The church’s soup kitchen program fills quickly, bringing a din of chitchat and the scraping of chairs on floor tiles and the thud of trays being knocked against the inside of a trash can.

But above it all, each and every weekday, hovers another sound, wholly unexpected: the clear, clean notes of a concert grand piano, there in a far corner.

On a recent Wednesday, like every Wednesday, it is not so much being played as it is being worked over by a man who seems to be warming up for a gig at a candlelit downtown jazz club.

Read more and see a video At a Manhattan Soup Kitchen, Food on the Table and Chops on the Piano – NYTimes.com.