Within 60 seconds of tinkling the ivories on what is believed to be the largest piano in the world, Grammy Award-winning jazz pianist and composer Bill Cunliffe was totally blown away.
"This is fabulous. I’ll take it -how much is it? Can I buy two, please?"
Cunliffe (66) is a cool cat, having played with jazz greats Buddy Rich Big Band, Frank Sinatra, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Benny Golson and James Moody.
So he has been there and done that.
"It was curiosity that brought me here. I’ve heard about it. I was like, what would it be like to play?"
Cunliffe said he could have just sat there and played the jazz standards on it for hours.
"Wow! It’s just beautiful."
Asked if he was serious about buying the 6m-long, 1.2-tonne piano, he said he had no way of getting it back to Los Angeles.
"And my house is not big enough unfortunately. It’s just so massive. I just can’t believe it."
Another reason there was no sale was, the piano is a one-of-a-kind and it had sentimental value for Mr Mann.
He built the piano when he was a Timaru teenager and named it after his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Barrie Mann, the first Mann to immigrate to New Zealand.
Aside from its colossal size, the thing that made it extraordinary was its sound.
Mr Mann said the bass strings in traditional pianos were wrapped in copper to give them more mass, so they would vibrate more slowly and make a lower pitch.
It meant the bass strings could be made shorter (up to 3m long), making pianos a more manageable size.
But it took away from the sound, the tone and the flexibility of the piano.
He wanted to see what a piano would sound like without copper-wrapped wires, which meant he had to build a piano that was 6m long, to get the same pitch.That length gave the piano a "booming, deep sound with great dynamic contrast" - something that made Cunliffe’s eyes light up.
He is not the only high profile pianist to play the piano.
It has also been played by Maurice Till, Michael Houstoun and Queen keyboardist Spike Edney, among others.
