Al pianoforte che fu di Keith Tippett - che come si sa è custodito da Janinka Diverio nel suo locale Three Cups a Malmesbury, nel Wiltshire - è dedicato un bel passaggio del libro di Martin Phillips Keith Tippett: Mujician – The Authorised Biography.
"Keith maintained long term friendships and working relationships with musicians, a trait extended to his own piano. When he and Julie moved in to their first shared flat in Beckenham, they acquired the instrument which would remain with him until the end of his life. “I bought that piano,” Julie remembers. “I paid forty quid for it. It was a Collard and Collard. A real beauty. It had a lovely mellow tone. I used to play it myself sometimes. I composed things on it. Keith played it every day when he was at home.” From the Beckenham flat, it moved with them, first to a cottage in Dyrham and then on to the living room in Tortworth. After Keith’s death, when Julie moved out of the cottage they and the piano had shared for over forty years, she didn’t have room for it in her new flat. Inca put out a post on social media asking if anyone would be able to house her dad’s instrument. By return, Janinka Diverio, who had worked very closely with Keith and Julie in the early 2000s, replied “Consider it done.”
“When Inca asked, I didn’t have a second thought,” Janinka confirms. She arranged to have it moved to the pub she had recently taken over, The Three Cups in Malmesbury. “Although the piano had been sitting in the cottage unplayed for a few years, it wasn’t in too bad a state. I had it re-tuned and gave it a polish. It’s got the odd note that’s duff, but that adds to its character. I’m going to get some further restoration done on it. We use it for some of the gigs we run [at the pub], and sometimes people ask if they can play it. But I don’t think of it as ours. We are just the current custodians of it. One day it might move on somewhere else.”
To welcome the Collard and Collard to its new home, Janinka invited Matthew Bourne, a friend and collaborator of Keith’s, to give an inaugural concert on the instrument. He remembers being quite intimidated by the thought of performing a solo recital on Keith’s piano. “When I got to the pub and played it, I knew it was going to be really hard work. When I’d first visited him in his cottage, he’d showed me the piano – but he didn’t want me to play it. ‘Oh, it’s got a few dodgy notes,’ he’d say. So on the [Three Cups] night, I wrestled with it through the gig and at the end I said to someone ‘Now I know why he never wanted me to play it!’ It was the perfect piano to practise on because it’s really hard work to get anything out of it. I can’t help thinking that the things he would have practised on that piano would have been so hard to achieve, so when he then performed on a nicer one, he’d be like ‘oh, this is great!’ So there was method in having a really tricky old instrument.”
For the time being, the Collard and Collard has pride of place in the bar of The Three Cups. It has one photo of Keith on the top lid. Another is placed on the wall directly behind the piano so that Keith can observe those playing it. Open the lower lid and you can gaze on the keys which Keith’s fingers have touched a million times. Countless scales have run up and down these eighty-eight notes. The ivory and ebony strips are where Septober Energy was born. Where the motifs for Frames, A Loose Kite, Cider Dance and many, many more first drew breath. This keyboard has been worked hard. Some of the white notes are browning slightly, signs of sweat from Keith’s fingers as he worked and reworked ideas, sending those upper-register spirals and thunderous bass rumbles swirling around the Tortworth living room. Were he to look down on his instrument now, nestling in the Three Cups bar, he’d be thinking of it not as an old adversary but as a faithful friend."
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