Late to Jazz

Serendipity

2012-01-28T14:45:00.002-06:00

If it hasn't already been written, someday I'm going to write a song called "Serendipity". It's going to be about the things that happen coincidentally, unexpectedly, or, just happen to be interesting. You know, those things that happen in a life, like jazz, or interesting odometer readings when you aren't moving and have time to take a picture. Like this one:

Serendipity: Odometer reading in mid-December on our 2006 Pontiac Vibe, just before I traded it back to Mrs. S for the 2009 Vibe with satellite radio.

Oh, and hello to everyone back in Cleveland. Dig that outside temp in mid December!

When jazz isn’t enough

2012-01-22T10:01:00.000-06:00

Last week, I had the privilege to hear Bela Fleck perform his Concerto for Banjo with Orchestra, only the second performance ever of this piece which debuted last year. Now, banjo is certainly not my favorite instrument in the whole world. In fact, if not for the steel guitar, it might well be my least favorite instrument. But Fleck is a blues-minded bluegrass guy with a decided bent toward and numerous accomplishments in the world of jazz, so I figured, why not go and listen to him play with an orchestra?

This turned out to be quite fortuitous, as I also got to hear a piece by Puts that was reminiscent of Smetana and a strings only piece that was so highly original, ethereal, and charming, it wasn’t reminiscent of any other piece I’ve ever heard. Then came the concerto. I really enjoyed it. I won’t bother to describe the piece (such things never quite doing justice to a piece of music you know probably 98% of your readers have never heard – and besides, one can Google it and get a rundown on it elsewhere), but I will say this: for something that was only performed once before, and to play it without sheet music (as Fleck did), even given the fact that as the writer of the piece you expect him to know it as well or better than anyone, Fleck’s mastery of the concerto and his instrument was beyond phenomenal. Even Mrs. S felt that last Thursday’s concert was probably the best concert we’ve been to this season, with the only possible exception being the New York Phil’s concerts.

Which makes me thankful that for a guy like Fleck: jazz, or bluegrass, or whatever he’s considered mainstream in, isn’t enough. It brings me opportunities to experience music I would otherwise never have experienced. Heck, I might even buy one of his creepy jazz banjo CD’s. (Maybe, someday.)

And for those of you tuning in to learn about my antique piano restoration project, I wish to formally announce that I have abandoned said project, as I have become convinced that piano will never be playable as it sits in my dining room today. I’m in the process of trying to sell the beast and am hopeful to have it gone soon. Should I be unable to sell it, I fully intent to gut it and make a bar out of it. (Yes, a piano bar.) Hopefully, a motivated buyer will save me from the ignominy of that arduosity. We’ll see.

New York Jazz Club Reviews - Part 4

2011-12-24T06:58:00.003-06:00

Birdland – On our last day in New York, Friday December 9, it seemed that our chances of catching the late show at Village Vanguard to see and hear Bill Frisell was not going to work out. It was far away from where we were, and the guy taking our reservation couldn’t spell Sedensky to save his life. Since Birdland was close to where I was going to be and the thought was that Mrs. S would get out of her concert early enough to make time to get to the jazz venue, that’s what we reserved. Dinner was far more of a challenge. With the concert and musical to break up the evening, we didn’t really want to do a heavy dinner late, so we were leaning toward a light dinner early. Unfortunately, 3:30 on Friday afternoon is not the best time to be making reservations for 5:00 on that Friday evening. Faced with no choice and a long walk to the theater, I convinced Mrs. S to just walk down the street and see what we could find. We found a decent sushi place and ate sushi then headed to the concert/musical. Mine was a lot farther away and I had to navigate Times Square, and, stupid, I went looking for where Birdland was before I realized, I needed to get to the theater. I made it with enough time to go to the restroom and find my seat just as the lights were going down. It was great seeing Brooke Shields in The Addams Family musical, even with the drunk lady in the front row ruining the show. (Amazing that a house filled with families of small children was besieged and disturbed by a 50-year old drunk woman. Mercifully, they kicked her out at intermission.) After the musical ended, I headed straight out, made my way the two blocks over and one block down, and arrived at Birdland to find, they didn’t have my reservation. Fortunately, there were plenty of tables and I was quite early, plus it wasn’t that crowded, so I got a prime rail-side table overlooking the front row tables, right behind the piano. Mrs. S showed up after I was halfway through my first beer, and we ordered up beer and wine and sliders:

That's Brooklyn Lager, the best beer I had in NYC, and don't those sliders look scrumptious!

We then settled in to hear the Frank Wess Quintet play one set. I’d never heard of this guy, but they played mostly originals and everything was good. I would say, however, that the show was too expensive ($20 to see Frank Wess, which would have been $40 if we didn't get half price for having a Broadway show ticket stub - Bill Frisell, by comparison, was just $25 at the Village Vanguard) and they only played one short (hour and ten minutes) set.

The Frank Wess Quintet lights up Birdland.

‘Course old Frank turned 90 years old that week, so, we didn’t complain. At least he didn’t die on stage. Unlike the Blue Note, Birdland I would do again, as long as the performer was somebody I wanted to see.

New York Jazz Club Reviews - Part 3

2011-12-22T16:12:00.001-06:00

Cleopatra’s Needle – This club was recommended to us by my contact at McGraw-Hill, where I review business books for them. (You can check out my blog at businessbooklook.blogspot.com.) She sent me three possibilities, and while Mrs. S was at her concert on Thursday, only staying for the Joshua Bell portion, she told me to pick a restaurant/Jazz club and make the reservations. The plan was for me to meet her at intermission and we would then go to the club for dinner and music. While any of the clubs would probably have been fine, I went for the one that was most convenient to the subway where we’d be and that looked casual and relaxing. (Seriously, who would go to a jazz club that makes you wear a jacket?) It turned out to be an inspired choice. First of all, Mrs. S and I had been talking about getting Greek food while we were in NY. Of course, we don’t have any ideas about where any Greek restaurants are, much less whether they are any good or not. But when we sat down at our comfortable, window-side corner table, the first thing Mrs. S noticed was the menu said “Mediterranean Cuisine”. Jackpot! Turns out the place is authentic and run by an Egyptian who’d been there a number of years and is a jazz fanatic. They had a full bar, intimate but not overcrowded tables, and a piano trio playing there. We ordered up Moussaka and Kofta Kebab and Tambouleh, with a bottle of decent red wine and the best damned baklava on this continent. Here's me and the food:

Clockwise from closest dish to me: Kofta Kebab, Tambouleh, Moussaka (kind of cut off).

The music was great, very vibrant and close. The pianist was an older guy and the drummer and bassist were two younger guys, and I assume Burt Eckoff is the piano player, as that was the name of the trio. They kept it swinging.

The Burt Eckoff Trio at Cleopatra's Needle.

The food was wonderful, probably as good a Mediterranean as you could get anywhere in New York. In many ways, our time at Cleo’s was one of the best, and the meal was one of the best, making this a sure highlight of our trip. It helped that we had good weather that day but regardless, we would definitely go back there any time.

New York Jazz Club Reviews - Interlude

2011-12-21T16:37:00.003-06:00

Interlude: Bella Hristova and Anna Polonsky – October 20, 2011

On our second night in New York, we attended the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance featuring Joshua Bell as soloist on a Tchaikovsky concerto, along with a short piece about Fireworks and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”. The Stravinsky was definitely the highlight for me, but in any event, I’ve written enough about Joshua Bell’s concerts that for the second entry in the New York series, I’m going to write about a recital we attended in Birmingham in October instead.

It featured a young Bulgarian (since naturalized, I believe) violinist named Bella Hristova. She’s something like 23, but she had really good command of her violin (even though it did slip a string on her, causing the recital to pause briefly while she adjusted it). Her accompanist, Anna Polonsky, is Russian and a quite capable, dynamic pianist. The program was unremarkable, but I remember that I really enjoyed the piece Bella played solo, which was commissioned specifically for her. It was quite captivating. I’d never really been to a recital where I wasn’t playing, other than one jazz trumpet recital I attended at UAH, so this was quite a good, and new, experience for me.

Though both the young ladies looked quite statuesque on stage from our front row seats, at the meet and greet afterwards, they turned out to be rather petite. During the meet and greet, Bella was kept quite busy, but Anna and her page turner were by themselves at the fruit bowl, so I went over there and talked to them for about ten minutes. Anna’s English is strained in places, but she was quite patient with me as we talked about the value of page turners, practice time, and repertoire. She was also nice enough to let an old creepy guy, me, take a picture with her.

Eric and Anna Polonsky

I finally noticed that Mrs. S had gotten Bella to sign her CD for us, which was a natural, as we were the only ones who bothered to bring her (only published) CD. We chatted a little bit and then she let me take a picture with her, too.

Eric and Bella Hristova

New York was much more exciting, I admit. The Stravinsky was really a revelation for my now well-tuned jazz ears, plus the orchestra was really on top of that one. It was a great experience to hear such a famous and world class orchestra perform, but from there on out, it would be jazz on our last two nights in the Big Apple.

New York Jazz Club Reviews - Part 2

2011-12-20T19:12:00.000-06:00

Blue Note – Prior to arriving in New York, we toyed with the idea of visiting the Blue Note by attending a concert featuring Manhattan Transfer. Neither Mrs. S nor I, however, are huge MT fans, and the $65 price tag seemed prohibitive. Not to mention, the Blue Note website makes it sound like seating is pretty haphazard, and we didn’t really want our first jazz club experience to be something that we had to leave to chance even while paying through the nose for, so we decided we would just drop in to the club on our first night, time and energy levels allowing, and listen to whatever they had going on that night. Arriving in New York on a Tuesday and with rain coming down steady, we played it conservative and had dinner at a hole in the wall Japanese place first (not really being thrilled with the burger-and-fry fare on the Blue Note menu on their website). Hagi (name of the Japanese place) was tasty and expensive. From there, we managed to figure out how to ride the subway (computers were down, so buying a Metro Card was tricky), but we sorted that out and got to the Blue Note about fifteen minutes before the 8:00 show time.

There was already a pretty good crowd inside, but there were still plenty of seats. Problem was they were spread around and we didn’t have any way of judging which would be good or bad seats. When in doubt, the best seats are usually right in front, so that’s where we went. Mrs. S was right on the main aisle, I ended up across the table from her under the guitar player’s music stand, next to a Russian tourist drinking a nice bottle of red wine by himself (more about that later). I literally had to climb to get to my seat. The picture below shows approximately the kind of view I had, which is to say, the picture shows that I could hardly see much of anything despite sitting in the front row.

$5 minimum?!?! So one martini and I'm good for the night, right? Screw it! Get Chris Botti out here. NOW!

The show was a Christmas gala with a bunch of competent, not-famous musicians. They played some fancy arrangements of familiar tunes, nothing too exciting. We drank wine and enjoyed the show. Funny thing was, one-fourth of the Manhattan Transfer, Janis Siegel, sang one song, so we really made out good getting to see her and not paying $65 for the privilege. (She's the one with big funky glasses if you Google or YouTube "Manhattan Transfer Jeannine". Awesome!)

Ms. Janis Siegel, center, performing "Deck The Halls"

When our wine ran out and the show was winding down, the Russian tourist shared his bottle of wine with us. He was drinking the good stuff: a bottle of something Sicilian, very scintillating on the tongue, smooth on the palate, that left a faint grapey currant wash on the gums. Really stunning and all the more unfortunate that I can't remember what it was called. And more unfortunately, his English was completely non-existent, and my Russian from my college days was only a little better, so we couldn't really chat with the guy. (We did try.) Once we got outside, Mrs. S wanted to take my picture, which is generally a bad idea most of the time, and a terrible idea late at night after I've been drinking. No surprise then we ended up with this "deer in the headlights" shot with the Blue Note as background.

