Truck fires and post-bop piano

Last Friday, Mrs. S and I headed to Birmingham one more time to see our last “popular music” concert of the year, called “Tao: The Art of the Drum”. We’d had our usual tough week, along with Mrs. S being in an accident (she’s fine, car’s not) and having to pay a towing fine when she went to lunch one day with the ladies. The thought was, a little watching of some smallish Japanese guys and girls beating the crap out of some big old drums would be good therapy. Although the previous week, we were lukewarm about this concert, by Friday evening, we were both looking forward to the show. We got in the car about one hour and forty five minutes before show time to make the hour and twenty minute (good conditions, hour and thirty average conditions) drive.

About twenty minutes from our house, traffic slowed to a crawl for an accident, but it was smallish and off to the side and after about two minutes, we were rolling full speed again. After about another twenty minutes, we came to another traffic jam. We could see police car lights maybe half a mile ahead of us, and not much else. Traffic was totally stopped. Neither lane was moving, not even creeping. As in “parked”. It also happened to be a part of the highway over a gorge, with the four lanes split into two, two-lane highways by a drainage ditch and a 25-foot high embankment. There was a cliff to the right. No going forward, left, right or back. So we stopped. And I shut off the engine, and we waited. After about 50 minutes, we finally started moving again. Eventually, we crawled past a truck that looked like it had burned out its load. There were two fire trucks on hand, too, so there’s was definitely a fire of some type. At that point, we were still close to an hour away from Birmingham, with about five minutes to go until the show started. We turned around and headed home at the next exit.

What does that have to do with anything jazz? Well, I was thinking about writing about the truck fire just the other day, but I wanted to have my Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra entry play lead fiddle on my blog just a little longer. Yesterday evening, however, as I looked around for inspiration to start writing the missed concert story, something caught my eye. Keep in mind, since I haven’t reclaimed the dining room by getting rid of my forlorn square grand piano, I have stuff strewn everywhere in my work room. Here’s what caught my eye:

Hello, little red book. What are you doing under there?

That fire truck red book on the bottom of the pile is a really good jazz piano book, one that I haven’t played out of in ages, Post-Bop Jazz Piano by the Hal Leonard Corporation. And as it peeked out at me, it gave me a really great idea: What would happen to my piano skills if I worked exclusively with this book, and maybe just a few tunes now and then, until I worked my way through the entire book? Would I get good? Would my jazz idioms impress instead of depress? Would I be able to play like Chick Corea? It’s an interesting proposition. I don’t think I’ve ever played through one piano instruction book exclusively before. I have worked all the exercises in Hanon, but that didn’t help nearly as much as I hoped. I know this book has good stuff in it. There might be some value in just playing “in the style” that the book purports to teach. It might even be enough to keep me working at it.

My brain immediately fought to quell this idea. You’ll work through the book, you’ll only get a little better, then you’ll be done with that book. Then what? But I already had the answer: I own two more books in that series, and there’s probably another dozen books in that series that I could own. It might be worth a shot. My piano instructor and I actually worked from this book a few times. And if I get good at working through books, there’s more and more of them to work through. Plus, I can gauge how long it take me to work through one of these things, then see if I can get any faster with the next ones. Anyway, how could I not get better working through an instructional book? Bottom line is, I haven’t had a clear idea of what or how to practice since I stopped studying at UAH. This is a method I’ve never tried before, so it might work. I mean, really, it’s not a bad idea.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Stay tuned.