Friday, Dec. 5, 2003 | 8:25 a.m.
Music has always been easy for Tommy Deering.
"When people ask how long I have been playing, I always say since before I was born," said Deering, resident pianist at the Bootlegger Bistro from Thursdays through Sundays. "When my mother was pregnant with me, she played piano every day ... I think I picked up a lot of music then, because I had nothing else to do."
If there is a musical instrument Deering can't play, he hasn't found it.
"When I picked up an instrument, I was always able to figure out how it worked," Deering, a native of Prosser, Wash., said. "It was easy for me to figure out the basics of every instrument. I could play something decent on any instrument within 15 minutes of picking it up."
His mother taught him how to play the ukulele when he was 5.
"That was just a couple of steps from a guitar," Deering said.
He was a professional musician by age 15, playing accordion with a band at an officers' club on a military base. With the gig at Camp Hanford, he earned enough money to take accordion lessons.
"My accordion teacher was expanding his school, and he wanted the two best young accordionists in Washington and Oregon to promote his school," Deering said. "In his opinion I was the best in Washington, and Bennie Farah was the best in Oregon."
Deering and Farah performed in school assemblies and did so well together they formed an accordion duo, opening for Sophie Tucker when "The Last of the Red Hot Mommas" held a concert in Portland, Ore., as part of her farewell tour.
"She made so much money on her farewell tour that she did three or four of them," Deering said.
While Deering was in Portland, where he and Farah were performing at various venues, he took music lessons from Stan Kenton's cousin, Bill, learning music theory, arranging, transposition and composition.
"Music was all I ever wanted to do," Deering said.
Deering and Farah found their way to Los Angeles, where they performed at the Ambassador Hotel and other venues. From there, they landed a four-week gig opening for Pearl Bailey at the Flamingo in Las Vegas.
"We were young and slick," Deering said.
He liked Vegas. It was the mid-'50s, when music was wall-to-wall with the likes of Louis Prima and the Mary Kaye Trio.
"Everywhere I went, there were big bands in the lounge -- Harry James or Dizzy Gillespie -- and if not a big band then a jazz trio or quartet, and if not that then a tremendous entertainment act."
Soon after that he and Farah went their separate ways, and Deering toured with the music/comedy trio the Marksmen for the next seven years.
"I was the comic, they were straight men," said Deering.
Eventually, Deering put down the accordion and took up the piano.
"The accordion was very demanding, physically," he said.
After the Marksmen broke up, Deering settled in Los Angeles and played in piano bars until he got a call in 1963 from Maynard Sloat, entertainment director at the Tropicana in Vegas.
Sloat, who produced the "Folies Bergere" at the Tropicana in 1968, once managed the Marksmen. He needed someone to play jazz in the afternoons in the Blue Room.
It was a three-week gig that turned into almost three years.
"I just played in the afternoon," he said. "The rest of the time I just had fun, too much fun to worry about my career."
Eventually he went to the Aladdin and started a soft-rock group, Tommy Deering and the Inner Circle. After the band broke up, he played piano at Caesars Palace's elegant Palace Court restaurant, a gig that lasted five years.
While at Caesars he put his composing and arranging talents to good use, creating music for " Lido de Paris" at the Stardust when Siegfried & Roy joined the production in 1970.
That led to an arranging job for Bobbie Gentry ("Ode to Billy Joe"). He was her conductor for a year and a half.
In the mid-'70s Deering returned to his one-man piano gigs.
He was performing at The Mirage in 1992, playing a song he had composed, when Paula Savage sat down in the lounge and listened to him.
Savage was the president of the newly established International Peace Garden Foundation, which each year rewards a different country that has done the most to promote peace with a garden of tulips for their capitals.
By the end of the evening, she had asked him to compose a song for the new foundation.
"I wrote a rhapsody," Deering said. "Because of the tulips, I called it, 'A Rhapsody in Color.' "
The tune is played annually at the peace award ceremony.
To kick off the use of the theme song, the foundation arranged a concert in Carnegie Hall, where Deering performed a dozen of his other compositions and ended the performance with the rhapsody.
As a reward for his work, the foundation created a scholarship in Deering's name for talented young musicians who can't afford to study music.
During a lifetime as a professional musician, he has almost never been idle.
"Very rarely have I ever been unemployed, never long enough to have time to do anything but go to the next gig," Deering said. "I think that's one thing that's held me back. Somebody always wanted me to do something next, and I didn't say no.
"I didn't have a plan to be somewhere at a certain age. I lived for the moment, with no direction. It came so easy -- I look at it now as a mixed blessing."
Lounging around
The old Kitchen Cafe, under new ownership, has been resurrected. Now the City Lights Bistro and Kitchen Cafe, 4850 W. Flamingo Road, the remodeled restaurant offers Greek and Mediterranean cuisine and live entertainment, including belly dancing and Greek music. Michael Karafantis says in the future the variety of music will be expanded to include jazz, pop and more.
Patrick Karst has been named resident pianist at the Nomiya Lounge. His performances are 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays and 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sundays.
The New Year's Eve bash in the VooDoo Lounge on the 51st floor of The Rio will feature party band LF8. Seating begins at 5:30 p.m. Tickets are $125 per person.
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