No. I mean, yes. What was the question? Leave me alone!

My conclusion after visiting the club is the Blue Note is the Mount Fuji of jazz clubs: Everyone should definitely visit once, but unless you are a local or there is a real headliner playing there, it’s probably not worth a second trip.

New York Jazz Club Reviews - Part 1

2011-12-19T21:53:00.000-06:00

Our recent trip to New York (December 6-10) was specifically for Mrs. S to (yet again) see violinist Joshua Bell in concert. While she would attend the concert three of the four nights we were to spend there, I was only to attend one concert, being left to my own devices to visit jazz clubs, hang out in bars, or otherwise kill two hours each night while Mrs. S enjoyed the concert. After discussing and planning, however, and considering that one of the highlights of any New York trip will certainly involve food, we decided to move things around a bit, cut short her attendance at one of the concerts, and keep our activities centralized so that we could enjoy the bulk of the activities together. This resulted in us being able to visit three jazz clubs (two of which we also dined at) together, and me being able to see Brooke Shields perform from the second row of a cozy theater (hubba-hubba). To sort of replicate the feel of that week, I will be posting reviews of the clubs over the next four days, in the order and two weeks after the fact of each visit. It should be good. Anyway, here’s Mrs. S and me in front of Macy’s.

We hope you like this photo, because if you’re getting a photo Christmas card from us, this is the shot. (If you’re getting a plain card from us, this is what you’re missing.)

Core Collection – A Picture

2011-11-12T10:35:00.000-06:00

When I first became interested in jazz, I picked up the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings and decided that acquiring the entire core collection – 187 (in that edition, the eighth) “must have” historic jazz recordings – would be the best way to learn about jazz. So I went through the book and made a spreadsheet and then set about finding all the recordings. Some of my efforts over the years have already been documented in this blog. In March of this year, I was able to track down and purchase three very hard to find, pretty expensive CD’s and announced to Mrs. S that I had completed my collection. The next step was to photograph it.

Several times, I stutter-started the project (much like my piano restoration effort), usually giving up due to lack of space, lack of time, or general resistance to the huge effort it would take to lay out that many CD’s so that they would be more or less visible in one photograph. But after the tornadoes rolled through Alabama last April, I’ve sort of been on a mission of getting rid of “stuff”. “Stuff” is nice, don’t get me wrong, but if a tornado blows it all away, you won’t have any “stuff” and you won’t have much of a way of getting it back. So, I thought it prudent to lighten my load. And now that I’m much more mature and knowledgeable about jazz music and my likes and dislikes, I decided that I should sell off the CD’s that I’m never going to listen to. Before that, however, I needed to make a concerted effort to take a picture of the collection as evidence that, at one point in my life, I did in fact have possession of the entire core collection, all at one time. Here’s what it looks like in chronological order:

Me and the core collection: CD's are in chronological order

This was actually the second layout I did, and it’s good that I did, because the first layout was missing three CD’s. This was due to working from a bad list and oversight on my part, but the chronological list was complete and accurate. So, with the initial layout and this one, I was invested for about two hours of my time. Even though I was sweating bullets for all the bending and moving around without stepping on CDs, Mrs. S still talked me into rearranging them once more, to get the original shot that I set out to take: an alphabetical shot with me in the middle of them. So, here’s what it looks like in alphabetical order in five blocks of 36 CD’s, with some sets pulled out so as to not block the view.

Me and the core collection: Alphabetical order

Let me put that picture in perspective now: three years of collecting, three hours of arranging, one photo. This is, I believe, also the first time all the CD’s of the core collection have been photographed together. That is “photographed together” and not “PhotoShopped together”.

Although I am tempted to keep this collection together, simply because of the achievement, but also because I might fancy updating it with the selections from Penguin’s current edition, I believe I have proved all I could hope to prove by assembling this collection, once, and so now, for many of the reasons I mentioned above, I’m comfortable just liquidating this and getting rid of what I don’t want to listen to and trading them for some that maybe I do.

If you fancy you want to have your own core collection, you need to go to amazon.com and ebay right now and buy up the CD’s I’m selling there. Some of them are really hard to find.

Another Night with a Different Jazz Legend

2011-10-16T11:43:00.002-05:00

- and follow up photos from the first night with a jazz legend.

Four months removed from the concert where I saw Herbie Hancock perform and got the chance to meet him, it seems much farther away that it really is. I was recalling that night, as it was the first time I got to see a true jazz legend (Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and Freddie Cole come close, but I wouldn’t consider them “legends” yet) in concert. It was not, however, my last.

On Friday night, Mrs. S and I made our way to Nashville to take in a concert featuring Sonny Rollins. This guy is ten years older than Herbie is, and he blows on a horn, so, yes, some of the edge is gone, but, wow! What a concert.

Here’s the stage set-up:

Schermerhorn Symphony Center stage, October 14, 2011, Nashville TN

He started off with a highly rhythmic original, B & K, moving smoothly into D. Cherry. He plays very solidly, moving around the stage slowly and calculatingly, which was good, because I would not have had a clue what to do if he passed out or, heaven forbid, fell off the stage. Then he took on a true jazz standard, My One and Only Love. That got a great reaction from the crowd, and I was happy to be able to listen to his take on a song I was vaguely familiar with (although I couldn’t think of the name of the tune to save my life). Then he did his trademark Patanjali followed by Nice Lady. Then he played to the crowd a little with Tennessee Waltz, followed by another recognizable standard, They Say It’s Wonderful. He closed out the show with Don’t Stop the Carnival, coming in at just about 90 minutes with no encore. That he played that long was amazing enough.

Sonny’s a truly class act and the music was unbeatable. The bass solo by Bob Cranshaw was one of the most remarkable solos I’ve ever heard, and the drum and conga duet “solo” was stunning. The guitar player was asked to keep one or two of his solos going longer than intended, so they did seem a little rambling at times, but there was nothing at all bad about them. His playing, and that of the entire supporting band’s, was phenomenal.

Unfortunately, as good a shape as Sonny is for his age, there was no autograph session or meet and greet or anything like that. So, here’s a picture of me receiving an autograph from Herbie Hancock back in June:

Herbie Hancock signing Eric's copy of "The Imagine Project"

And here’s me, Herbie and Mrs. S enjoying a group shot.

L to R: Eric, Herbie, Mrs. S (in case there was some doubt)

Yep, I’m late to jazz, but catching up.

Days 92 and 93 – Sunday, September 4 and Monday, September 5 – Good progress

2011-09-06T19:39:00.001-05:00

Goals: Work on it

Music: Doing some tuning, so none.

I did a second coat of acrylic on the mother-of-pearl inlay because the first coat did not come out very even. The second coat didn’t either, because it is basically impossible to get the acrylic even across the board, because it is so long and narrow and because it drips over the edge. I got it pretty close to what it needs to be, and I’m leaving it at that.

Then I got to work on the strings. I had to re-shim about 25 pins, but that’s all I did. I did not mess with bigger pins and whatnot. If a pin was loose, I shimmed it, re-strung the existing string and cleaned it up as best I could, then tuned it. Two days of that, and the strings are completely tunable, and, as of this moment, in tune. That’s as far as I’m going with that.

Next is to get the keys working. I’m very close to settling for a majority of the keys working, as opposed to a fully working piano, so if some keys are stubborn and do not work, there is some chance I may talk myself out of working on them and simply leave them dead in their tracks. I really just want to get the piano looking nice and trade it to somebody for a sweet black lacquered baby grand. There is still an outside chance I will end up with a bar or a desk, if I meet any severe adversity before the end of the project.

Inching closer to completion, and I must say, it feels good – again.

Day 91 – Saturday, Sept. 3 – Because I just can’t put it off any longer

2011-09-04T10:56:00.000-05:00

Goals: Get the artistic stuff on the accent piece finished

Music: Charlie Parker’s “Complete Jazz at Massey Hall” and Complete Verve Master Takes, Discs 1 and 2.

There’s just no getting around it. Whether Mrs. S. cares if we ever get the dining room back or not, I for one am definitely sick of having this piano project hanging over me. I decided not to make excuses and to just get back to work.

Since I didn’t want to tangle with the strings, which is off-putting in general and particularly hard work in specific, I decided to exhilarate my artistic side and work on the mother-of-pearl inlay on the fascia board. I touched up the gold paint, having already done the black paint before the project went into hibernation, and I drew in some leaves and flowers to make it look nice. I poured a layer of clear acrylic over it, and that made a bit of a mess. I shook most of it off and left it to dry.

This morning I checked the board and the acrylic didn’t turn out bad, but it isn’t great either (pretty much like everything on the piano). So, I will try to put a few more touches on the board and then one more coat of acrylic and then we’ll see about the strings.

It’s supposed to rain today, which means I won’t be able to smoke the ribs I prepped, which means I won’t have to spend a ton of time cooking, running back and forth to the grill, etc. So I’ll be cooking in the oven and have plenty of time to work on the piano. Hopefully, I’ll make some genuine progress today.

Top ten reasons why finishing my piano is taking so long

2011-07-17T14:32:00.000-05:00

10) It won't cooperate. Let's face it: even inanimate objects can be a bitch sometimes. This thing goes out of tune if I look at it cross-eyed. It's discouraging.
9) Runner's knee. Had it for four weeks. Doctor says I'm not a five-foot-five, 110-pound Ethiopian and that I need to run in shoes instead of barefoot or flats. Seriously, though, the single most painful activity with runner's knee is standing - the required posture for tuning a square grand.
8) I can't see the end so I'm reluctant to work toward it. I don't know what else to say about that.

I guess there are only three reasons.

Day 90 –Sunday, June 26 – Rain outside, gloom inside

2011-07-03T16:01:00.000-05:00

Goals: Work on it

Music: Doing some tuning, so none.

A bad case of runners knee and cloudy skies and the threat (and actual falling) of rain more or less forced me to work on the piano. A while back when I inserted the keys, I realized that I had some double strings that I had tuned as if they were singles, meaning that my piano was severely under-tuned in the lower register. I set about correcting that. So, to be sure I had everything correct, I started at middle A, which, diligent readers will remember, I tuned to G# to lower the stress on the piano. Unfortunately, I seemed to have miscounted, probably because of the double strings I counted as singles, and what should have been G# was actually at F. Cripes!

So, starting at middle A, I moved everything up so that all the keys would be a half tone flat. That meant tightening everything. That meant finding some pins that couldn’t hold tune because of the increased stress. I wanted to get at least half the keyboard done, but standing up in that awkward posture made my knee start hurting too much, so I wasn’t quite able to do half the keyboard. And at that, I had four strings that were untunable. I might try for a whole tone down to see if that makes life any easier for me. Anyway, I could only work for an hour and half, but that was enough. The piano is getting closer and closer to being a decorative piece and not a musical instrument. I swear if things don’t start going right with it pretty soon, I’m turning the sucker into a bar.

Studying Up

2011-06-15T19:55:00.000-05:00

It’s hard – no, make that impossible – to work on much of anything whenever you get called in to work on the weekend. This happened to me two Sundays ago and last Saturday, so progress on my piano has more or less ground to a halt. Because of my ruined Saturday, Sunday was overly hectic, but I did find time to leaf through and read my piano repair manual and try to figure out what to do with the wippens that are killing about fifteen of the keys in my piano (if in fact it is the wippens – there may be some fit issues with the hammers as well). In short, at this critical and hyper-detailed juncture, I’m not finding much help for my square grand in a manual that focuses almost exclusively on grands and uprights, not to mention the frequent detailed passages about Steinways. I was able to glean a few ideas from the book, but I’m still not really sure what is going to be the best way to repair the keys that keep dying. I expect it will require some experimenting.

