Month: June 2018

Yes, this was supposed to be about my journey back to writing, but I’m already going to change it to my journey back to just plain being creative. Whether that manifests as learning katas and using the movements to channel and grow creative chi, writing posts of random thoughts, actually preparing “Jim” for submission, new fiction *gasp*, or like the last few days… practicing a little piano.

Ronja would play the melody on one keyboard, and maybe some drum beats. I’d jump around doing the horns on another, and maybe bass and background vocals on a third. We’d take turns being keyboard, horns or rhythm sections. Other times she’d let me try improvisation. She’d play some sequence of chords on one keyboard, while I’d do little runs using 3-4 notes, graduating to a pentatonic scale up and down another keyboard. I have two or 3 videos of my fetal attempts at improvisation. Nothing amazing, but they are fun to watch if for no other reason that you see two people having fun. I made funny faces when I messed up, but just laughed and kept going. That’s jazz, as Thelonious Monk said, “There are no wrong notes, some are just more right than others.”

Taking lessons at a music school in a practice room with 3-4 keyboards and sometimes other instruments is one of the reasons finding an instructor now is hard. I’m not sure sitting at a lone acoustic piano would be as fun. Granted 75% of the time it was just me sitting at the piano and her in the usual teacher’s chair next to me. But the times we let loose little and she’d play one of the other keyboards playing horns or whatever, and we just tried stuff out were some of the best lessons. It really helped to understand some of the music theory concepts. Why are the horns doing x chord progression, against the melody? What part is the bass filling in, that the keyboard or pianist doesn’t have to play?

Also music schools like Modern Music School (MMS), often have a “band concert” 2-3 times a year. They throw together a few students and find songs where no one has anything to difficult to play. My was a bunch of super beginner adults. Many of the kids, now teenagers, had been playing together for years and were really good. Composing their own songs and shit. My band, “Not My Tempo,” consisted of me on the keyboards, a drummer who had less than months of lessons, a guitarist who never learned the song, and thankfully, a decent singer. We met once a week for 4-6 weeks in addition to our lessons. The night of the concert we knew our guitarist was going to be iffy, so Ronja’s husband rounded out the band and played bass for us.

We didn’t sound very good. Someone turned my keyboard volume down during sound check, so if you were in the audience, good chance you didn’t even hear me. BUT it was so much fun. I was mouthing the chord changes to the guitar player, since he kept missing them, but again FUN. Plus I learned it is much easier to stay in time with a drummer, even if his timing slows and quickens, than it is to stay with a metronome. Fortunately, there was a soundboard and the event was recorded. Maybe no one more than 2 rows back heard me, but on the DVD you hear me.

Anyway, why am I posting this. Well, I fell for the Simply Piano advert, thinking at least I’ll start practicing, again. Even though I am a patreon and YouTube subscriber to Bill Hilton’s tutorials I’ve fallen WAY behind. I think he’s on beginner lesson 24, and I’m on like lesson 5. Great vids, but I haven’t kept up. This cheesy piano app has segments that are 5min or less. Shit, I can do 5minutes. Even my YouTube/Patreon “instructor” only asks that you do 20minutes a day. Poor Ronja had to deal with my lack of practicing for weeks. She fortunately was not threatened by my YouTube instructor, but instead happily incorporated his jazz inprov ideas into my lessons.

Ronja was technically a vocal coach. After the first year another good instructor Song was leaving and Ronja filled in until the new teacher came on. We just hit it off so well. She became a great friend, part-time therapist (half kidding), and mentor. Although, I think the mentoring went both ways at times. I helped her with ideas on how to promote her band, and some career advice. She listened to me laugh and bitch at a time when I had almost zero local friends in California. We spent the first 10 sometimes 20min or so just chatting. Then next 30-40 working on songs and playing, then often the last 10-15min we geeked out over music theory.

I was into jazz, but she was not only a trained vocalist, but like many music instructors, had trained for years in classical piano. I was in no fear of going beyond her piano teaching ability any time soon. Even with my lack of discipline, and weird music tastes, she was just happy to be teaching songs that weren’t the latest Disney theme. We worked on songs from an “easy swing” book I bought that included Count Basie tunes.

When I said I wanted to learn “Linus and Lucy,” which was way above my ability, she agreed as long as I understood it may not sound like anything for many months. I worked on it in addition to my easier pieces. Only took a few weeks before I could play the first 8 bars at about 40% tempo. A few more weeks, it was still slow, but people could tell what song I was at least attempting to play.

Then I introduced her to Thelonious Monk. I found an easy arrangement of “Well You Needn’t” that I’m still hammering away at. Before we moved and I stopped practicing for months, the song was passable. The best thing about jazz, and this song in particular, was how much fun it was to pick apart and look at the music theory behind it. Ronja is a big music theory geek. Unlike any of my other instructors she gave music theory some application. She show how it fit into the pop songs on the radio, the jazz tunes I was learning to play. Sometimes I’d send her a video of Thelonious Monk playing. She’s take time to look at it and even thought it was not something I could play, but we could watch what chord progressions he used and pick apart the music theory behind his choices. This for me was super interesting, and made me love not trying to play pian, but love trying to understand jazz and theory.

It’s going to be super hard to find an instructor and a school with all the same advantages. The few instructors I’ve found are into “Church music” and classical. None seem like they are going to be into jazz, or able to make theory fun. I can’t afford lessons right now, and as someone said, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Let’s just hope Simple Piano app will make sure I’m ready.

My point? It’s hard to start writing, again. It’s hard to start playing the piano, again. Sometimes just letting yourself be creative is hard. You just have to get through the hard, and look for the fun. If was fun once, the fun will return. It’s probably just self-created fear.

Pay the thunder no mind – listen to the birds.
~ Eubie Blake

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say.
~ Maya Angelou