JAZZ

Time was when Eddie Condon's saloon on Third Street rattled nightly with inspired polyphony from George Brunis' trombone and Bill Davison's trumpet. Condon's rickety palace is no longer subject to such damage, with Bruins in Chicago; but the proprietor, operating as always with an eye for the main chance, has recouped his loss by promoting a remarkable young pianist.

Ralph Sutton came cast from St. Louis two years ago for a short New York contract, and just stayed. His unique approach to ragtime piano and his remarkable repertoire have kept him popular. Customers at Condon's, once wont to chat through intermission piano and save their attention for the antics of Bruins, now treat the band with a conversational scorn but restrain themselves to gentle hell taps while Sutton experiments between sets.

Every hour on the hour he leaves his beer, turns out the stage lights, and addresses the piano. Hr begins every tune with a style just this side of Eddie Duchin, but infinitely more subtle; this pleasant music may last for as many as 32 bars before the cocktail pianist gives way to the ragtime revivalist. Sutton plays almost no ragtime "classics"--his entire repertoire consists of such out-of-context numbers like "Just One of Those Things," "The Way You Look Tonight," and "Body and Soul."

Yet never were these sub-deb tunes played as he plays them. His walking bass is a thing of inexorable sureness; his traditional handling of these untraditional pieces is never dull, almost always completely new.

He plays the expected ones too, but only on request or by whim. "Peg O' My Heart" got a scornful but amazingly inventive treatment the night I last heard Sutton, while a private joke with clarinetist peanuts Hucko produced a "Sugar Blues" that laughed at Duchin and Peewee Hunt but wound up with three choruses that were all Sutton, joke or no joke.

Condon's has a low enough cover and a good enough six-piece band to make a visit desirable anyway. The addition of this soloist who looks like a junior executive makes such a pilgrimage almost compulsory. He treats a concert grand like an upright with newspaper behind the strings a la Chicago. That's no mean treatment, either.