So, this coming weekend, I think I’m going to move to some cosmetic work. Probably work on the mother-of-pearl inlay some and maybe even go back to the stool again (I’ve got the brushes for it).

I need to be pushing a little harder on this.

A Night with a True Jazz Legend

2011-06-05T14:51:00.000-05:00

Wednesday June 1 found me and Mrs. S once again in Birmingham AL, to attend a jazz concert at the Alys Stephens Center for the Arts. We sure spend a lot of time there for it being over a one and a half hour drive from our house. But when a guy like Herbie Hancock is performing in your neck of the woods, 90 minutes seems a pretty reasonable drive. As part-time patrons with dedicated front row seats, it’s hard to pass on an opportunity like this, so naturally, we also signed up for the VIP “Meet & Greet” package for our chance to meet the legend and possibly have a few photos taken and get a few CD’s signed. Imagine our surprise then when one of the event coordinators told us that his contract did not allow for either. (Turns out he did both.)

So come time for the concert and it’s mostly empty seats, but they filled up pretty quickly and the show started maybe only ten minutes late. Herbie’s drummer comes out and he starts right into a funky syncopated riff that I couldn’t see how he could keep going but that he did and never missed on. The bass player wandered on stage and it took him about thirty seconds to get to his five string axe, attach the strap, and get it settled before laying a line down on top of the drums. So, they’re on the right hand side of the stage, wailing, and I’m all caught up in the beat when out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of glittering orange, and there’s this tiny old guy moon walking toward the keyboard pit. (Yes, moon walking!)

And the crowd goes wild!

And those turned out to be the two main themes of the night: a little old dude who should be laid out on a recliner or playing bingo somewhere, funkin’ it up on a piano, computerized synth, and a keytar, and a bunch of people screaming at him as he does so. Which is also what got me: Here’s a guy who released an album in every one of the last six decades, has more than fifty albums of material to choose from, is over seventy years old, can do anything he wants musically and professionally, and if he was taking it easy and swinging through a quiet version of “Watermelon Man” or letting some singer take the lead on one of his compositions while he sleepwalks (instead of moon walks) through the comps and a canned solo, everyone would still be appreciative and crazy, but instead, he’s out there with a freaking keytar, jumping around like a four-year old with a squirt gun on the first day of summer as he bangs away on “Actual Proof” or “Chameleon”. What’s going on?

I’ll tell you what: Herbie Hancock is going on. And on, and on, and on. No wonder his latest album involves musicians of eleven different nationalities singing in seven different countries recorded in four different studios. When you’ve done as much music as Herbie, that’s the only way you can get to something new and fresh. Stunning.

Honestly, the concert made me dizzy and I don’t think it was from the drive and the stifling 95-degree heat. Herbie did mostly new stuff from his Imagine Project recording, which I have a hard time classifying as jazz but which I enjoy immensely. I was especially psyched when he and his two man band and one woman singer did my favorite track from the work, Tamatant Tilay/Exodus. Everything else he played, he played as funky as possible, spending probably 40% of his stage time on his Roland keytar. His piano, a Fazioli concert grand, didn’t sound real. His playing sounded fresh, whimsical, and inspirational. Somehow. The supporting band members were solid musically and just, everything was great. Words escape me.

Our signed copy of "The Imagine Project"

The meet and greet session started frightfully stiff. Only one guy seemed truly comfortable talking with Herbie, and they started talking about, like, Herbie’s third album, released the year after I was born. It was sort of electric just hearing Herbie say the name, "Miles Davis". Anyway, to get things moving, the coordinator jumped in and made everyone get their pictures out of the way so Herbie wouldn’t spend the whole night standing around with our lot. When I went up to meet him, I had him sign our copy of his latest, The Imagine Project, and we took two photos before Mrs. S joined in. Then he spent the rest of the time chatting her up. Later, when Herbie was done with the photos, he wandered over to the fruit tray, where Mrs. S and I were, so we talked a little bit more and Mrs. S had him sign our copy of “Maiden Voyage”. (I like his signature. He writes so you can actually read his name. See above and below.) I literally had a whole stack to be signed, but we were being reserved since we were told right out of the gate that he wouldn’t be doing that.

Our signed copy of "Maiden Voyage"

After he’d had a few pieces of fruit, he looked around for something to say and do, but the coordinators gave him the go ahead, so he waved, and was gone. He’s a very nice, personable, agreeable gentleman. He’s small, but his hands are firm and supple. His smile is bright and his eyes even brighter. He doesn’t move fast and his hair is thinning, but he’s genuine, real, meticulous, and true to his songs when it comes to his music. I think top to bottom, meeting Herbie Hancock was one of the most satisfying and valuable experiences I’ve had in my short four year jazz career. I may have been late to jazz, but I’m catching up fast.

Days 88 and 89 – Saturday and Sunday, May 28 and 29 – Looks like a piano!

2011-05-30T14:51:00.000-05:00

Goals: Finish with the leather on the hammers and install the keys

Music: Shelley Manne and His Men’s “Complete Live at the Blackhawk” (all four discs).

With the keys inserted back in the piano, it again looks like a piano and the temptation to chop it into a desk or a bar is reduced. As has been the case throughout this project, however, the piano continues to beset me with “good news, bad news” scenarios:

-Good news: I successfully manufactured a replacement hammer from scrap hammers purchased online. Bad news: I wasn’t actually missing a hammer. The space on the hammer assembly is for something else. (Wish I knew what.) At least that explained why I ended up one piece of leather short when I was adding leather to the hammers.

-Good news: I successfully rebuilt the pivot arm end of a broken hammer. Bad news: The difference in shape and size is just enough that the wippen didn’t pick it up and project the hammer correctly. Hard to believe when you look at the photo – we’re talking a fraction of a millimeter difference! (I ended up shimming the whole assembly to make it work; it still joined the ranks of dead keys after the first go around.)

Top is the replacement, bottom is an original. Yeah, they're different, but...

-Good news: I finished putting the leather on all the hammers. Bad news: Even with careful and thorough trimming, the tiny size differential makes many of the keys stick, both against each other and against parts of the piano when the keys are reinserted.

Hammers all covered in leather and ready to go.

The pile of leather chunks that took be two days to trim from the heads - and they still don't work right.

-Good news: I was able to insert the keys and a number of them actually hit on the strings they were supposed to and made a passable sound. Bad news: After playing once through the keyboard, any number of keys went dead, or took some jiggling to get playing again, or didn’t sound at all in the first place.

-Good news: The rough tuning of the piano means I have actually gotten a reasonable facsimile of harmonic sound from the strings. Bad news: Not realizing that some of the “single” bass strings were actually “double” bass strings, I’ve got the piano tuned to play more notes than there are keys.

Good news: At the lower end of the keyboard, all the keys work. Bad news: The ones that are supposed to be hitting double strings are only hitting one string. (Maybe it doesn’t matter if I tune them or not.

Memorial Day will be filled with tuning work and key adjustment. I’m even going to have to get my piano repair manual out and see what my options are with the wippens that aren’t triggering the keys right after I just fixed them. (I mean, of course I made sure all the keys were working before I reinserted them, but I didn’t think so many would go dead right out of the gate!)

One more: Good news: The soft pedal actually moves the damper assembly into position and deadens the hammer strike on the strings. Bad news: It doesn’t go back on its own. More adjustment!

Days 86 and 87 – Saturday and Sunday, May 21 and 22 – Devil in the Details

2011-05-23T19:29:00.000-05:00

Goals: Put the leather on the hammers, install the keyboard assembly after checking that everything works

Music: Humphrey Lyttelton’s “The Parlophones” (all four discs); Bud Powell’s “The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume Three”; Buddy Rich’s “The Best of Buddy Rich”; Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite”.

Delicate, boring work. Boring and delicate. That’s all that separates me from a completely refurbished antique square grand piano: boredom and delicacy.

All I did on Saturday was cut the leather strips for the hammers and glue them to the hammerheads. That’s “all”. As I recounted in my last entry, I did not want to do this in stages because I was afraid of mixing the lengths. And, because I was using contact cement, I wanted them to be done all in one fell swoop. I was a little non-committal about whether I should put glue on the entire head and strip or just glue the ends with the body of the strip stretched over the hammerhead. I opted to leave the middle glue-less to give me some land to handle the strips with. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as I will relate in a moment.

One I got to cutting and placing the strips, I noticed they were all just about the right width, but most of them were too long (not sure why). Some I cut, some I used the extra surface for stronger adhesion. This, too, turned out to be fortuitous. Anyway, it took about four hours, but I managed to glue all the strips to the hammerheads.

On Sunday, I reviewed my work and naturally, all the strips were jamming into each other, causing all the keys to stick, pull multiple hammers, and not return to the down position properly. I expected this, and was sure they’d have to be cut. Here’s where not gluing the entire strip to the hammerhead paid off: I could trim the leather strip without having to trim a fat portion of the felt head. Nearly all them went smoothly. Some I could get just with the small pointy cosmetic scissors, but the majority required being held with tweezers while cutting with a razor. Due to placement issues, some I ended up cutting close to only about an eighth of their original width. That’s where the extra land for adhesion came in handy (for those strips that had it). Unfortunately, with my poor eyesight and inexperience, some of the strips I cut right through, releasing one end of the hammer. I used super glue to reattach these, not wanting to fuss with the contact cement any further. At the end of the session on Sunday, I was about twenty keys from the end, but that’s actually much closer to the end of this stage, because the high keys, which sit almost directly perpendicular to the strings and parallel to each other will not need any trimming. (Hooray!)

I have at least two wippens that will need adjusting before I can install the keys. Then, the sound of hammer hitting string and generating music will again emanate from my piano, almost one year to the day since the last note was heard from it.

I bought some clear acrylic resin that I’m planning to use to fix up the mother of pearl inlaid board. If I can get that to look pretty decent and the piano to play, I will have 99% succeeded in the refurbishing of this piano.

Days 84 and 85 – Saturday and Sunday, May 14 and 15 – Andddd...........next!

2011-05-17T19:52:00.000-05:00

Goals: Finish the piano

Music: Gerry Mulligan’s “Original Quartet with Chet Baker” (both discs); Bennie Moten’s “Band Box Shuffle” (both discs); Paul Motian’s “The Sound of Love”, Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron’s “Complete Blue Note Recordings” (both discs).

With jazz improvisation class finally over, I have nothing but time for working on the piano. And after my trip to Memphis where I saw Francis Scott Key’s square grand piano and the non-functional shape it was in, I’ve been feeling a little inspired to get my piano back into operation. So I set to work.

Needless to say, there’s nothing left but a lot of little jobs, most everything cosmetic. I just take each job as I think of it and in whatever order necessary to complete the work properly. I obviously needed to get the key and hammer assembly back in, which meant repairing the one broken hammer and fabricating the missing one. Using spare parts that I bought on e-bay, I started with repairing the one broken hammer. It just needed a new pivot head (I’m calling it – I don’t know what it’s called). Not knowing how much of the shank goes into the pivot head, I decided to split the old one to see for sure. Here’s what that looked like:

Bottom shows pivot head in mount assembly. Those pieces are the old pivot head. Uppermost is the original hammer and shank.

After that, it was an easy enough job to remove one of the old pivot heads from the spare parts, drill and scrape out the old shank bits, and sand and shorten the actual shank to fit into the hole. Wood glue and a little eyeball measuring next to the other hammers, and it was ready to install:

Repaired hammer ready for installation.

Manufacturing the replacement hammer for the one that was missing was a bit trickier and time consuming. Because the hammer has to fit between a bunch of other hammers, it needed to be sized correctly, but all of the parts I got off the internet were for the larger hammers at the other end of keyboard. I thought about sliding all of the hammers down one, but I was worried doing so might create fit issues down the line, especially with the felt pads that catch on the wippens. I didn’t want to deal with that , so I decided to see if it was possible to use my Dremel tool to whittle down the size of the felt on one of the big replacement part hammers to make a small felt head hammer.

