One key at a time: How ABQ’s piano man preserves history

Alexander D’Von Boggs casually leaned against a dark wood, upright Chickering & Sons piano built almost 150 years ago in Boston.

“This here’s Theodore Roosevelt’s piano,” D’Von Boggs said with a smile. “This was his personal piano.”

Some of the ivory keys are stained a light chocolate shade, perhaps because Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. president, was a noted perpetual cigar smoker, he said.

Although the piano is decidedly rough around the edges, D’Von Boggs said he has no intention of doing any restoration work on the historical piece. He said the same is true for a New England Piano Co. piano from the 1890s that used to belong to Lew Wallace, New Mexico’s territorial governor from 1878-1881 and the author of “Ben Hur.”

“Nobody wanted it,” said D’Von Boggs, owner of 88 Keys Piano Warehouse. “(This lady) called me and said, ‘Do you want this piano? You could just have it. And we know it’s Lew Wallace’s, but, we think that you should just have it.’”

The 6,500-square-foot showroom and shop contains high-end pianos and historical restoration services — something not found elsewhere between Dallas and the West Coast — as well as starter pianos for new students.

His life revolves around pianos by bringing old ones back to life, selling high-end used pieces — like a $70,000 Steinway & Sons Model B from 1879 — and retailing new ones at his store. Old and new pianos can even be retrofitted with programmable player mechanisms.

But not these historic pianos. “I’m not doing any work to either one of these. Just going to leave them as is,” he said.

“This is the culmination of 700 years of development, right here, the grand piano,” he said. “The resonance, the tonal qualities are unmatched. They simply can’t duplicate it. They’re trying to come close. But this isn’t a keys with a sensor and a speaker. This is actually acoustic analog sound. So we try to stay orthodox here.”

The shop has numerous pianos in various stages of repair. Depending on the amount of work that needs to be done, a complete and painstakingly tedious restoration job can take a year or longer.

On a workbench, carefully labeled Ziplock baggies hold numerous brass fittings pulled from a 1922 Chickering. Each piece, now badly tarnished, must be cleaned and polished to original factory specifications — returning the luster.

Another bench contains bags of felt of differing thicknesses to use on the hammers. The pieces are hand-trimmed to exact measurements for perfect tonal quality.

“I have enough work for the next year and a half,” D’Von Boggs said. “I have a company back East that sends me pianos for restoration. So I get pianos from all over the country.”

A search for arts and culture

D’Von Boggs, originally from Clemson, South Carolina, did not set out to go into piano restoration and sales, although music was in his blood from an early age. He first started with lessons when he was about 10 and quickly gained an aptitude.

“My mom so wanted Chopin, but she got Fats Waller instead,” he said with a chuckle. “And that was a consequence of growing up in the Deep South. My great uncle was a Dixieland clarinetist in the ’20s. And when I was growing up, he was always around, and it was always old-school jazz, blues, Louis Armstrong. And so I naturally gravitated toward that, and I’ve been playing piano ever since.”

After working his way through a few careers, usually which in part included music like playing in clubs, D’Von Boggs found his way to Albuquerque almost 30 years ago.

“I moved here to New Mexico in search of arts and culture, and I certainly found it,” he said.

D’Von Boggs started as a technician at a piano store and all that did was whet his appetite to do more.

“The more I got into pianos and working on pianos, the more my love deepened because they’re fascinatingly complex,” D’Von Boggs said. “Pianos, they’re almost alive, I think, because of the woods involved and they just always intrigued me. And the more I work on pianos, the more I love it. So I’m a lifer. ”

D’Von Boggs realized he needed to take another step so about 20 years ago, he enrolled in the Steinway Technical Academy at the company’s New York City factory. He became a Steinway certified technician following the program.

“They have these tutorials where you learn their methodology and you’re tested. They want you as a certified Steinway piano technician, to know how Steinways are made,” he said. “It takes a year to make a Steinway in the factory. It takes a year to make a grand piano in the factory. And there’s so many layers involved.”

Building a piano is incredibly refined work, D’Von Boggs points out.

“It’s more difficult to make up a quality piano than it is a car,” he said. “The simple reason is because the wood is a principal component of a piano, and you have to draw these woods down properly. You need to know how to work the wood in the proper way.”

Yet, the end result is amazing, he added.

“They’re very delicate, but yet they’re very heavy and bulky. It’s just a strange kind of juxtaposition with pianos,” D’Von Boggs said. “They’re not made in bright, fluffy clouds in the sky. They’re made in dingy factories sometimes; craftsmen surrounded by wood chips and wood dust and so forth. That’s how these things are created.”

‘A piano boutique’

The retail showroom takes up about a third of the space, with the rest dedicated to the restoration end of the business.

“The showroom is not as big as I would like, but it does, in a way, force me to be very selective about what I sell. And so we’re keeping only the best stuff,” he said. “We’re more like a piano boutique. We’re not a giant store.

“Everything that I have here is hand-picked, and we warranty everything that we sell — and so it’s imperative that we sell good products.”

D’Von Boggs has a crew of six to seven contract workers who perform various tasks to help keep the business humming.

“This is a seven-foot Mason & Hamlin and it’s a wonderful piano,” D’Von Boggs said. “This piano was played on by Jerry Lee Lewis at the Camelot Casino back in 2000, 2001. We had to completely refinish this because he tore it up, gouged it with his fingernails. It was like a werewolf attacked it.”

Sometimes he takes on a job just because the piano has promise.

“This piano was given to me and it’s a very, very interesting piano,” he said of an upright with fire-red keys. “It’s from Sweden and it has a German accent in it. It’s a really good-sounding piano and has these very interesting red keys.”

It all makes for busy days.

“I tune pianos in the morning,” D’Von Boggs said. “I move pianos in the afternoon.”

As D’Von Boggs reminisced, a cat, C Sharp, strolled into the workspace, sparking a memory.

“He adopted me. He came in off the street. But he’s been doing his job. We get a lot of old uprights, like this one that we got in from Houston, Texas,” D’Von Boggs said, pointing to piano awaiting repair. “When we opened it up, mice started running out of it. And it took him about a week to catch them all. He was one motivated cat.”