The Reverend Dwayne R. Mason says he was appreciative when Erwin Helfer came up to him after a 9/11 memorial performance last year and complimented his piano playing–he’d accompanied a gospel choir–but didn’t think much about it. Helfer is one of the city’s most knowledgeable and skilled students of prewar piano styles, and a compliment from him is nothing to sneeze at, but Mason didn’t know who Helfer was. A month later Helfer called him at home; again he expressed his admiration and mentioned that he’d told Steven Dolins, who runs the Highland Park label The Sirens, about Mason and that Dolins might want to put out an album by him. “It was totally unexpected,” says Mason, “but I didn’t take it seriously.” Dolins says he had to leave about six messages on Mason’s answering machine over the next few months before they actually spoke.
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Mason sees gospel as a calling, not a career. A licensed mortician who preaches regularly at his own church, he says he never spent time listening to other types of music, and though he’s been playing piano all his life he’d never thought about making records. Dolins finally persuaded him to try, however, and this Sunday night Mason celebrates the release of his debut, Glory! Glory!, with a performance at the Old Town School of Folk Music. He’ll play on a solo piano bill with Helfer, ragtime specialist Reginald Robinson, and jazz pianist Earma Thompson; for Mason, who turns 42 Friday, it’ll be his first musical performance that’s not connected with a religious service.
Mason says that when he was six his pastor, Frances Davis, told King that God was using music to come into his life, and she blessed and anointed him. Immediately afterward, he says, he was able to play all the way through a song for the first time. The church paid for his lessons with private teachers and at downtown piano stores like Lyon & Healy and Wurlitzer. Mason learned the basics this way, but he hated the rigidity of formal training. He says he learned more from soaking up the sounds every week in church, and he routinely gospelized the songs his teachers wanted him to play. Finally, as he recounts in the liner notes for Glory! Glory!, an instructor named Daisy Robinson told King that Mason didn’t need any more lessons, but just needed to practice: “The music is already in Dwayne–we can’t teach him–we will only distort what God is doing with him.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Andre J. Jackson.