What I started with (left), and what I hoped to finish with, approximately (right)

I found that it was an easy enough process with the only drawback being that it generated a lot of dust, and so I set to manufacturing a replacement hammer, doing most of the felt trimming outside. That was a two day process due to the amount of sanding needed and also having to glue the felt, using contact cement to hold it and super glue to harden it. When all was said and done, I had my replacement hammer:

Left: What I started with; Middle: What I ended with; Right: What I was trying to get to

It fit adequately in the spot that had been missing a hammer for almost forever. (I could tell by the wear on the felt underneath the hammer housings.)

Here you can see how light the felt is where I removed the hammer, but how dark where the missing hammer was. That hammer was missing for a long time, telling me this piano has probably been unplayable - and unplayed - for 50 or more years.

I reattached the wippen stoppers and hammer assembly to the keyboard frame, holding the wippens in place with string when I fitted the hammers back in place. Upon releasing the string, I found all the keys and hammers in working order. (Thank God!) I wanted to slide the keys in to see and hear them hit the strings and hear what it sounded like, but I still had to put some leather over the worn surface of the hammers. What’s next is next, so I set to it.

I marked up the thicker portion of the lamb leather that I will be using to cover the hammer heads with, having measured and calculated that some time ago.

The leather, ready to be cut (pencil for scale)

I didn’t start cutting up the individual strips, though, because I’m going to cut and glue and cut and glue those individually so that I don’t have to mark them up or anything. I’m not really sure which would be more tedious, cutting all then gluing, or cutting and then gluing as I go, and although I think splitting the jobs would be faster, cutting and gluing in tandem should be easier and make it easier to avoid mistakes.

So, without having enough time to tackle the leather gluing job, including the fact that the outside temperature was too low to open the windows, I moved to some other minor finishing jobs. So finally, I cut a few pieces of felt and threaded them through the strings, working from photos of the original state of the piano (always an inspiration).

I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do about the missing damper arm. Hopefully I’ll get lucky one of these days and come across some damper arms on the internet. Until then, I’m going to have one low, long-ringing F note.

When I finish the piano, that is.

Eight hours driving, forty minutes of violin music, and a brief tour of Memphis Tennessee

2011-05-16T19:36:00.000-05:00

Readers of this blog will be well familiar with Mrs. S’s passion for the playing and boyish good looks of the world class violinist, Joshua Bell. And in the past, I had told her that any time he came within a reasonable driving distance, I would be willing to escort her to any concert of his. (He’s good enough that even I, a jazz musician, enjoy and appreciate his superb playing. He’s remarkable.) Several months ago, she unilaterally decided that four hours one way was within “reasonable driving distance” (okay, she did ask me) and so it was that last Thursday we traveled to Memphis, Tennessee to hear the Memphis symphony and Mr. Bell play.

The drive was actually quite easy except for the part in and around Memphis. As we followed the printed directions from the internet, we came off the highway right in front of the Marriott where we were staying. I said, “There it is,” but Mrs. S said, “No, that’s not it.” So we drove around looking for the hotel we just passed but eventually found our way back there, no problem.

Since we were really in town just for the JB concert, we didn’t really do much sightseeing. We did take a walk down Main Street and Beale Street:

A mediocre shot of me in the "French Quarter" of Memphis

And we saw Francis Scott Key’s square grand piano on the mezzanine of the Peabody hotel:

Sorry, FSK, but my square grand will soon be playable, and yours won't!

It has some very nice mother-of-pearl inlay inside on the top and very elaborate carving on the front, back and sides, but the wood finish needs redoing and the inside was in complete disrepair. (Not surprisingly, as seems to be the case with these older square grands, the damper pads and arms were all in pieces. That piano would definitely take some serious work to restore to functionality again.)

We ate a light dinner at the hotel, together with a number of other people who, it turned out, would also be at the concert later that evening. The MSO was a smallish but very efficient orchestra, doing a nice Schubert piece and a Beethoven symphony under the confident and enthusiastic baton of conductor, Mei-Ann Chen. After intermission, Josh came out and lit up the place with Tchaikovsky, and for an encore, Yankee Doodle. He signed autographs (3 CD’s) and took a couple pics with Mrs. S.

Getting to be very familiar with this shot...

When I noted that Memphis is a lot farther from Huntsville than Birmingham was, he thanked us for our long drive. He then kind of remembered us, but not really. (He gets around, you know.) We also negotiated with a symphony rep for the JB banner hanging in the foyer.

We visited the Memphis Zoo and the Brooks Museum the next day so that it really wasn’t eight hours of driving for forty minutes of music. It was a nice trip to Memphis and another great Joshua Bell concert. Sure beats working.

No piano and no piano

2011-05-04T18:49:00.001-05:00

I find myself all of a sudden briskly stomping through the month of May, no closer on the completion of my antique piano refurbishing project due to having spent the last three weeks mastering my transcribed solo and three songs that I’m not very good at playing, along with a host of melodic minor scales and modes, all for jazz improv class. And this is not to make light of what is a devastatingly serious topic, but the tornadoes that ripped through Alabama last week left us without power for four days, which not only made it impossible for me to practice (digital piano only), but ended up wiping out my last two classes in any event. It left me with a piano not yet refurbished and some performance ready pieces that have gone as stale as the ground meat in our freezer prior to power being restored. No piano, and, no piano.

At least with class over, I can get back to devoting some time to the refurbishing job, and would have over the weekend if it wasn’t so dark in the house. If I can finish it this month, it will get done in one year, start to finish.

And, not to overemphasize the point, but if you’ve never seen the destructive force of a tornado up close, either during the storm or after, count yourself lucky and offer a prayer to your deity of choice that you never do. The raw power of nature is as terrifying as it is humbling and is better marveled at from a distance. Trust me on this one.

Top ten reasons why I haven’t worked on my antique piano in two weeks

2011-04-13T05:48:00.000-05:00

10) My “consultant” will be visiting me on April 16^th and I want him to be able to see the inside and all the work I’ve done. (Kind of a BS excuse, which is why it’s #10.)

9) I finished the strings and I’m taking a break between milestones.

8) I’ve been too busy listening to “Milestones” by Miles Davis. (Actually, “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise” by The Modern Jazz Quartet, see #1, below.)

7) It’s hard work.

6) I’ve been taking advantage of the weather and working outside a lot.

5) I’ve got to finish schoolwork before the piano. (Again, see #1, below.)

4) No, it really is hard work.

3) Anyway, I’m almost done. Kind of.

2) Tomorrow is another day.

1) I finished the transcription of the piano solo from “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise” by The Modern Jazz Quartet. My last day of class is May 2, and between then and now, I not only had to do the transcription, but I’ve got to learn a bunch more scales and I’ve got to be able to fashion my way through the melody and a one chorus solo for at least five different songs. That takes practice, not an antique piano. So the number one reason I haven’t been working on my piano is because I’ve been working on my music and my class work. The most excellent part: I finished the solo transcription in one weekend of heavy (10+ hours) of work. But it’s finished, so now, I just need to practice, and I’ve promised myself to turn off the TV during the week and turn on the piano instead. (I’ve already turned off Facebook and kept it off for over a month now.) We’ll get the piano finished pretty soon, don’t you worry.

Days 82 and 83 – Saturday and Sunday, March 26 and 27 – Strings are strung

2011-03-28T21:44:00.000-05:00

Goals: Finish the strings

Music: Tony Bennett’s “MTV Unplugged”; Lars Gullin’s “Danny’s Dream".

I decided it was high time I quit making excuses and started making some progress on the piano. I was helped by the fact that I largely didn’t feel like practicing the piano this weekend (as much as I do need that). So on Saturday, I completed the rough tuning of the piano, tuning everything down a half tone, so middle A on the piano sounds like G#. My tuner is actually pretty handy, but as I got higher into the upper register, it became less and less reliable. By the time I reached the last few notes, I was tuning by ear alone, but as I got the tones to where I thought I was close, I was able to use the tuner to check them and they all were fine. At the lower end of the double strings, there were about a half dozen pins that needed shimming, including one that I had used a sandpaper shim on. Although I’ve gotten quite skilled at that, it took a little more time than I would have liked, due to having to replace two strings, one that was too short to begin with and one that was kind of short and broke off at the end. Again, due to having gained some skill and plenty of practice in this area, it didn’t take me long to do.

On Sunday, there was nothing left but the 33 wound bass strings, all singles. Not being in the mood to fuss and knowing that when I did the reaming I started at this end and wasn’t tired so the holes were probably all over-reamed, I went straight to the oversized pins. Even at that, I had to shim quite a few, say one of every three, so towards the end, I just went with putting a shim in automatically without bothering to check fit.

Because all these strings were custom made, I took my time handling the actual strings. I made sure every one had plenty of wire to wind on the pins, I started the pins up high to allow me to wind them well, and I made sure every one was seated properly before winding. I only had one or two give me fits, mostly towards the end when my eyes were getting tired and I couldn’t tell if the coils were seating correctly or not. But in about three hours, I had completely attached and tuned the 33 single bass string strings. The strings are now complete:

The big advantage of finishing this part of the project is it allows me to clean up a good bit. I can put away all the boxes of pins (3 of them), the sandpaper and metal shims, the aluminum bushings (never used) the coils of wire, plus all the tools that go with this part of the project – hammer, pin driver, pin turner, tin snips, stamp tongs (for inserting shims), calipers (for measuring strings and pins), and tuning wrench and tuner (which I’ll need again later). I can now also throw out all the old strings and put into storage my string size chart, marking flags and all the miscellaneous stuff that accumulated during this phase of the project. I’m sure I won’t know what to do with all the space.

Next up is the hammer assembly and the damper arms. I still don’t know what I’m going to do about the missing damper arm, but as I do have replacement hammers for the broken and missing ones, I guess that’s where I’ll start. Although I have a lot of little jobs left, I’m thinking I’ll be able to steamroll through them. I very well may be catching my second wind for the fourth or fifth time.

Day 81 – Sunday, March 13 – Not sure where to go

2011-03-14T21:39:00.000-05:00

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano

Music: None

Thinking I was going to rough tune the piano down a half tone, I started at middle A and was shooting for G#. The first string I was able to tune down, no problem. The second one was at F# and the pin was too loose to tune it higher than that. I was neither mentally nor physically willing to wrestle with the tuning pins, having worked outside most of the morning including running one mile in my Five Finger shoes, so I decided to just stick to tuning what I could. Rather than go up and find all my hard work undone by loose pins, I decided to work down and just stick with finding what was tunable and what was not and tuning as much as possible. Long story short, almost all the pins on the short side of the piano will have to be redone. Ten minutes and I was done. There was nothing left but hard work. And I left it.

Listening to Chris Botti in Boston while cooking dinner and sipping rum made me feel better. His version of Miles Davis’s Flamenco Sketches is stunning, with the Boston Pops swinging hard and some guy doing a guitar solo that is nothing short of mesmerizing. That’s the kind of music that makes people want to make their own music, not work on pianos.

Q&A with the late George Russell

2011-03-08T19:36:00.002-06:00

You may be a jazz heavyweight. You may be a jazz lightweight. You may be late to jazz, or you may be steeped in jazz from before you could walk. So some of you may relate to my latest jazz learning experience, but some of you may not. But from out of nowhere, I’ve found out about this guy who’s name was George Russell. I’d only heard of him in passing for the first time a few months ago, as I noticed one of his recordings on the core collection list, my own collection of which was nearing completion and conspicuously missing his recording.

