mel Torme, he says, was among the best songwriters he ever knew but “had an ego the size of Europe.”

Mercer was the undisputed king of the lyricists, he adds, playing with the piano keys as he talks, like the idling of a perfect engine. “He wrote such lovely words, sometimes off the wall. Full of images, a poet.” He remembers the time Mercer wouldn’t talk to him for six months because a singer Cavanaugh was backing had changed one word in “Laura.” He laughs at the memory, then adds in a tone of nostalgia, “Where did all the lyrics go?”

He mentions Sarah Vaughan, Rosemary Clooney and a lot of others, some who were stars when I was a teenager. They’re gone now, he says, pausing between tunes to wonder why they’ve all died and he’s still playing, then shrugging it off. That’s just the way it is.

Spry and in some ways toughened by the road, he becomes a midnight kind of guy at the piano when you’re sitting by a window and there’s a full moon peaking through the mist. A master of the vibrato, a voice for the wee hours. When I left he was singing “I’ll Remember April” in that whispery way. The room was quiet and full of memories.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.