The Leader of the Band

Once upon a time, a teenage boy in Lindström, Minnesota, started a rock ’n’ roll band with his friends. They wore tight white bell-bottoms and shiny nylon jackets, called themselves Neon, and played the Bee Gees, Elton John, and Billy Joel. One day, a band member’s parent suggested they expand their audience by learning some old-time songs. The lead singer’s mom had a little-used accordion tucked away in a closet, which she offered to one of the band members—on the condition that he return it when she asked for it back.

Dan Chouinard, now forty-three, hung onto the instrument for twenty years, growing more enamored with it every day.

Chouinard—who is best known today as a pianist—is the second of six children in a musical family. He started tickling the ivories before his feet could reach the pedals and gave his first command performance—a version of “Alley Cat” he learned listening to the radio—in kindergarten. He eventually grew into playing at weddings and continued piano lessons through his college years at St. John’s University, where he studied French and Italian and took the opportunity to travel abroad.

One evening in 1987, a couple of years after graduating from college, Chouinard was having a drink at The Gay 90’s in downtown Minneapolis when someone requested Don McLean’s “American Pie.” The club’s pianist didn’t know the song, so Chouinard volunteered to play it. “Within a few months,” he says, “I was playing Thursday-night open mike, hosted by Lori Dokken. I was the human jukebox.” The weekly gig lasted seven years—during which Chouinard met many major singers.

That same year, Chouinard was listening to a band at the Dakota when a musician approached his table and told him Prudence Johnson was looking for a piano player for that weekend. “I remembered hearing her on A Prairie Home Companion as a teenager on the farm and marveling at her voice,” recalls Chouinard. “She was the first musician I worked with in town who left me starstruck.” Their gig was at the Kahler Hotel in Rochester, where the half-dozen people at the bar did not listen to them. “But,” Chouinard says, “I was still nervous.”

Since then, Chouinard has worked a lot with Johnson, and this February, at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in south Minneapolis, they will reprise “I Love Paris,” singing French tunes and trading stories of their separate travels to Paris.

“She’s got a high level of musicianship,” says Chouinard, “and I appreciate her attention to the tiniest nuances. She’s one of my closest friends, in addition to being one of my most frequent collaborators.”

“Our working relationship has become much more collaborative,” says Johnson. “It’s a partnership rather than a singer/accompanist relationship. He’s brilliant and so intuitively musical that working with him is an absolute joy. Best of all, Dan is truly family to me and my husband, Gary.”

The list of Chouinard’s collaborators is a virtual who’s who of Twin Cities musicians—from guitarist Peter Ostroushko and gospel singers Gwen Matthews and Robert Robinson to classical soprano Maria Jette and folksingers Neal and Leandra. “We regularly interview local singers and actors,” says Dale Connelly of Minnesota Public Radio’s The Morning Show, which he cohosts with Jim Ed Poole. “When there’s an in-studio performance included in the interview, the singers usually have a pianist in tow, and increasingly that pianist is Dan. Everybody wants to work with him.”