Well hiatus, brief post, hiatus, delay, lockdown, avoidance… perhaps time to get the blog going again..
A few things happening which I am quite excited about, new teaching, new job, new house, new bands… but lets start with a focus…
During lockdown there were lots of difficult things we had to face, which I am going to totally avoid talking about here. But there were also some moments of pure joy (for me and I hope for others too!) And one of these, which is still going strong for me is this:
I got a piano! A real live piano, that actually works and plays the right notes when you press the keys. The notes also stop when you lift your fingers and they are actually tuned to a semblance of the right sound. This small thing is making such a difference to my musical life. The ability to potter, to play, to do scales and work my fingers around the notes. To bash out chords, and to do all this on a real instrument.
Keyboards just don’t cut it. No matter how responsive, how amazing the samples they use, they just aren’t real. They don’t create real vibrations of wood and metal on a form that you can feel in the room. It doesn’t matter that I’m no great shakes at the piano, for me there is never and has never been a temptation to pootle around on the keys of my (quite nice) electric piano keyboard, that has been sitting in my studio for the past 10 or 20 even years. It just isn’t a joyful thing to work with. However even my cheap, budget, small, slightly creaky new instrument pulls me almost every day to work and play, and practice.
Its great!
Every home should have one. You don’t know you need one until it is there. If you can’t play then try, and if you still can’t, get somebody else to come and play it for you!
So now I have this truly mediocre but wonderfully joyful instrument what next….
One thing I have discovered is that I am very bad at learning new things. I have a great repertoire of about twenty or so classical pieces that I can play through pretty well. I learnt them as a teenager and they have stuck with me. Done me proud in fact. The problem is learning new things… my fingers lack the musical memory to learn new fingerings, lack the coordination to synchronise their motion whilst I curmudgeonly clamber through the notation. Its frustrating to be limited in this way. To see my weaknesses as a musical learner. I’ve been working at a short piece of quite elementary Bach for about a month now, and I can just about get through it (with a strong following wind that is). But actually for me that is enough. Actually 20 or so pieces is enough to keep my interest at the moment. Enough of a repertoire that I always need to tinker and perfect, practise and improve.
Whats next then? Well apart from perpetually cycling through this limited repertoire of music I do have some aims. Jazz voicing has always eluded me, along with any real competence at playing in a jazz style. Yes I’ve had good enough chops to hash through a rehearsal with my improvising pupils. Yes I can do a rather bland walking bass, and thrash out some syncopated chords in the right hand, but I’ve never really applied myself to being able to play what I would describe as real ‘jazz piano’.
There was a long journey back from a gig the other night, where a band compatriot inflicted a jazz piano podcast upon me. It wasn’t fun listening to the instructional… just play this mode over this chord and it sounds… totally awesome because you are actually quite good…
Anyhow… some kind of jazz journey, working out what I can do on this instrument could be quite exciting…. Expect updates soon.
(or perhaps another hiatus…)
Musical Adventures 