Jane Jarvis made music for the New York Mets

Published 4:00 am Sunday, January 31, 2010

Jane Jarvis, who brought a jazz sensibility to unlikely places as an organist for the New York Mets and a programmer for Muzak, died Monday at the Lillian Booth Actors’ Home in Englewood, N.J. She was 94.

Jarvis’ career was bracketed by jazz, which she considered her first love: She formed a jazz band in her native Indiana as a teenager, and she worked steadily as a jazz pianist, mostly in New York, from her mid-60s into her 90s. But for more than two decades she was best known as a ballpark organist.

After eight years playing for the Braves at County Stadium in Milwaukee, she was a fixture at Shea Stadium from 1964 to 1979, performing a repertory that mixed jazz staples like Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From the Apple” with more conventional fare like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Few Mets fans knew that Jarvis had begun her career as a jazz pianist. Even fewer knew that she had a day job with the Muzak Corp.

Muzak was synonymous with soothing sounds piped into elevators when Jarvis was hired for a clerical job there in 1963, not long after she moved to New York and roughly a year before she joined the Mets.

She worked her way up to vice president in charge of programming and recording. She then hired Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry and other jazz musicians. The result was canned music considerably more swinging than the Muzak norm.