ON a recent Sunday night at Smalls, the Greenwich Village basement club, Johnny O’Neal sat at the piano drawing lush clumps of harmony from the keys as he shouted a blues standard. “She puts whiskey in her coffee, whiskey in her tea,” he sang, his voice craggy and windblown. “Whiskey in her whiskey, too much whiskey for me.”
At one point his singing crumbled into a wheeze, and the crowd tittered, half sure it was all some put-on. “Y’all think I’m messing around, but that’s just my voice,” he said. “I’m hoarse.” The next line came out in a rasp too, and the audience laughed again — this time in complete solidarity.
Leaving one of Mr. O’Neal’s shows, you’ll probably feel both exhausted and unburdened. In conversation he likes to say, “I don’t play to get house.” But this is guile; his performances are a constant pursuit of affirmation. Between songs he tends to gush, “We just love you so much, you’re a lovely audience,” inviting an equal response.
Mr. O’Neal made a name for himself in New York in the early 1980s, drawing comparisons to classic jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. But after being mugged outside his Harlem apartment in 1986, he left New York and spent the next two decades performing in relative obscurity, eventually developing AIDS. He returned to New York four years ago, hoping to make good on his earlier promise, and as his health improves, he is quietly trying to put his career back on track.
“A lot of cats have said that the reason why I’m not where I should be is that I wasn’t on the scene,” he said in a recent interview. “You’re out of sight, out of mind. I really believe that was a big factor in why I’m not the household name I should be.”
Now 57, Mr. O’Neal has brought his illness under control. He often sells out small clubs around Manhattan, and he recently released an album, “Live at Smalls,” his first in 12 years. Regular gigs with his trio — at Smoke in Morningside Heights every Saturday night, and at Smalls on Sundays — provide him with a steady income and a foothold on which to build a following. (On Sunday, he will also perform at MIST Harlem.)
Critics and peers acknowledge Mr. O’Neal as perhaps the leading exponent of mid-20th-century jazz piano technique. “He’s a very special cat,” said the pianist Barry Harris, 84, a bebop luminary who mentored Mr. O’Neal in the 1970s and ’80s. “If ever somebody sounded like Art Tatum, it’s him. He’s got it all.”
The similarity wasn’t lost on the director Taylor Hackford, who cast him in the role of Tatum in the 2004 biopic “Ray.” In one scene Mr. O’Neal sits onstage at a club, flawlessly carrying off Tatum’s signature downhill sprints and herculean harmonic leaps.
The guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, 43, who has featured Mr. O’Neal as a guest performer at his concerts, considers him “an important figure” for younger players to hear. “My jaw dropped when I heard him play piano — and then my heart dropped when I heard him sing,” Mr. Rosenwinkel said.
After arriving in New York in 1980, he played in the bands of old masters like Art Blakey, Milt Jackson and Clark Terry. When Mr. O’Neal opened for Peterson at Carnegie Hall in 1985, it felt like a passing of the mantle. But the next year he was attacked and decided to leave New York. He spent the next quarter century playing mostly in Atlanta, Detroit and St. Louis, touring and skirting the spotlight.
But leaving New York only partly explains why he might have fallen out of the public eye. There is his self-professed identity as a bisexual man in jazz, where a boys-club, soft-discrimination ethic has always dogged gay musicians. Still, as Mr. O’Neal points out, “You’d be surprised by some of the famous jazz musicians that were gay.”
His unrepentant classicism probably didn’t help either: Even during the late 1980s and ’90s, when jazz went through a period of neo-traditionalist revival, the musicians who succeeded were those able to give old repertory the sheen of the new. Mr. O’Neal was never much of a composer or conceptualist. He comes across as a perfectly preserved artifact — in disposition as well as performance.
He was living in Detroit in 1998 when he contracted H.I.V. In 2009 he lost his insurance and stopped receiving medication. Untreated, his illness worsened rapidly, and by the time he returned to New York a year later, he had lost over 100 pounds.
Yet during his time away he discovered that his gustily radiant blues singing was as appealing to audiences as his piano playing. “The audience is where I get my energy,” Mr. O’Neal said. “I’m a piano player first, but they tend to love the singing. Part of my drawing power is just me singing the blues.”
In the last few years, with help from a close circle of friends, Mr. O’Neal, who lives in Yonkers, has fought back to health. He’s regained more than 40 pounds, and the virus is now undetectable in blood tests. His gigs today attract young singers and pianists who come to learn from a master; some have become his students.
“When he first started hanging at Smalls, he’d just sit at the piano and play, and there’d be about 10 piano players gathered about him,” said Spike Wilner, the club’s owner and a pianist himself. “Everyone was scared to death to play,” he said. “He would look around and he’d say, ‘All right, you play something!’ and it’d be, ‘No, I don’t want to play.’ ” Eventually someone would be coaxed to try.
Last year Mr. Wilner organized a recording session at one of Mr. O’Neal’s gigs. It became “Live at Smalls,” which was released on the club’s SmallsLive label.
On the unaccompanied ballad “Goodbye,” his sprinkled arpeggios and peripatetic left hand turn the tune’s minor harmonies into an affirmation. Throughout the album, his touch is at once flickeringly percussive and caressingly tender. At one point during “Blues for Sale,” you hear him react after his right hand loses the tempo: “Uhh, ahh, bear with me!” You can feel the support echoing back from the crowd — something rarely achieved on record.
Mr. O’Neal has a few unrealized goals. He would like to play at a show with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and to have a weeklong run at the Village Vanguard. He hopes to find greater financial stability. But he has accepted that big rewards come in small rooms, low pay and all.
During a recent show at Smoke, Mr. O’Neal finished playing a ballad and glanced toward the bar. About a dozen younger pianists and singers had congregated to watch him perform, and hopefully to sit in. There wasn’t time for all of them to take a turn onstage, but they knew he would be there next week, playing a new set of standards and telling different jokes with the same doe-eyed affect. Most of them would be there, too, lined up along the bar, learning by ear.
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