And I couldn’t find it anywhere, or at least, not anywhere for less than $75 or so. But when I started to read and learn about George Russell, like so many things jazz before this, I wondered how I’d missed him this whole time. I won’t go on about George. You can go to Wikipedia or his eponymous website to learn all you want about him. As for me, a student in my last semester of jazz class, second straight semester of jazz improvisation, I’m a little aggravated to have all this awareness of George and his contributions to jazz sideswipe me this late in my education. So much so, I had dreams of George’s face talking to me from the psychedelic purple cover of his complete Bluebird recordings (the long version of the CD that is really hard to get).

So, to be honest, I don’t know very much about Mr. Russell, yet, but I plan to learn everything I can about him as quickly as possible. In the meantime, the little exercise below is merely for entertainment and to hopefully clear my dream state of Mr. Russell’s all-knowing, ghostly-yet-serious face. If you know about George Russell, you may even get a couple of my puns/jokes/inferences. To obtain the maximum visual effect, imagine the interview being conducted by Connie Chung in a dark suit from Chanel. (George is in black and white tweed, just like on the cover of “Jazz Workshop”, which is same as the picture above. Also, if you notice, George is not resting his head on his chin, but is, in fact, showing you his fist a good ten inches away from his body..."Watch it, buddy!")

Connie: Thank you for agreeing to talk with us, and thank God for allowing us into heaven to interview you, Mr. Russell.

George: George.

Connie: George.

George: Hmph.

Connie: So, tell us about the afterlife.

George: It sucks. Wrong kind of music, everywhere. It’s like I’m trapped in an ethereal universe above the clouds with a bunch of singing angels and every song is the Oratorio from “The Messiah”…oh, … wait…

Connie: What’s different about the music?

George: Everything’s Ionian and straight up. I keep begging for somebody to play something in Lydian, or even Dorian, or to at least swing a little bit, but no.

Connie: It sounds positively heavenly here. What’s wrong with that?

George: Nothing, really, but I’m going to throw up if I hear the four chord resolve to the one chord one more time.

Connie: Would you explain that for the beginning jazz musicians in our audience?

George: No.

Connie: Maybe God would let you arrange an angelic choir sometime?

George: Meh! Who’s got time for that?

Connie: Don’t you have an eternity?

George: Yeah, but I’m busy working on another edition of my book.

Connie: Let’s talk about your book. I’ve noticed that on Amazon, first editions of the spiral bound, Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, are going for anywhere from well north of a hundred dollars, all the way up to $500.

George: Really? Damn. I could’ve used some of that scratch while I was alive. But what’s my book doing in Brazil? I didn’t know they sold books in the rain forest.

Connie: Yes, … but don’t you feel that the title of your book might be a little off-putting to the average jazz musician?

George: I hope not. The editor scrapped my title for it.

Connie: What was it originally called?

George: Conceptualization of Asynchronous Harmony from Chromatic Permutations of Lydian and Mixolydian Flat-6 Tonalities Derived Using Tonal Organization of Synchronous Patterns and Sonic Causations of Melodic Structures.

Connie: That’s quite a mouthful.

George: Please, don’t say “mouthful”, Connie. Anyway, it had a subtitle.

Connie: Which was…?

George: Cool Sounding Jazz Music.

Connie: Yes, um, er, okay. So, on another subject, is Bill Evans up in heaven with you?

George: I thought this was a serious interview.

Connie: Sorry. Why do you think your CD’s are so hard to find back on earth?

George: “Kind of Blue” is hard to find? I heard it’s the most popular jazz recording ever.

Connie: It is, but that’s a Miles Davis record.

George: Yeah, right. Good one.

Connie: Okay, why do you think jazz recordings – with your name on them – are so hard to find at reasonable prices back on earth?

George: My recordings are selling at a premium, too? Goddammit! Oops. Anyway, I’m going to talk to the land Lord when this interview is over about getting a few minutes back downstairs. Got to be a few royalty checks bouncing around with my name, somewhere.

Connie: Do you need money in heaven?

George: I wouldn’t if Jesus would stop cheating at cards. He deals off the bottom, that Son of a …ah, um, God.

Connie: Do you think the average man on the street will ever be made aware of all your contributions to the field of music in general and specifically, jazz theory?

George: No.

Connie: Why not?

George: Well, how many people alive today do you think know about my work?

Connie: Well, a precious, but lucky, few.

George: Hmph. And how many people read this “Blog” magazine you’re interviewing me for?

Connie: Um, it’s a website, and well, not many.

George: Whatever. How many readers, exactly?

Connie: Well, um, basically, one. The author’s parents and siblings don’t even read it.

George: Really? Wow. Must be crap!

Connie: Well, we are interviewing you.

George: Point taken.

Connie: Well then, what would it take for people to become more aware of your contributions to jazz?

George: Let’s see... Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber doing a duet of my “Ezz-Thetics” arranged by Ozzy Osbourne on the first ever joint Grammy/Academy Awards show. Hosted by Charlie Sheen, of course.

Connie: I thought you wanted this to be a serious interview?

George: Pink and that other Justin then. I’ll do my own arranging. We can do without Charlie, too. I don’t think the folks up here are going to let him work for a while, anyway.

Connie: Ahem. Any special message for our readers?

George: Well, always remember: Don’t confuse chromatic Lydian with Lydian augmented or Lydian flat-7. The dominant chord functions as a five, but it sounds like a one, whereas in the augmented, you have the case where…

Connie: Ahhh, thank you, George, I think that’s all we have time for.

George: All you have time for, Connie. I’ve got an eternity.

Day 80 – Saturday, March 5 – This is getting serious

2011-03-07T19:42:00.000-06:00

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano

Music: None – I’m tuning a piano here

Things have once again gone from bad to worse. A number of the pins that I shimmed and tune have slipped out of tune and, of course, they are no longer tunable. The shim solution worked, only to a degree. Now I’m not sure if I can use two shims per hole, or if I want to use the bushings that I bought, or if I just want to keep using larger size pins (I still have two more sizes to go before that is no longer an option). Again, I’m not sure what the best route is, so I’m going to call one of my consultants today. Depending on his answer, I may either

-Tune to a half tone or more below concert pitch to lessen the pull of the strings on the pins

-Double up shims with larger pins

-Use bushings

-Make a desk out of the sucker

This is not looking good.

Days 78 and 79 – Saturday and Sunday, February 19 and 20 – Tuning in

2011-02-22T20:06:00.000-06:00

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano.

Music: Ornette Coleman’s “Beauty is a Rare Thing” discs 5 and 6; David Murray’s “Ming” (only for as long as I could stand).

Mrs. S. decided to go out on Saturday and she made it clear that she wanted to see some progress on the piano when she got home. So, I got busy and kept plugging away at the loose pins, badly wound strings, and other issues that are awaiting correction on my piano. The good thing is that now it is nothing more than a repetitious process of determining which strings are untunable because of loose pins, removing the pin, inserting a shim and/or a larger pin, tightening down the pin, rewinding the string and rough tuning it to make sure it will stay.

So that’s what I did, both Saturday and Sunday. I’d say about one third of all the pins require shimming, maybe even one half. I started at middle A and after two days of steady work, I’m up to the highest C on the keyboard, which leaves about seven or eight keys to go (remember: my square grand only goes up to A with its 85 keys) to have the upper half of the keyboard tuned and ready. Then I’ll be ready to do the fifteen keys leading down to the single-wound-string bass notes (33 of those) before moving to the hammers to finish up this project.

I’d be making better progress if not for two things: this re-doing the strings bit is really, really tedious. Just terribly boring, yet requiring full attention and awareness, not only to do the job right, but to keep from getting hurt as the strings are loosened and tightened over those 130 year old pin blocks. The other factor is that I reached all this avant-garde jazz crap at the same time as trying to tune the piano, which, for obvious reasons is basically impossible to do. No one can tell the difference between Bb3 above middle C and B3 with David Murray screeching some crap out of his sax. Turn off the music, work, turn on the music, work, turn off the music – that’s doesn’t get it. I worked in silence on Sunday except for the reverb from the strings and soundboard. It may be like that for a while, now.

Day 77 – Sunday, February 13 – Finally, some success

2011-02-14T20:29:00.000-06:00

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano.

Music: Ornette Colemans’s “Beauty is a Rare Thing” discs 3 and 4.

After making excuses for an entire month (shame on me!), I decided yesterday that I could not put it off any longer, and I needed to try the metal shims I bought and see if they would solve the problem of the loose tuning pins. I found the middle A strings and amazingly, they were still in tune. B-flat right above had one of the problem tuning pins, which I had already removed and left in that state, so I got my tin shears and cut me a tapered shim, quarter inch at the bottom, a little more at the top. I had a little trouble getting it seated at first, and although it was a crisp, tight fit, when I had the pin turned in and strung, it held. I tuned that pair of strings to B-flat and moved to B, C, and C#, all of these needed a shim on both pins. Long story short, it was tedious process, but the metal shims worked on every tuning pin I’ve tried them on so far (tapping forehead in lieu of wood), and my piano is, in fact, tunable. More importantly, I’ve been able to use the wires that I’ve already strung onto the piano, so I’m going to save a lot of work in not redoing all the pins and wires (a scenario I had been trying to mentally prepare for, but which I was increasingly going to face by tearing everything out of the piano and inserting an electronic keyboard instead.

Now, I have every reason (and no excuse not) to work on the thing. It may actually be able to be completed, maybe in just a couple of weeks. I’m praying for bad weather next weekend so I can stay in, drink brandy tea, and work on the sucker. I really want to get everything back inside the piano, up off the floor and finish turning the dining room into a music room. But the piano has to be first, so, no more excuses.

Advanced Jazz CD Collecting: A Quick “How To”

2011-02-05T10:11:00.011-06:00

The basis for my jazz music collection has always been the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide’s “Core Collection”. Remember that I started out in jazz without owning a single jazz album, except for three culled from a Wall Street Journal article about “must have” jazz recordings and some average stuff borrowed and burned from the library (I don’t do that anymore, so don’t call the FBI.) . So using the core collection of the Penguin Guide eighth edition, I began buying jazz CD’s.

As is to be expected with a list like the core collection, probably more than half the CD’s are common, relatively inexpensive, and easily found on amazon or ebay. But as you pick what I call the low hanging fruit, you are left with high hanging fruit that gets increasingly harder to find and more and more expensive. Some of the recordings are downright rare, and as I’ve written before, some can’t be had for love or money. They just aren’t out there. Be that as it may, I am dangerously close to completing the core collection with only one or two substitutes, but no integral gaps from the 188 selections.

Notice there that I say “selections” because some are multi-disc sets and some recordings are now available either as parts of boxed sets or other compilations. That complicates matters. So here’s the “how to” for completing the core collection:

1) Get the easy ones first. Lots of artists can be had for just a couple of bucks: Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, etc. Most every selection on amazon will have a “People who bought this also bought…” underneath with a bunch more of the selections you will need to complete the collection. Pick up what you need.
2) Buy used. Used CD’s are almost always half the price of new, or less. There are some CD’s I literally picked up for the cost of shipping.
3) Keep track of what you have and what you don’t. You will quickly form a mental database that will help guide your search and will alert you when you come across something rare or hard to find.
4) If you see one of the rare ones, buy it. You have to convince yourself that money is not an issue here, because there are some that I have seen and failed to purchase because I thought it too expensive, and then I never saw the thing again. It’s frustrating. More frustrating than breaking the budget.
5) Search ebay and amazon everyday. The foreign amazon sites are also worthwhile. I found some on amazon Japan that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Use the wishlist (amazon) and watchlist (ebay) to keep your eye on prices and availability.
6) Spend the time and money.
7) Listen and enjoy your collection. You deserve it.

Depending on the availability of one or two CD’s and whether I opt to substitute or not, I should finish my core collection by the end of March. I plan to take a picture of me sitting in the middle of all those CD’s. It’s going to be exciting.

