Derek Paravicini's Extraordinary Gift

There are some people we meet in our "60 Minutes" stories who we just can't let go, whose next chapter we're almost compelled to follow.

Like Derek Paravicini, a masterful musician who is blind, with disabilities so severe he can't tell his right hand from his left or hold anything but the simplest of conversations.

"60 Minutes" and correspondent Lesley Stahl started following Derek because of his gift at the piano, but it's what he has taught us about relationships, communication and what music is really all about that has kept us coming back.

Full Segment: Derek
Web Extra: "Tick Tick Derek Boogie"
Web Extra: "YMCA" A La Derek
Web Extra: Teaching Derek
Web Extra: Derek & Princess Di
Book Excerpt: In The Key of Genius
Derek Paravicini
Adam Ockelford
Bristol Ensemble
Create Arts

When Derek is playing the piano, it's hard to believe there is anything he can't do, and yet when you meet him away from the keyboard, as we first did in London six years ago, the contrast is shocking.

Derek is a musical savant, blessed with an island of extreme talent in a sea of profound disability.

"Do you know how long you've been playing the piano?" Stahl asked.

"Was it about a year, wasn't it?" Derek asked. "No it wasn't."

Asked if he knows how old he is now, Derek said, "I don't know how old I am, no."

Today Derek is 30. He grew up in an upper class British family, the nephew of Camilla Parker-Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall. But none of that matters much to Derek.

"You gonna have pizza tonight?" Stahl asked.

"Yes, pepperoni!" Derek excitedly replied. "In New York, what do they have? If I come next year, what do they have there?"

Derek was excited to show us the skills that make him so exceptional, the ability to instantly call up any piece of music he's ever heard. Like the Village People's "YMCA" or the show tune "My Favorite Things."

But it isn't just that Derek remembers them: he can transform them effortlessly and seamlessly into the styles of different musicians, like jazz greats.

Asked to change to the style of Oscar Peterson, Derek changed style mid-song, playing "My Favorite Things" Oscar Peterson-style.

He also wowed Stahl by playing the tune in the style of Dave Brubeck.

"It's like he's got libraries of pieces and styles in his head," Adam Ockelford, Derek's teacher, told Stahl. "And he can just whip out a piece book and a style book and just bring them together. It just kind of explodes."

How Derek's fingers can do this but can't button a button or zip a zipper remains a mystery. There are lots of theories about savants, but few real answers.

In Derek's case, the problems started early. He was born more than three months premature, weighing just a pound and a half. He hung on, but was left blind and with severe cognitive impairment. Derek's father, Nic Paravicini, says the first thing that really interested Derek was a small toy keyboard.

"My daughter suddenly said one day, 'He's just played one of the hymns we heard in church this morning," Paravicini remembered.

Derek was three years old at the time.

"And he didn't know, 'cause he couldn't see, and no one had told him, that you're meant to use your fingers to play the piano. So he used karate chops and elbows, and even his nose, I seem to remember," Derek's father told Stahl.

Derek had never met a piano teacher, until he literally crashed into one during a visit with his parents to a school for the blind. The teacher was Ockelford, in the middle of a lesson.

"Suddenly I felt a shove in the back. And he literally pushed me off the piano stool, and just started karate chopping the keyboard," Ockelford remembered. "I thought he was mad, actually, 'cause it was just chaos of notes and hair and elbows but then suddenly I noticed out of all of that was coming 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina.' I thought, 'Crikey, he's not mad at all. He's brilliant.'"

Ockelford phoned Derek's dad and told him he'd like to teach Derek. "It was almost as though Derek, through his pushing me off the stool was saying, 'Help,' you know, he was saying, 'I need.' 'Course he didn't, but, 'I need teaching,'" Ockelford said.

"So it was compassion," Stahl remarked.

"It was compulsion, I think," he replied.

But how to teach a child who couldn't see, didn't understand much, and wouldn't allow anyone to touch his piano?

"Well, he was only tiny. I just picked him up and popped him the other side of the room. And then in the ten seconds I had before he raced back, I could just play [a brief scale]," Ockelford explained. "To get him to copy. And of course by the time I played that, he was back, and pushed me off and copied it [scale] with his karate chops."

Before long, Derek seemed to get it; this was not someone trying to take away his precious piano - this was someone trying to reach him.

"I think suddenly it clicked that he could have a conversation in sound. And suddenly he just blossomed," Ockelford explained.

"So that ability to communicate was revelatory for him?" Stahl asked.

"Absolutely," Ockelford replied. "From all this confusion that he must have experienced as a child, not understanding much language, suddenly here was a language that he could control, he could play with, he could dialogue. All the things that we normally do with words, Derek did with notes."

His progress was astounding. After three years of daily lessons, Derek was invited to play a few songs at a major charity fundraiser.

It was there that Ockelford first saw the thrill Derek got from performing and from feeling the love of the crowd.

