Eden Prairie piano man takes his ragtime skills to compete in world championship contest

When David Cavalari sits down to play the piano, his otherwise low-key and thoughtful persona transforms into a frenzy of flying fingers across white and black keys, creating foot-stomping, head-bobbing, raucous ragtime music.

Cavalari, once a professional actor and musician, now performs his piano magic in the master bedroom of the Kingston Drive rambler he shares with his wife, Dacia, and son, Felix, in Eden Prairie.

Now, he plays the piano for fun and is preparing to compete in the 50th Annual World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest over Memorial Day weekend in Oxford, Mississippi.

Washington, D.C. to EP

The 42-year-old Cavalari grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, went to high school at Fairfax High School in Virginia, and earned his arts degree at the College of William & Mary.

The arts brought Dacia and him together.

“My wife and I met while we were doing regional theater together in Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, a place called Wayside Theatre that unfortunately has gone under since then,” he said.

Eventually, the couple decided they needed to move somewhere that cost less and where they could find steady work.

“We settled on the Twin Cities because (Dacia’s) family’s from South Dakota,” Cavalari said. “And the cost of living was good for us. And I’d always been told that I would like it here, which it turns out I do.”

They lived in St. Paul for a few months, then in Burnsville, and then landed in Eden Prairie in 2016.

Both he and Dacia went back to school and became software engineers. “Which is why we can have a house now, fortunately,” he said, smiling. “When I was doing music professionally, I lived in a small apartment, and I had a small digital keyboard, and now I have a piano and a house, but I can’t do music professionally anymore.”

Officially, he’s an amateur musician now, he said. “Which I mean in the original sense, where I do it because I enjoy it and I don’t do it for the money, which is better in a lot of ways.”

As a professional, it’s sometimes construed as meaning you get to just have fun playing music and get paid for it, he said. “In reality, it means you play ‘Piano Man’ 20 times a day. And instead of what you necessarily want to play, you have to play what people want to hear.”

From harmonica to ragtime piano

Cavalari started playing piano in his late teens, old by piano standards.

“I started on violin in fourth grade, and then I switched to trumpet so I could be in the band,” he said. “So I did learn music. I learned how to read the notes, and I took a music theory class and learned harmony and things like that.”

During lunch breaks, he would go to the band room and “noodle” on the piano. “I knew where all the notes were, and I knew how to play a melody, and I knew some basic chords, but I didn’t rigorously start practicing difficult piano music until about 20, and I probably didn’t get into ragtime until about 21 or 22,” he said.

Cavalari stumbled onto the ragtime genre while playing the harmonica.

“I had a harmonica collection as a kid, and I had some practice books from the local music store,” he said. “And there’d be old songs in there like ‘Wabash Cannonball’ and, of course, ‘The Entertainer’ was in there, which is a little tricky on harmonica. So I was familiar with some of those, and I guess they spoke to me. And so when I came across a book of ragtime sheet music at a Borders bookstore one time in college, it just spoke to me again.”

Old-Time Piano Playing Contest

The World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest is the only competition in which Cavalari has ever participated.

While playing in a dinner theater in 2012 just outside Denali National Park in Alaska, an organizer of the competition who attended the dinner show approached him at his piano and asked if he’d ever heard of the competition.

He hadn’t. He checked out their website and signed up in 2013.

“I did pretty well, too,” he said. “It was challenging. That was my first competition ever. I got sixth place, which was pretty good if you heard the first five.”

It was there that he learned the peculiarities of competing. “I think it did hurt me that it was my first year,” he said. “In the preliminary round, I had to play second in the early morning. And I had to play right after someone in the junior division – a kid who was better than me. And unbeknownst to me, because I hadn’t heard his set, I played one of the same songs that he played.

“I did much better in the second round,” he said, laughing. 

He went back and competed for six more years and has been in the final round every time. “I’ve never won, but I’m always a finalist,” he said.

Competitions came to an end in 2019 when his son, Felix, was born. Then COVID-19 hit. So, this year is his first competition since then.

The event moved in 2016 from Peoria, Illinois, to Oxford, Mississippi, and the campus of Ole Miss – the University of Mississippi.

“Oxford has a lot of great restaurants, which is one thing I look forward to when going down there,” he said. “The museum at the school is really cool. They have a nice old antique gramophone, which I got to hear the last time I was there, which was really amazing.”

Cavalari is entered in the New Rag and Regular Division of the contest. In the New Rag category, he has submitted a tune that he composed, competing for $500 in first-place money and a trophy. He has also submitted a list of five tunes composed no later than 1939, which he will play while competing for a $2,500 first prize.

Jelly Roll to ‘Cool Sprinkles’

One of the pieces Cavalari will perform is by one of his favorite composers, Jelly Roll Morton, and was composed in 1931. “If you look at transcriptions of some of his performances, there’s just incredible counterpoint in there sometimes,” he said. “It’s almost like Bach, and it’s mind-boggling how he improvised that.”

Morton, who died in 1941, cut his teeth as a pianist in New Orleans’ bordellos, according to Biography.com. An early innovator in jazz music – he even claimed that he created the genre – he rose to fame as the leader of Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers in the 1920s.

It was the free-wheeling style of Morton and some of his early jazz contemporaries that attracted Cavalari’s attention.

“I like the freedom of ragtime,” he said.  “If you play a classical piece, you’re meant to perform it exactly as written on the score,” he said. “And with (ragtime), it’s popular music, and so it’s really expected that you put your own spin on it. And that appeals to the composer side of me, too.”

Ragtime had its beginnings in the early 20th century. “From 1900 through about 1918, you have ragtime, and then from 1918 through the ’30s, you have the jazz era, and then in the ’30s, people called it swing or big band,” Cavalari said. “So, the definition of ragtime depends on the time period it was popular.

“My style is probably hot piano or swing piano,” he said. “There’s not an agreed-upon term for it, which is interesting.”

Whatever you want to call it, Cavalari has been working on his composition for this year’s contest for months.

It’s called “Cool Sprinkles.”

“I like to start by picking a title and then try to come up with musical ideas that fit the title,” he said. “Lately, the way I’ve been coming up with titles is by keeping a list of odd things my son says, and ‘Cool Sprinkles’ was from that list.”

Felix is 4. (“We’re in the throes of the 4-nado,” Cavalari said, smiling.) “One time when he was 2, he walked up to me while I was practicing and said, ‘Cool sprinkles!’ for some reason. My wife said, ‘Is that a ragtime title?’ And I thought, ‘Well, maybe it is.’”

Where you can watch

The World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest runs from May 23 to 26. It has a YouTube channel where you can watch the livestream on Memorial Day weekend or view clips from previous years.

The event features 1,200 piano players from the United States and around the world.