Still scared – still not back in the water

2011-01-31T20:19:00.001-06:00

It’s a good thing I have my piano off in the seldom visited corner of the house. You know: out of sight, out of mind. Attentive (and even not so) readers will have noticed that I have not worked on my piano of late. I purchased everything I think I need to fix it and get it operational, but I have not jumped back in the pool since right around the holidays. The reason is simple: I’m scared. I’m deathly afraid that I will find the piano to be beyond repair, at which point, I will have to face that fact that I am hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars SOL. I know avoidance is not the best policy, but for now, it’s the policy I’ve chosen. Two weekends ago, I promised Mrs. S I would work on the thing this past weekend, but this past weekend, the temperatures hit darn close to 70 degrees, so I worked outside trimming all our crepe myrtles and all of Mrs. S roses instead, needing two and a half hours on Saturday and one and a half hours on Sunday to do it. So, here’s hoping it is cold and miserable next weekend to put me in the mood to work on the piano once again. Maybe I can at least finish it before I’ve owned the thing one year (Memorial Day-ish).

I’ve been occupying my other free time with practicing my melodic minor scales, searching high and low for a good trumpet, searching preliminarily for a violin, and seeking out and buying the last few CD’s I need to complete the entire 188 disc “core collection”. So let me write about those things instead.

For buying the trumpet, I enlisted the help of a classmate at school, and I did a ton of reading online. Since the trumpet will basically be just a decoration in our music room, the number one priority was to buy something that looked nice, but it also had to be playable, since I intend to mess around with it some. (That rules out “brand new student trumpets”, especially anything made in China.) Having only played the trumpet all of one summer when I was ten or eleven, I had to study some to not get too badly burned in the market. But since I wasn’t completely without experience. I was up to speed pretty quickly. Anyway, if you go to ebay and search trumpets, you will find about 135 pages with 50 items to a page, or roughly 7000 trumpets, mouthpieces, stands, pipes, valves, care kits, etc. It is no small task weeding out the wheat from the chaff. And after letting a really nice, rare trumpet slip away last week, I paid close attention this weekend and picked up a 1941 vintage Conn trumpet for right at $350. It is two-toned, engraved, and very classic looking. I’m excited to see it in person. Here’s a picture from the auction:

The 1941 Conn "New York" Trumpet

So after that, Mrs. S said, see if you can spend the same energy and effort to find a violin. Well, if you go to ebay and search violins, (wait for it) you will find about 885 pages with 50 items, or roughly 45,000 violins or violin items. Of those, roughly 44,273 of them are made in China. (Mrs. S said, “No ‘Made in China’, no matter how good it looks or how cheap it is.”) Despite the long odds, I still found a couple of nice ones, but the closest we could come to buying one, was finishing second in a reserve auction that the first place bidder did not win because not even he bid enough. Unlike the trumpet, it is unlikely that Mrs. S or I will play the violin, other than taking a few token strokes over it with the bow, so we’re primarily looking for something that looks nice and which we will be able to resell for what we pay for it. That means we’re going to have to spend a couple hundred on it, too. And, we have to keep looking and wading through the plethora of Du-shi and Xiang Ho and Ming Mang Mong instruments.

Who knew having a music room to display an antique piano in could be so difficult and expensive?

I’ll write about the CD collection in a separate entry.

A(nother) Night with Joshua Bell

2011-01-22T15:10:00.001-06:00

For the third time in eleven months, the virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell made his way to Alabama, and so, for the second time in about eight months, we made the trip to Birmingham to see him and hear him play. I think if Mrs. S could have written a script of how the night would go, it would have gone pretty much like last night did. Here’s the rundown.

The drive from Madison to Birmingham was uneventful. So much so, we had time to scout out the dinner location prior to the beginning of the cocktail party, which started one hour prior to the concert itself. Even with all that, we were still the first to arrive for drinks. So, we had some. They had some good finger foods there, too, (smoked turkey pita pockets, anyone?) and though we were reluctant to fill up on them prior to the concert and post concert dinner, we ended up eating our fair share of them (which turned out to be a good thing, for reasons which I will soon divulge).

The concert (I thought) was average. I just didn’t think the songs were that exciting. Of course, Mr. Bell’s performance was top notch, as was that of his accompanist, Sam Haywood. I suppose the only notable event at the concert was the mad rush to the stage to try to find the horsehair that fell from Josh’s bow during the final suite of songs. (Nobody could find it.) We stood in line to get an autograph before heading to the post concert dinner.

The dinner was held at an old house at Birmingham that had been converted to an arts studio, with music studios, dance room, poetry room, the works. It was a lovely old house and held the fifty or so dinner guests comfortably. We mingled with the guests while sipping California wine and toured the building on our own. We met lots of interesting, influential Birminghammers. When Mr. Bell arrived, the remainder of the party obviously revolved around him. Mrs. S. wanted to take a bunch of pictures and get her picture taken with him, so while most of the rest of the folks headed off to the buffet, we stood around drinking and watching other people chat with JB. Eventually, we got our chance to chat and take photos before he himself headed off to the buffet.

Mrs. S and Joshua Bell

All that standing around translated into us being the last to hit the buffet. By the time we were ready to sit down and eat, several people had already moved into the living room, as most of the seats in the two dining areas were taken. But there were, in fact, two seats available at one of the tables, right next to Mr. Bell. And we were welcomed to sit, so Mrs. S plopped right down next to her idol. It was a fast and fascinating dinner. Mrs. S couldn’t take but a few bites of her meal, partly because it wasn’t very good, but also because she was so excited to sit next to Mr. Bell. JB, for his part, is an amiable, charming personality, and he obviously knows a lot, has many interesting stories, and is very indulgent of his fans. I would guess we spent a good seven or eight minutes, just chatting with him. He signed a personalized autograph for Mrs. S. and answered questions about whether he would so some more jazz projects (maybe) and why he comes to Alabama so often (“Because they keep asking me”). He left after the hostess’s birthday cake came out. We drank champagne and ate cake before hitting the road. At 11:00 at night, on a frigid mid-week evening in mid-January, I was able to lock the cruise control at 75 and we made it home at exactly one minute before midnight.

Honestly, I was a little amazed at how much fun I had. We became patrons of the arts in Birmingham Alabama for one night, and it was exhilarating. Like I told the hostess, who said it must be rough to drive down from Huntsville to Birmingham and back for the event, “If I could do this every week, I would.”

Something else that is nearing completion

2011-01-17T18:53:00.002-06:00

At the end of last year, I tallied up the number of CD’s I have from the Penguin Core Collection (Eighth edition) and found I had reached about 75% completion of the 188 or so CD’s. And as I have said in the past, all or nearly all of the ones that I have are “low hanging fruit”: easily purchased from amazon or ebay for a few, or sometimes maybe twenty, dollars. Now, I’ve got around 40 to go to complete the collection, and I’ve begun pushing it. In fact, I was lucky to find some of the missing ones for as low as $5 here and there, usually on ebay. Some of the others are semi-low hanging fruit, in that they require some surfing around and they are often expensive (more than $20, sometimes $50 and up), but at least they are out there and available. That can’t be said for all of the remainder. Some are as rare as a unicorn and cannot be had for love, money, or anything else.

A good example of the latter is the Art Ensemble of Chicago 1967-68 CD. I’ve only ever seen two. The first was on ebay for “$125 or best offer”. I offered $77 but it ended up selling for $100. The other was listed for $200 and it sold in a day. I haven’t seen one since. Another one I’ve never seen is Humphrey Lyttelton’s Parlophones, volumes 1-4. I’ve only ever seen volume 1, and they were asking $100. That would push the price of the set up to $400, (if you could find the other three in the first place). That’s just not worth it. I suppose if I get all the others and it comes down to it, I might spend that much to complete the collection. (After all, if they are selling for that much, they can probably be resold for that much, or possibly even more, at some point in the future.) Personally, I just want to see the collection laid out on the floor to see what it looks like. I think it will make an awesome picture. (I plan to sit down in the middle of it.

I briefly toyed with the idea of downloading MP3 for some of the ones missing from my collection. I nixed that idea because usually, the recordings are esoteric enough that the MP3 isn’t available either, but I also felt that downloading MP3’s constituted a bit of cheating or forgery. Having collected stamps for forty years now, I would never stoop to making a color copy of a stamp just to fill a space in my album. That just doesn’t make sense. I considered an MP3 file that same thing: it’s a color copy of an original, and just not the same.

Although I have nothing against Martin Luther King Day, with so many CD’s in transit, I’m aggravated that there won’t be any mail delivery today. I’m itching to size up my current purchasing activities, narrow down my focus, and do what has to be done to complete the collection. Not getting mail or package deliveries slows down my efforts. I did, however, get my oversized tuning pins and shims on Saturday, so I have plenty of other things I could be doing, if I felt up to it. I’m saving that for Saturday though. Honestly, it just feels good to write about something other than my goofed up piano.

Day 76 – Sunday, January 9 – More things to swear about

2011-01-16T12:39:00.000-06:00

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano.

Music: Louis Armstrong’s “Complete RCA Victor Recordings” discs 3 and 4.

With my shims ready to go, it was time to test them out. I checked the tuning of the middle ‘A’ that I had done the day before, and I found it had disconcertingly slipped. I retuned it and it seemed like it would stick, at least for another day. I moved to the G# below it, where I had already removed one pin and wire. I inserted a shim, made it stick, put the pin in and turned it down. It sort of stuck. Sort of. I put the wire on and tried to tighten it, but alas, it would not hold.

Where one wouldn’t work, maybe two would. So, I put another shim in opposite the first one and tightened the pin. Again, this seemed to work, but it occurred to me that maybe I wanted more wood surface on the pin and less sandpaper and varnish, so stacking the shims might be a better idea. So I removed the pin and found the shims essentially shredding themselves to pieces against the pin.

Not good.

So I stacked a new shim on one of the old ones, inserted and turned the pin, and it held. It took about 25 minutes start to finish, mainly due to having to get the shims positioned correctly, but also wrestling with the existing wire. I did one more in the B-flat range, and that one actually worked. All-in-all, the sandpaper seems like an acceptable solution, but not if I hope to sell the thing someday. I made up my mind to go ahead and buy proper shim material, including some of the collared bushings, just to see if they work any better or worse than the metal shim option, but also to check out their appearance. As I said in my last entry, I’m at the point where I’m just trying to avoid having to redo everything. Hopefully, the “designed as shim material” shim material will be the solution.

Come to think of it, I didn’t swear hardly at all during this session. I was concentrating and checking results and thinking too hard to cuss out my piano. Or it might have been the rum I was drinking…

Day 75 – Saturday, January 8 – Again

2011-01-09T09:17:00.000-06:00

Goals: Replace untuneable pins with larger pins and rough tune first set of wires.

Music: Louis Armstrong’s “Complete RCA Victor Recordings”, discs 1 and 2.

I thought that at last, this would be a simple job, but I was wrong.

I found the strings that equate to middle ‘A’, on which one of the pins would not hold tune. I replaced it with one of the larger pins that arrived this week, and that worked fine. I rough tuned to the string to 440 Hz, plucking it with a credit card. So happened the next string over also had one pin that would not hold tune. Took it out, inserted a larger pin, and,

Still untuneable.

Cover your ears because here it comes:

Shit!

I literally stood there and thought for the next fifteen minutes. Just standing, staring at the piano, sagging my head, thinking: Start over? Gut it? Buy another set of even larger pins? Try some bushings? Try some shims? Start over? Gut it? Shims? Bushings? Start over? Gut?

