The Audition

Before reading this entry, it would be good if you read the first part. (This entry won’t not make sense, but it will lose some of its impact if the two episodes are read out of order.)

Come Thursday, and my company begins the process of laying people off. Since I work in HR, that fills up my half day so that it just whizzed by and I didn’t have fifteen seconds to think about my audition. But, I did take care of everything I needed to take care of and I did leave on time, stopping to buy some stuff for lunch. After eating lunch, I went straight to the piano and began practicing.

I got out a recording of Thelonious Monk playing Duke Ellington and worked on It Don’t Mean a Thing. I improved it a lot in the thirty minutes I spent on it. I went over and over the back end to get my timing down, and I played the chromatic bass line chords to eradicate some less useful chords that were still in muscle memory that I no longer wanted to use. It tightened up a bit, but I left it a little ragged. I figured I didn’t want to sound above my actual level of skill at the audition, as if that might be an issue. I decided I would not play A Child is Born, because that requires some pedal and light keyboard work, and I wasn’t sure what quality of piano I was going to have to play on. I decided a rough version of Bewitched would do for the ballad, and I just played it through a few times to freshen it up. Then, I worked on Blue Monk. Over and over. Again, I smoothed it a little, but not enough to impress anyone. And again, that would give a better indication of my actual playing level.

So I drive over to the audition, and the jazz ensemble director is there waiting for me. He recognizes me right away (we’d met before), and we chat briefly as we make our way to the practice room. If the following is read at normal speed, it will very closely approximate the beginning of the actual audition:

Him: So, I couldn’t find any jazz music books, other than this mini-book of chord changes, so I’m not sure if you...
Me: Well, I brought my Real Book.
Him: Okay, Real Book. Great. That’s even better. Turn to Blue Bossa. (!) Do you know it?
Me: Actually, my instructor and I looked at it last night, but that was the first time I’d ever tried to play it and I didn’t even glance at it after the ...
Him: That’s good. Here we go, 1, 2, ah 1, 2, 3, 4...

And he started playing it, strumming away on his guitar, just like that. Ten seconds we’d been in the room, and I’m bashing out a semblance of a tune on the piano. I sounded terrible, but for the most part, I kept up. What I played in the right hand was more or less what it needed to be. What I played in the left hand were chords that vaguely followed the printed page. I was still able, however, to assemble everything together at the ending C-minor. He said he liked my chording, but he then proceeded to tell me a bunch of ways to “jazz them up”. He also then had me improvise to the chord without playing them, which I actually did pretty well with. Ten minutes, and the audition was over.

The long and short of it is, because I’m not enrolled as a regular music student, I get last choice of classes. The ensemble director told me that I was not good enough for the advanced ensemble on Thursday, but he might be able to fit me into the Wednesday ensemble, depending on whether there was already a piano player in that group or not.