"When you're on a big stage, the applause hits you like a wave. And Derek just jumped off of his piano stool. He was trembling with excitement and elation, that people are reacting to his playing," Ockelford remembered.

And he has been performing ever since - in jazz halls, at benefits, in churches, connecting with audiences in ways most musicians wouldn't dare: taking requests, with a twist.

He'll ask an audience member to selects a song - then let a second audience member choose what key he'll play it in - and then let a third select a style.

At one event, Derek was asked to play "Ain't No Sunshine" in B major in ragtime style. He executed it perfectly, delighting his audience.

Remember, he had no idea what song would be chosen - no rehearsal, new key and new style. It was no problem.

"It's breathtaking to watch. Think about all the thinking almost anyone else would have to go through," Stahl remarked.

"It's like having three computers all working at once and you could just put them together straightaway, without thinking," Ockelford replied.

"Sometimes when he's playing, he smiles. Is that really him enjoying what he's doing?" Stahl asked.

"Yeah. Sometimes he does something quite funny musically. You can see a little sparkle," Ockelford said. "I think he's actually quite pleased with himself what he comes up with."

Nic Paravicini says Derek "absolutely loves" people. "And then he wants to know when he's gonna meet them again," he explained,

"And it's rather engaging, 'cause he always operates in the same way. He will put his hand out…because he doesn't know where the other person's hand is gonna come from. And he'll say, 'I'm Derek,'" he added.

"I remember once coming out of church. And we had the Archbishop of Canterbury there," Paravicini remembered. "And I said, 'You're gonna now meet the Archbishop of Canterbury.' Of course Derek said, 'Hello. I'm Derek. Hello, Archbishop of Canterbury!' It's very engaging, though. Of course, the Archbishop loved it."

"Derek's an extraordinarily warm person. To be honest, if he was just a musical computer, he wouldn't be that interesting. But his real love is actually people. And music is his way to get to people," Ockelford said.

And music is his way to help people.

"Now I understand that he's actually begun to work with older people," Stahl remarked.

"As people get older and they start to lose some memories and language, music remains. Music's the first thing to develop. Before you're born, you're musical, way before language. And it's the last thing…to go. And of course, Derek, like this super juke box, can tap into whatever they want. Sometimes people that haven't spoken for a year will start to sing. It's fantastic," Ockelford explained.

Derek has also given charitable concerts throughout his life that have raised in the millions.

"They say good comes out of bad. Well, it certainly has in Derek's case. Without knowing it, he's done more good than most of us will ever do," Derek's dad Nic told Stahl.

Twenty five years after Derek shoved him off his piano stool, Ockelford continues to work with Derek weekly. He's written a book about him, helped him put out a CD, tried to give him all the opportunities he'd have as an artist were it not for his disabilities.

Last year, Ockelford felt Derek was ready to do something that once seemed unimaginable: to headline his own full-length concert, with an orchestra, on a major London stage. It was a sell-out crowd.

The featured piece in the performance was Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," a challenging piece for any pianist, not to mention one who is blind and needs to handle intricate back and forths with the orchestra without the benefit of seeing the conductor.

"You could almost physically sense the connection between him and the orchestra and the audience. The immense musicality and the power of his musical communication was just fantastic," Ockelford said.

Asked if he thinks Derek is aware of that, Ockelford said, "I think Derek's learning about emotion through music, which, of course, is the reverse way around for most of us."

And as we have discovered with Derek, there's always something more. During one performance, he was performer, and with a little help from the audience, a composer.

Derek offered to create an original piece of music on the spot from three notes called out at random by members of the audience.

"So we've got C, B flat, F sharp," Ockelford told Derek, playing the three notes. "Can you do a blues on that?"

"I can do a blues on that!" Derek said, playing away.

"He's really improvising, and he's truly creative?" Stahl asked. "I mean, because you think of people with brain disorders, that there's a lot of rote involved."

"Derek undoubtedly is improvising and truly creative. What's happened in the last five or six years is that his authentic voice has come through," Ockelford explained.

"It's almost a signature. You know it's Derek," Stahl remarked.

"He's a power, he's a insistent communicator. You can't not listen when Derek's playing. There's something about his playing," Ockelford said.

"Did you used to think that Derek was gonna plateau?" Stahl asked Derek's father.
"That was something we were told. But it hasn't happened, and it won't happen now, because he keeps progressing both musically and socially, and I think that will continue. No plateaus," Paravicini replied with a smile.

And before leaving Derek, we had a request for our own encore - something he'd compose just for "60 Minutes."

"What if we called it the "Tick Tick Tick Derek Boogie?" Stahl asked.

We played for Derek the "tick tick tick" stopwatch sound that follows every "60 Minutes" story, and Derek composed an accompanying boogie on the spot - "60 Minutes" never sounded so good.

Produced by Shari Finkelstein