I went online to investigate more about bushings and shims. I stumbled across a do-it-yourself shim method using sandpaper and varnish, which I happened to have on hand. I have nothing to lose by trying it at this point. So I spent the rest of the work session prepping the sandpaper, which involves varnishing the back of it to stiffen it. We’re going to cut tapered strips that are 3/8” at the top and ¼” at the bottom, insert those sandpaper side to the pin block, push it so it holds itself in place, then set the pin in and turn it until it seats. If this doesn’t work, I’ll have to splurge for actual bushing material, which is only a couple of bucks, although, I don’t see why the sandpaper shouldn’t work. Here’s the varnished sandpaper before and after cutting:

Keeping fingers firmly crossed.

Days 73 and 74 – Friday and Saturday, December 30 and 31 – A Smattering Modicum of Advancement

2011-01-04T20:20:00.000-06:00

Goals: Finish the metal wire “stringing”; order parts to move on to the final stages.

Music: Paul Bley’s “Time Will Tell”; Charles Gayle’s “Touchin’ on Trane”; Dave Douglas’s “Convergence”; Michel Petrucciani’s “Solo Live”.

The hardest thing I have had to deal with in this late stage of the piano restoration is figuring out how to make the wires the correct length so that they wrap neatly around the tuning pins and yet still hold the wire at or near the correct tension. I suppose one is supposed to not cut the wire, but rather, string it on one pin, pull it down to the holding pin, pull it back to the second pin, then cut the correct length at that point. Unfortunately, on a square grand, several of the wires have to pass under a frame brace or a damper arm support, and several more have the back pin under the actual frame of the piano. Needless to say, it is not possible to pass a coil of wire through these narrow spaces. That leaves only the option of cutting the wire to length. This is tricky, due to the bends the wire has to take around the pin blocks and due to the unsure wrapping requirement, which depends so much on the pin tension, which depends so much on the condition of your 130-year old piece of pine wood pin block. It’s a process and a guessing game and a lottery, all rolled into one. I finally figured out that I could just measure the longest string for the given wire gauge, then shorten it once I had it partially strung. If that string seemed too short before I’d got to the end of that gauge wire, I could make the next one a few inches longer, and that would limit the amount of wasted wire that ended up being too short to reach the tuning pins.

(Too late, this led to another realization: I could have done short and long wires of different gauges at different stages of the restringing to hold the felt pieces in the correct positions, instead of adjusting the felt as I went. Although I did not end up with an especially unattractive felt pad, its hole alignment also is not perfect. Again, hindsight is 20-20, and I make this note here not only to admit my inexperience, but also to hopefully help someone else avoid this problem. Note also: I’m not sure how much harder – or easier – the actual stringing would have gone with this strategy, as the stringing was hard enough without having to do it in between two sets of strings. Maybe I’ll try it in a limited context on my next piano refurbishing project.)

When all was said and done, after a two day push, the second day of which really was a push until late into the evening (even after an early start), all the double-strung wire strings (52 of them) are complete. To celebrate, I drank some Cajun-spiced rum that we bought in New Orleans, and I ordered a set of larger pins and a socket adapter for touching up the wire strings and finishing the 33 wound strings. (I’m expecting many more of the holes in the lower end to be unable to hold tune with the narrow pins, due to the fact that I reamed those first and did a much more thorough job than on the higher register ones, and the increased tension of the larger strings.

Anyway, here’s a shot of the stringing so far, pre-pin adjustment/re-installation/rough tuning.

Days 71 and 72 –Saturday and Sunday, December 25 and 26 – Why piano wire makes a good murder weapon

2010-12-27T14:05:00.000-06:00

Goals: Blow up the piano (nah, I’m kidding – just keep restringing)

Music: Art Pepper’s “Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section”; Joe Pass’s “Virtuoso”; Freddie Hubbard’s “Open Sesame”; George Lewis’s “Jazz in the Classic New Orleans Tradition”.

I continue to work hard at the restringing. It takes about an hour to do four or five strings, depending. Sometimes it goes a little faster, but rarely. As the strings have gotten longer, I’ve been having a hell of time getting the wire the correct length, because it is not possible to use the whole coil while doing the stringing, due to the proximity of the strings, and all the stuff that is in the way. One wire, I swear to God, I measured four times, cut it two inches longer than I thought I needed, and it was too short, so I measured again, got the same number, cut it four inches longer than I thought I needed, and that was too short. I decided to use string to measure actual lengths between pins, around string supports, etc, but there wasn’t a piece of string in the house long enough to do that. Mrs. S. has since supplied me with ribbon, which I used to measure the last of the five strings. I’ve decided to cut all five to that extra length and trim them down, because I really will blow up the piano in frustration if I keep getting short strings.

I really want the spare parts I found on ebay from a seller in Canada to arrive so I can work on something other than the strings. And anyway, I have to get some larger diameter pins, as I continue to have problems with untunable pins (probably five or six of them by now, and more to be expected). Since there are two layers of strings, I have to get the first layer complete before I can move on to the second layer.

Much to consider. I just want this project to be over.

And why does piano wire make a good murder weapon? I don't know. Maybe because you can still use it in your piano after you pull some guy's head off with it...

Time out for work

2010-12-26T10:37:00.001-06:00

I worked a lot on my piano yesterday, but ran into a few more roadblocks. I’ll be happy to tell everyone about those tomorrow, but today I’m going to take time out to review some software I had the opportunity to download for free – in exchange for this review.

The software is a registry cleaner from Digeus.com. Now, if you’re like me, when you hear “registry cleaner”, you start thinking Russian hackers, Trojans, worms, and a whole lot of bad stuff. My computer, however, has been running bad enough of late that it was worth a shot, figuring if anything really untoward happened, I could always do a system restore and get back on my feet.

I’m happy to report, digeus did nothing bad to my computer, and probably did some good. The software downloaded quickly and easily, and I had no problem running it. The initial scan said it found over 1600 registry errors, and it fixed them all (I guess) in less than a minute. I wouldn’t say that my computer is noticeably faster or anything like that, but it does seem to not freeze as much when surfing the Internet, and email seems a little faster, too.

All in all, I think digeus’s registry cleaner is a good product and worth giving a try. And it’s free if you click here. (Note that I am not endorsing this product and will not accept any responsibility for anything bad that happens to your computer because you use this software. Not saying anything will, just a disclaimer.)

Days 69 and 70 –Saturday and Sunday, December 18 and 19 – Trouble

2010-12-20T19:56:00.000-06:00

Goals: Pain and torture (seems like)

Music: Joe Henderson’s “The State of the Tenor” (both discs)

Things have, well, not been going, um, well.

On Saturday, I felt quite happy with the appearance of the inlay board, so I was ready to give it a clear top coat to seal in all my work and call it complete. With three possible options – spar varnish, water-based poly urethane, and oil based acrylic – I thought a little experimentation was called for. So on the reverse side of the board, I carved out an “E” (for “experiment” or “Eric”) and filled it with the colored wood filler that I used on the front. When that dried, I coated over it with the three stripes of the coatings in close proximity and allowed them to dry. Here's the before and after of that:

Before - no coatings

After - poly urethane, oil poly, varnish (top to bottom)

Both the oil based products looked a little too shiny for me, and one of them (the varnish) was still a bit tacky even after two hours or so. I also had some concern that the oil-based products would be too strong and would probably take off some of the lighter touches of ‘art’ that I had done on the board. It seemed that the water-based poly urethane was the way to go.

So I put the board on some newspapers and coated it. The result was 80% of the artwork that I had done on the mother-of-pearl pieces came off in the process. Since I don’t have a means to spray coat the thing, that was always going to be the result, in hindsight. Still I was amazed at how easily things like lines drawn by a Sharpie, charcoal pencil ground into the crevices, and make up powder, just came right off. That’s the bad news. The good news is, the dullness of the finish improved the overall appearance enough that the loss of detail is not that significant.

I’m still considering my option of replacing that board entirely and using the brass letters to do an inlay on the piano that will make up for the loss of the mother-of-pearl work. We’ll see.

On Sunday, it was back to stringing. I wouldn’t say that it didn’t go well, but the issue is I’m having more and more pins end up being loose and untunable, and it has been a struggle to get the length of the longer wires correct. I’ve resorted to laying out a tape measure on the floor and making all the wires two inches longer than I calculate, and even at that I’ve had one come up short somehow. As for the untunable pins, I still haven’t decided what to do and none of my consultants have dropped me a line, so I’ll have to call one today to get the low down. I think I’m just going to get two dozen larger pins and if that doesn’t work, do some shims.

Bottom line: the piano will not be finished by Christmas, and I will have to continue to listen to Mrs. S complain about the lack of a dining room/music room every time I point out I have nowhere to store my burgeoning CD collection.

Recent New Orleans trip schedule = Beginner's guide to the "Big Easy"

2010-12-16T20:09:00.000-06:00

Oddly enough, it took me five trips to New Orleans before I finally got around to doing all the things that tourists are supposed to do when they visit there. So my most recent NOLA travelogue is really a list of stuff that you should do if you’re visiting “the Big Easy” for the first time:

See the inside of St. Louis Cathedral – It is the oldest continually operating Catholic church in the United States, and the inside is far nicer and just as photo-worthy as the often depicted outside. Mrs. S and I went inside to hear Ellis Marsalis play a free Christmas concert, accompanied by the rest of his quartet including his drummer son, Jason. The chords that Mr. Marsalis played when he tackled “Oh Tannenbaum” were spine tingling. During the concert, filming and photography were not allowed, so we came back the next day to take photos. Don’t miss it. (Keep your distance from the guys on the bench outside with the 16-ounce malt liquor cans in paper bags.)

Have beignets and coffee at Café Du Monde – This is probably the staple of the New Orleans tourist experience, and again, we had never done it. The beignets were tasty and a plate of three with two large coffees was just the right amount of food and drink for Mrs. S and I to go away satisfied, yet craving more. We went back on our second morning of the trip as well. Bring cash. It helps if you speak Thai (but since you can only order one thing to eat and maybe five to drink, communication is not an issue).

Eat a meal at the Acme Oyster House – This we had actually done before, but not in a while. We went on our first full day for lunch. We had some char-grilled Gulf oysters that were phenomenal, along with two different Po-boys and a glass of local beer. We enjoyed it so much, we decided to do it again the next day, doubled up on the oyster order, and got two different Po-boys and another local beer to wash everything down. Highly likely that in future trips to NOLA, we will eat all our lunches here.

Tour a rum distillery – Yes, there is a rum distillery in New Orleans. It’s not much of one, but it is a rum distillery. (Okay, it’s a shabby warehouse with some tanks that can be used to make booze.) They do three tours daily (call ahead) and they are a little out of the way in a seedy neighborhood by a cement factory, but the rum is tasty, they serve samples, and although the tour is pricy at $10, you get $5 off a bottle of rum if you buy one (and you will). Definitely something different to do, especially if you are newly devoted to spirits, as I am. Which leads to our next tourist “must-do”:

Have a cocktail at the carousel bar at The Monteleone – If you are not up on your cocktails, you can order the signature drink, The Monteleone, which is a variation on a martini (I think). That’s what Mrs. S had. Made her drunk enough to lose her scarf. I had a Sazerac, another New Orleans cocktail. It takes about 15 minutes for the bar to go around once, so drink slowly or have two.

Me and my Sazerac (photo © Mrs. S)

Listen to jazz at Snug Harbor – There’s nothing like real live jazz, and all I can say is, you may want to do Preservation Hall for the tourist’s touristy jazz, but I would recommend Snug for the “in-the-know” tourist’s jazz. We heard Delfeayo Marsalis lead the Uptown Jazz Ensemble, a 17-piece band that played on a stage that wasn’t more than 15 by 20 feet in a room that couldn’t have been more than 50 x 20 total. An awesome experience and only an $8 cab ride to and from just about anywhere in the French Quarter. You can keep your costs down by not ordering too many $8 drinks.

