Pianist Charlap returns to stage

On Saturday, four months and 10 days since his last public performance, Grammy-winning jazz pianist Bill Charlap came out to play.

It was the torrid start of a July heat wave, and though he knew the club where he was headed to in the Pennsylvania hamlet of Delaware Water Gap would not be air-conditioned as a precaution against viral transmission, he packed a dark blue Zegna suit into the back seat of his Nissan Rogue.

"The people I always looked up to dressed well," he said. "Performing is a time of honor. It's a dignified thing. We dignify each other."

But in these times, to perform at all will require substantial adaptations, ones that keep the audience sparse and distant and possibly alter that alchemic connection between artist and listener that the best shows create.

Charlap, 53, is the son of two professional musicians — theater and film composer Moose Charlap and standards singer Sandy Stewart — and has been playing professionally since he was a student at the High School of the Performing Arts in Manhattan. For more than 20 years, he has led one of the top trios in jazz, and he has collaborated with the likes of Diana Krall and Tony Bennett (on their 2018 duet recording "Our Love is Here to Stay"). Like so many performers, Charlap had no idea when he sounded the last notes on March 8 at a jazz festival in Laramie, Wyo., that he was about to endure the indignity of extended, forced idleness.

In late June, the pianist got a job offer from Bob Mancuso, one of the owners of the Deer Head Inn, a rambling 19th-century country hotel with mansard roofs, perched on a hillside overlooking Main Street in Delaware Water Gap, which sits within walking distance of a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. The inn's first floor bar and restaurant has featured jazz since 1950, leading owners to dub the Deer Head "the longest...