Piano Man on a Mission

Thus was born, as Hull came to call himself, the pianist-errant. He would become not only a classical pianist but also a traveling one, playing, literally, in the streets, for the masses. How to do so, then, was just a remaining technical puzzle.

In the fall of 2007, Hull headed to his family's winter home in Dunedin, on Florida's west coast. He acquired an Eighties Chickering upright piano on a lease-to-own payment schedule, not mentioning his travel plans during negotiations with the dealer. With his brother Troy's help, he built a steel brace to go around the bottom, on which he mounted four pneumatic casters that could be refilled using a bicycle pump.

"We stayed up all night, hacking the steel, bolting the thing onto the piano. Then it didn't fit out the door," Troy recalls. "So we had to hack off two inches more steel. You figure he'd measure it before we did all that work."

This past December, Hull launched www.pianisterrant.com, and in January, it was time for him to test his idea. He invited his family to accompany him to the neighboring community of Crystal Beach. A small crowd quickly gathered as he played on an oceanfront promenade. His family looked on, flabbergasted but not entirely shocked. Soon he arranged through the community association to give an official free public concert.

"That was the first time I'd ever seen him play for a large crowd of people," Dawn says. "I thought he was fantastic. And ... his strength of will to actually accomplish this thing was just stunning to me."

"I believed he would do it, because there was no way that he couldn't," says Troy. "His whole life was in that direction for so long, and it came down to the point where all he had was his piano and his truck."

A hit in Crystal Beach, Hull was invited to perform at the community association's annual charity auction, where a bidder would win a private concert by him. As he played, he was suddenly roused from his "pianistic ecstasy" by a hand grabbing his shoulder.

He wheeled around to see an unfamiliar woman, who was hysterical. "I think that's your car!" she sobbed. Looking beyond her, through a set of glass doors, Hull saw what she meant. The emergency brake on his pickup truck, parked on an inclining street, had somehow disengaged and the truck rolled into the side of her brand-new 2008 Saturn Sky roadster.

The police were called, but nobody was injured, and Hull's insurance took care of the damage. Shaken, he returned to his piano and finished the concert. But when Staaffe showed up, more or less on a whim, to meet him shortly afterward, they agreed it was time to go south and try their luck in Miami.

Arriving in the Magic City in late February, Hull and Staaffe stayed in a series of low-rent motels around Biscayne Boulevard, from the White House Inn on NE 123rd Street down to the Best Value Inn on NE 52nd Street. They decided to stick around. Hull would cut his teeth on pianist errantry while the cold weather everywhere else subsided, and Staaffe would try to find work in his trade, fashion photography.

They found an unfurnished one-story duplex on NE 26th Street. It was mostly raw concrete and exposed wiring on the inside. But it was large and cheap and, most important, boasted a gentle concrete slope up to the door, perfect for getting the piano in and out.

They lucked into a sympathetic landlord named Richard Strell. A man about town and proud occasional political gadfly, Strell founded the Neighborhood of Edgewater Association of Residents. He introduced Hull to local singer-songwriter Jesse Jackson, who also got his start here a few years ago busking on Lincoln Road. Jackson was performing at his Tuesday-night residency at Amendment XXI, in the Design District, one night in March when he noticed Strell "with this scraggly-looking dude with crazy hair."

"Kris introduced himself, and I said, 'Dude, do you have your piano on you?' And he did. We walked out to the pickup truck, and he pulled it out and played it right there on 46th Street," Jackson recalls. "Then we wheeled it into Amendment XXI, miked it up, and had him play. And it was a hit. It was a fucking hit, man."