Irving Fields

Irving Fields was one of the last of his generation of active musicians; trained in the prime years of Tin Pan Alley and classic American popular music before World War II, he could be found still playing piano regularly in New York at the start of the new millennium. Born in August 1915, Fields grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and, after a stint as a child actor in Yiddish theater, became part of the generation that followed New Yorkers like Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, George Gershwin, and their contemporaries into music. At age 15, he won first prize playing piano ...