Based in Provincetown, MA, Jon Richardson is the founder of the online entertainment platform, Virtual Piano Bar (VPB). Since the start of the COVID19 pandemic, VPB has attracted thousands of fans and viewers who enjoy the entrtainment provided by top cabaret entertainers from around the globe who perform live. Richardson is himself a piano player, singer, and songwriter, who’s performed at the Front Porch in Ogunquit, Maine and at Tin Pan Alley in Provincetown, with a varied repertoire of showtunes, jazz, classic rock, pop and original compositions. In 2016, Richardson founded JJR Records. Albums have included Tonic (2016) and When I Left (2018), both by Richardson, Live from the Bridge (2019) from the group Tin Planes and Christmas in Provincetown (2019) and The Gift and the Rock (2020) by Donnelly & Richardson.
NiteLife Exchange (NLE) asks Jon Richardson (JR) Six Questions:
NLE: How did you come to start Virtual Piano Bar; when was the light bulb moment? How did you promote the concept?
JR: I did my first Virtual Piano Bar on the first Monday of Lockdown on March 16, 2020. That was a time of so much fear and uncertainty so I just went live on Facebook (like so many of us did!) and began to play piano and drink Manhattans. Before lockdown, working as a piano bar musician, my entire livelihood related to large crowds of people crammed together belting out showtunes. I realized pretty early on during the pandemic that this style of entertainment was basically impossible so I did my best to create a similar environment virtually.
Today, I’m able to promote the concept through all the amazing musicians who perform every week on the platform. Back in May, I recruited Todd Alsup to join VPB. I’d worked with him for years in Provincetown. Then we brought on New Hope-based piano bar legend Bob Egan. He and his partner Michael had built an incredible bi-weekly show. Then Joe Regan joined us—also in May of 2020—he’s incredible and has had an awesome career at Don’t Tell Mama’s in New York. Then, David Maiocco joined in June of 2020 and he is well known as a Liberace impersonator. I’d known him from Provincetown as well. Then, this past fall, we added amazing singer/piano players like Michael McAssey from New York as well as our youngest little phenom is Robbie Pate who performs with us live from Boston every Tuesday. Lastly we have two phenom singers who live in London who perform every Sunday—Heather and Stu. All of these performers bring their own awesome audiences and eyeballs to the platform. The performers are our chief evangelists for Virtual Piano Bar!
NLE: What makes the art form of piano bar special?
JR: The best piano bars are the ones where everyone feels comfortable enough to sing. It’s one of the only musical forms that is truly based in inclusivity. It’s a thing that is most special when every single person in the room is singing along. To me, piano bar is most special when it sounds almost like congregational singing at a big gay church. I always say to people, “It doesn’t matter what your voice sounds like just as long as you’re singing!” I mean that about 95% of the time.
NLE: What attributes make a great piano bar host?
JR: The best piano bar artists are the ones who can lead a big group of people (who are usually a few cocktails in) in song together. In these times, I especially miss piano bar for the electricity of a crowded room of people all singing torch songs together. The person behind the piano is able to forge a kind of musical bond between all of these people.
NLE: You’re a multi-instrumentalist and singer, as well as half of the singer-songwriter duo Donnelly & Richardson; how does this part of your creative life differ from your persona at the piano bar?
JR: While I play guitar fairly well and I can fake it on the trumpet and I love goofing off on those instruments, mostly I just play piano. My main project outside of piano bar work is with a singer-songwriter named Peter Donnelly. We write music together and we’ve performed regularly for the past three years under the name Donnelly & Richardson. I’ve even added our duo to Virtual Piano Bar and we perform every Wednesday at 5PM for a Happy Hour show. It’s been wonderful introducing the Virtual Piano Bar audience to Peter and our original songs.
NLE: How did you come to call Provincetown home, especially coming from the Midwest? What’s special about P-town?
JR: Before I made music my full-time career, I worked as a headhunter. I was recruited right out of college and so I moved to work at the firm that hired me, which was based in Boston. I grew up in Minnesota and went to college at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. My dad’s family is all from Rhode Island so the move to New England was pretty smooth.
My first regular gig at a piano bar was in Ogunquit, Maine at the Front Porch Piano Bar and Restaurant. It’s an amazing piano bar and one that I had visited as a patron many times during my pre-musician days. My first few nights playing there were rough but eventually I got the hang of it and gained some courage. Around that time, a piano bar in Provincetown called Tin Pan Alley agreed to give me a few shifts there in early spring 2017.
I was steadily able to add more and more shifts at both places and eventually my schedule became this: I would play three shows in a row in Ogunquit and then the next day I’d drive to Provincetown, play three shows, take a day off, then do it all over again up in Maine. Eventually I just decided to make Provincetown my home base and continued to drive the six hours back and forth, every week, for about 2 years. I was averaging about 170 shows a year in 2017, 2018.
Provincetown was a natural place to choose because the piano bar culture here keeps growing and growing in fervor. There’s so many industries in this town that feed so much creative energy so I feel privileged to live here year-round.
NLE: Before your musical career you were an executive search consultant; how did you arrive at that career and what caused you to transition out of it?
JR: When I was a senior in college I was chosen to serve as the student representative on the committee that selected the new college President. The head hunters who partnered with our committee eventually offered me a job and I spent about 7 years as a headhunter focused specifically on leadership within non-profits. My clients were the boards of trustees or the executive director for higher ed organizations, or hospitals, or museums.
In 2015, I let my bosses at the firm know that I’d been accepted to music school at New England Conservatory and they were very supportive of me as I worked on getting my master’s in musicology there. After I finished they were also very supportive as I started getting more and more jobs as a musician. The firm, Isaacson, Miller, even hired me to play my first holiday party in my first year as a full-time musician.
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