From Piano Bar Musician to a Nationwide Stage:

Our Origin Story

How do you go from playing background music to running a nationwide entertainment network? For me, the lightbulb moment happened on a vacation to Texas, back in 2005.

I’d been playing piano professionally since the late 90s, making my living in restaurants and old-school piano bars in New York. On a good night maybe 30 people were around the piano. But when I walked into a joint called Pete’s on 6th Street in Austin, TX, I saw a completely different beast. Two grand pianos, a drummer, and 300 people going absolutely wild. The players were throwing it down, rocking out in a way I didn’t even know a piano could be played. I had one immediate thought: How do I get into this??

Back to New York, I put an ad on Craigslist, and found a veteran player (thanks Paul L!) to teach me the format and the essential first 100-song list. I got us small bar gigs in Hoboken, NJ and started learning the trade.

After a year, I was invited to train full time for a summer in Fayetteville, NC where we did dueling piano shows 4 nights a week. I wasn’t very good at first. There was so much to learn about working a room, knowing hundreds of songs by heart, being a comedian, and being a good dueling partner. It was really hard! But soon, with the helpful introductions of my trainer Tim B, I was flying across the country, playing dueling piano bars four nights a week. Every week was a new city. St. Louis, Virginia Beach, Minneapolis, OKC, Dallas, Gainesville, Kansas City, and dozens more.

The beauty of that circuit was shared stages, band houses, and drinks (so many drinks!) with the best players in the country, building a massive, tight-knit network of professionals. It also exposed me to so-so players, good players, and some of the very best duelers in the business. I got to know who’s who. (This becomes important later)

One night, before a show in Hampton, VA, I was at dinner with our team of 3 duelers, one of which I had worked with in Chicago before, and one who was new to me: Marcus, the guy who had hired me and was the house player there at the time. We had never met, but I came with the right introductions, which is how it was done in the dueling pianos road gigs. As we were eating, I couldn’t stop staring at him. Finally, with a mouth full of bolognese and eyes as wide as meatballs, I blurted out…”YOU’RE THE GUY! You’re the reason I’m even doing this!!” Turns out, Marcus was one of the two duelers onstage that night at Pete’s Dueling Pianos in Austin.

Eventually, I got tired of the airport grind. I realized there was a huge opportunity to take this high-energy show out of the bars and package it—pianos, sound, and lighting—for private corporate events, country clubs, and galas. At this time the only dueling piano “companies” were mostly focused on bringing the format into bars and clubs, which wasn’t what I set out to do. I bought a minivan, hired my new/old friend Marcus to build portable grands, begged my bestie Link to make me logo, taught myself video editing to make a promo reel, and hung our shingle out for corporate clients, country clubs and brides to find us. 

At first it was mostly local private event shows in New York City, North Jersey, Connecticut, and Philly. But because I was the only mobile dueling piano company that was purely focused on private events and corporates, I started getting calls from places I had worked in when I was a road warrior. Florida, Texas, DC and Virginia event planners were on the line asking if I serviced their area. (I didn’t…or at least I hadn’t). “Suuure!!”, I said. “We cover Texas!” I mean, that’s how a young, scrappy and hungry business grows, right? I’m not throwing away my shot! (thanks for that Hamilton.)

When out-of-state calls started pouring in, the truth was that I didn’t have to scramble. I just called up my trusted network of road-tested friends. Today, 14 years later, New York, NY Dueling Pianos is a robust operation. We run top-tier, fully produced shows across the 50 states, built entirely on long-term relationships, top-quality players, and a whole lot of trust.

–Eddie Mondress
  Founder of NY NY Dueling Pianos and OG of dueling piano private events.