Doran Danoff & Edward Symes: Black Magic Piano

Teddy Symes was just a child when he first picked up a guitar. Inspired by his brother (musician, Nathan Symes of Chapel Hill) and other gruff, brooding vocalists (Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Leonard Cohen), Symes always kept music near and dear to his heart. It was documentary filmmaking, though, that ultimately won his favor. Symes wouldn’t express himself through music until he moved to New York in 2009, when he found himself sharing a small studio apartment with an enormous grand piano.  Symes arrived in the big apple after a break up and having lived several months on the road. He’d been shooting videos for the Obama campaign and a labor union in several different states, and his arrival to New York marked the first time he’d been stationary in a long while. The filmmaker settled into a fourth floor walk-up in the Village, where he was able to reflect on movement, the city, and his recent break-up. The studio apartment was dominated by a giant grand piano that had once been housed in Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Room. The piano’s mystery extended beyond the fact that it somehow climbed to the fourth floor of a narrow Manhattan building; it had an ineffable allure that beckoned to Symes and, in a single month, it wrenched 14 songs from the neophyte piano player.

After the sudden catharsis, Symes shared his music—which resides within that same Tom Waits realm—with Doran Danoff, a professional musician and an acquaintance from his alma mater, Kenyon College. Danoff liked the combination of the “simple” piano compositions and the descriptive “little vignettes of an experience of someone in New York.” He was impressed at the quality of the compositions, given Symes’ inexperience with songwriting, and, in jest, attributed it to the piano’s “black magic.” After fleshing out the arrangements and recording the songs at a Brooklyn studio, Danoff pushed Symes to reimagine the project as something more than just a musical EP. The scope should be larger, he thought, and it should utilize Symes’ skills as a filmmaker.

Soon enough, Black Magic Piano had legs as a multimedia project. Symes began probing visual mediums for additional inspiration, and he felt that elements of modern opera would fit the Black Magic Piano aesthetic. It was natural, then, to involve Danoff’s partner and now-wife, Elizabeth Wilkinson, a modern dancer and choreographer.

Over the course of six years, the trio edged Black Magic Piano toward completion. Limited funds and resources threatened to kill the project on more than one occasion, but they pushed ever onward. Through music, film, and movement, Symes pieced together a “universal story” of the struggle to make art in New York City. Though not strictly autobiographical, the project certainly bore similarity to Symes’ life, and as the creative process wore on, Symes’ resemblance to his fictional protagonist, McNair, grew more and more apparent.

That kinship between character and creator makes Black Magic Piano feel both relatable and authentic—an honest ode to the unforgiving and singularly beguiling New York City art scene. 7/8 of an iceberg remains below water, forever inching toward the surface, half drowned, as the tip slowly melts; the same is true of New York City artists. As such, Symes and Company stay true and place colorful overlays of statues, bridges, and other iconic NYC ephemera side-by-side with the city’s more lackluster trappings—the cockroaches, the dollar pizza slices, the cheap ramen, the endless search for a few extra bucks.

T. You’d hear the steam coming up the pipes to heat the building in the middle of the room, and you’d get these weird sounds and it was very ghostly. We had no idea what we were going to do with the songs at that point. I mean talk about an organic process—it took almost six years to develop it, but it reminded me a lot of a documentary film because a lot of the time you just have to have that leap of faith. If you start the ball rolling and moving in some direction and let it guide you, it will come together.

So after you fleshed out the songs and it started gaining some form, what was the next step?

D. We had the arrangements in order. We had 14 songs, and I put together a band of some great players I knew in New York. We found this studio called Seaside Lounge in Brooklyn. It was like a poor man’s good studio. And we went in and cranked it out. We did it in three days of full band sessions and it turned out great. We got some really good stuff. And then from that point, that was ground zero. Having the music was just the beginning of the whole thing. We had the bones. We had the framework to make it happen.

T. I remember deciding that we really wanted to make it feel like it was played by a live band. We wanted it to feel live to have that vintage feel. We had these great musicians that Doran was able to attract and we said, ‘hey, we’re going to play this live in the studio.’ It was really just trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Doran is such a strong bandleader, so we were just trying to capture that feel. At that time, he was the music maestro and I was seeing the music in colors and shapes and stories and more from a visual standpoint.

So is that when you decided to add a visual element?

D. We were having a conversation about going to the studio. That was Teddy’s idea. And then I said to him, ‘what’s your intention here? You’re not a musical artist. You’re not planning on going on tour.’ I was like, ‘why don’t we think of an outside of the box thing with this?’ And that was when we brainstormed about making the album into a movie.

So once you did decide to turn it into a film, how did the narrative arise? I know the lyrics were already there, and it’s about love and heartbreak. But did an overarching narrative arise from that pretty naturally?

T. It didn’t really happen very naturally. It was really tough for me to make this film because there are a lot of elements that are autobiographical and a lot of stories from friends of mine, who either have slept in their studios or have almost been homeless in New York so they can keep making their art, or they take really weird jobs. I listened to the songs and I just started living a life in New York. I think we were just learning a lot in that period of time. I felt like I was learning something new about the city every day. I didn’t really want to make the film about my own experience, so I started thinking about a main character that arrived in New York, this universal story about how people move to New York and try to make their way, some of their setbacks, some of the challenges that they face.