Dante de Blasio Is Off Vocal Rest
The New Yorker · Jane Bua ·
As a newborn, the son of the former mayor won free music lessons for life at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music—and then he quit. Now he’s finding his way back to the notes. Jane Bua reports.
“I was extremely punctual,” de Blasio said the other day, standing by a Knabe piano in the center of a Park Slope loft. “I think it was, like, 12:30 A.M.”
De Blasio, now twenty-nine and six feet three, was setting up for a fund-raiser he’d organized to give back to the Conservatory. It had come about largely out of guilt. “I started taking lessons around age eight, I think—I’ll have to ask my dad,” he said. “I just remember the rage. I was very stubborn and had no musical talent.” (His father, the former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, clarified: “He was positively sour.”) Among piano, guitar, and singing, piano was the worst. “It was the social element,” Dante said. “I did not like being told what to do.” He quit after less than a year.
Time passed, and other pursuits prevailed—debate at Brooklyn Tech (“Teen-agers screaming at each other”), political science at Yale (because of Dad? “God, no”), soccer (“My left knee is busted”). Occasionally, de Blasio felt a musical itch. “There’s a Steinway piano at Gracie Mansion, so I tried to teach myself to play it during the pandemic,” he said. He used a German music app called Flowkey. “I didn’t keep up with it,” he said, as guests streamed into the loft and looked around.
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