Dinner at Stella – I’m pretty sure this is the best restaurant in New Orleans. If you buy the cheapest wine on the list, two appetizers, two entrees and two desserts, you won’t get away for much less than $250 – 300. The tasting menu is something like $125, plus another $95 for the flight of paired wines. If you’ve hit the lottery, you can try one of their $150 vodkas or the $3000/ounce caviar. With the Acme Oyster House, this is the only other thing on the list we did not do for the first time (and hopefully not for the last, either).

That’s it. Two and a half days, three nights. Really, the perfect trip. Geaux, geaux, geaux to New Orleans! (Author is not provided with compensation by any party affiliated with the city of New Orleans.)

Day 68 –Tuesday, December 14 – Now, I’m an artiste:

2010-12-15T20:46:00.000-06:00

Goals: Try out my paint pen on the inlay board

Music: Percy Faith’s “Music of Christmas”.

My Sharpie extra-fine point gold paint marker arrived, so I couldn’t wait to try it out on the inlay board. I was hoping and praying that the gold was opaque and non-metallic so that it would match what was on the board already, and I was praying that the point was fine enough to get the detailing to look right. Imagine my surprise and delight when it succeeded on both counts. I spent about one hour doing the detailing, entirely by free hand, and entirely with my mind’s eye – no stencils, overlays, copying of something similar, or anything like that. Mrs. S was not impressed, but I’m quite happy with the result. Here’s a sample:

Before

After (sorry, slightly out of focus)

The only thing I have to do now is “age” some of the new mother-of-pearl pieces and then seal the board with urethane or some other clear coating. The sealing part is going to have to be trial and error, but since I just need something to get me to a uniform appearance, I think urethane is the way to go, but I may try lacquer as well. I think lacquer may give it more of an antique look with its slight yellow tint. Well have to see when I do the test piece.

I haven’t had any response to my inquiries about the untunable pin, but it doesn’t matter because I’m unlikely to have time to work on the piano tonight or tomorrow or Friday, due to having to work late, my piano lesson, and working as a casino dealer at a Christmas party, respectively. I will have the weekend, though, so hopefully my consultants will weigh in with their opinion pretty soon.

The big development today was that I found some replacement parts that I need on e-bay, so I snapped them up and sent an inquiry if he has any more of the parts that I need. I’m hoping he does and he sells them to me at a reasonable price. We’ll see.

Day 67 –Monday, December 13 – Slipping...slipping...and slipping again:

2010-12-14T19:24:00.001-06:00

Goals: Continue restringing

Music: Andrew Hill’s “Point of Departure”.

Did a couple more strings – not bad for a working week night It’s getting hard(er) now because the strings are stretching to up to six or seven feet in total length. It takes serious concentration and focus to keep a handle on the wire ends, especially when cutting. I also have some concern about there being enough wire to complete the project. Individual notes eat up a lot more wire when you’ve got to run seven foot lengths instead of ten or fifteen inches.

Now that I’m about halfway through, I started to wonder: will the piano be tunable? I tried to pluck the strings to at least see if they continue to go up in tone as you pluck them from left to right. As I did so, I found that most were doing fine as far as a semblance of accurate tonal direction, except for one. So I tightened and plucked and no change. So I tightened again and noticed that as soon as I pulled the tuning wrench off, it slipped back. There it was: my first un-tunable string. As I understand it, my options for making this string tunable are many:

1) Use a bushing

2) Use a chemical that expands the wood

3) Use a larger pin

I have just a little leeway at this point, so I plan to start by seeing if I can drive the pin deeper and get it to catch before it pulls the string too low. I figure this is a good gamble to make, since it’s not working right now as is. I might just save myself having to install a bushing or messing with chemicals.

I made some inquiries to my group of “consultants” as to what they recommend. Fortunately, because it is only one string, it shouldn’t hold me up too much. (In fact, I plan to do some more work on the piano tonight.)

Again, wish me luck.

Day 66 –Sunday, December 12 – Getting strung out:

2010-12-13T20:39:00.000-06:00

Goals: Install the lock, continue restringing

Music: Roy Hargrove’s Quintet’s “Earfood”; Coleman Hawkins’ “The Stanley Dance Sessions”; Barry Harris Trio’s “Magnificent”.

If you did not read yesterday’s entry – and even if you did – let me start off by reiterating: stringing a piano is hard, hard work. Stringing a finicky square grand piano for the first time ever, with five different types of wire and an assortment of harp frame obstacles, not to mention 130-year old parts, is even harder than that. So, although you may not be impressed when I say I’m about at the halfway point of the restringing, I assure you, you should be. That represents a vast amount of tough physical labor, mental gymnastics, and eye strain.

I broke up stages in the restringing by installing the lock, which required custom fitting, and a touchy wood filler job. The escutcheon is still not quite right, and that will require precision gluing and refitting. There will be much surface refinishing in the area as well.

I ordered some more things for finishing up the piano, and with school out and TV still boring as hell, I’m planning to spend some evenings working on the piano. And yes, I’ve said that before and nothing became of it, but if I’m going to finish that sucker this year, I’m going to have to be serious about working on it in the evenings as well between now and Christmas. The finished product would make a great present to give myself on my 47^th birthday, just eleven days from now.

Here’s a photo of where I’m at with the restringing now.

Halfway there

Here's a “guts pose” that came out of me unexpectedly.

Just glad I still have both my eyes and no new scars...

I shall see you all back here again tomorrow. Still got a New Orleans’ travelogue to share, you know.

Day 65 –Saturday, December 11 – Dealing with antiques:

2010-12-12T09:50:00.000-06:00

Goals: Install the soft board, re-start the restringing

Music: Grant Green’s “The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark” (both discs); Vince Guaraldi’s “Greatest Hits”; Herbie Hancock’s “Head Hunters” and “Maiden Voyage”; Roy Hargrove’s Big Band’s “Emergence”.

I had an opportunity while in New Orleans this past week to actually learn a little about antiques. Mrs. S likes to visit all the places we can only dream of ever buying something from, and so, we tour those places just like a tourist would: with our eyes and mouths wide open. But usually, the shop owners are friendly and helpful, and you can talk to them about the pieces and the Saints and shrimp po-boys, and antiques in general, and they will indulge you.

So at one of the places, I’m noticing how furniture that is as old as my piano looks shiny and new. I asked the guy what they used on their furniture to make the finish look so bright and lustrous, and he gives me some BS line about “special wax imported from Wales – we use it on all our pieces”. I asked him about some of the things I’ve been using on my piano, mainly lemon and orange oil, and he explained those products cause the wood to soak it up, but eventually it evaporates and you’re left with the same old dried wood. As we’re walking around the store as we’re talking, there are three cans of what turns out to be this "wax imported from Wales", sitting on a table, with a price tag of $35 (each) on them. Is this it? I ask. Oh yes, he says. (Why he didn’t grab one up and try to sell it to me right away, I have no idea.) So anyway, the best thing to come out of our recent trip to New Orleans for me is an antique preservative product to try on my piano and a couple of blog entries that I will write later this week.

One more thing about the antiques store guy: we were commenting on a less than well kept piece and how it looked a little rough, and he says, "Well, it’s old." That’s the bottom line with my piano. Things that are 130 years old don’t look new, and that’s that. Yes, I’ve made some mistakes, and yes, the veneer on the back is a bit bubbly, but overall, the piece is in much better shape for all the work I’ve put in, and if anyone is expecting something different, well that will be their tough luck.

Yesterday, I set out to install the soft board, having bought the screws necessary for the job right before leaving for NOLA. Right away, I put one screw in, and it split the wood. I had to glue it, wait for it to dry, and while that was going on, I cleaned the hammer assembly and shanks and heads, cleaned the support frame, pulled off the old felt and washed it, cleaned off the old glue, and cleaned the wood of both of the support pieces. During those processes, one of the stop buttons split, so I had to repair that too.

After all that, I put a support screw in the soft board where it split, cleaned and polished the swivel support (you can see what 130 years’ worth of patina/dirt looks like in the before and after photos, below), and put the board in. Of course, the screws I bought were just a little different than the ones that came out, and they extended through and were scratching the soundboard, not to mention not allowing the soft arm to move freely, so I took the screws out and cut them. I also put some felt pads under the soft board for better support.

Swivel tab - before

Swivel tab - after

By this time, the felt that I removed from the hammer support frame was washed and dried, so I used my contact cement to stick it to the bottom of my sock when I stepped on it accidentally while trying out the lock in the lock slot. After I got the felt off my sock, I put it back on the support frame to avoid any further problems with it. I filled the lock slot with acrylic filler because (of course) the lock I purchased doesn’t fit quite right. I used bamboo to fill the extra wide hole to fit the new escutcheon, and then I had to wait for all that to dry.

It was time to do some stringing, again.

It took me a long time to get to actual stringing. I had to count how many spaces were left, which string widths went where, and because I didn’t know quite what I was doing back when I was taking off the strings, the numbers weren’t working out quite right. All I really knew was that I had 33 custom strings for the low end, and five different widths for the high, and that was it. Try as I might, I couldn’t make the numbers come out, but, I had one note that I wrote down that made it come together. It said “0.8 mm that side of frame, 0.86 this side of frame”. By using the numbers I had for the four string widths on this side of the frame, I was able to find the correct positions for all the width ranges.

Now I really was ready to string.

I could only do two more strings over the next 45 minutes, because the pins were all under the support arm and I have 47 year old eyes. I had to shine a flashlight, take my glasses off, put them back on, check the wire position, remove my glasses, recheck, replace, put my glasses back on, move the light, hold the wire, insert it in the pin, remove my glasses, check the wire position, move the light, replace my glasses, ... like that. Did I mention I was working with 0.86mm wire? You know, where if you let go of it, or it slips, it springs and snaps backs, and if you’re holding you head right over it with your glasses off, it’s really dangerous? I did mention that? You get the idea. Here's what it looks like now:

Seriously: Stringing antique square pianos is not for the timid.

But I finished the two really hard ones yesterday, so now I’m set to keep stringing all day tomorrow. Wish me luck. I'm going to do that while baking a chocolate Cajun-spiced rum cake to keep the house (and me and Mrs. S) warm.

Day 64 –Sunday, November 28 – Bad planning

2010-11-29T20:19:00.001-06:00

Goals: Work on the keys

Music: Chris Connor’s “Chris Connor”; Ben Webster’s “Music for Loving” (both discs); Earl Hines’ “Plays Ellington Vol. 2”.

I had a notion that if I focused, worked hard, and was careful, I would be able to finish the key assembly on Sunday. Unlike the day before, however, I felt I would need a little more time, so I started moving things into the sunroom just before lunch. The first thing I did was put the keys back onto the key rack. Some of them were pretty sticky, mainly on the front end where the lateral slide pads had expanded or slipped out and were sticking on the alignment pins. Some of them I just took out the pad on one side, some of them I widened by shoving a screwdriver in between them. Out of 85 keys, only one needed to be height adjusted, and that was a lowering that was easy to do by removing one punching. No problems there.

I cut five pieces of felt to replace missing backcheck felt, and I trimmed 85 leather strips which I had cut out some months ago. I used my trusty contact cement to attached the felt and leather strips to the backchecks, not very concerned with appearance, though they turn out okay, anyway. (See below.)

While working on the keys, many of the felt pieces that I had attached with double-sided adhesive tape were coming loose, due to the tape sticking to fibers but pulling the fibers away from the actual felt pieces. Double-sided tape was a quick, easy solution, but ultimately ineffective, I decided. Bad planning part one. So, I took them all up and re-glued them. That took about two hours, which is the max drying time on the contact cement, so I brought that in just under the time limit. Then I realized, I was going to have a hard time getting the assembly out of the sunroom and into the dining room, due to the arrangement of doors and temporary walls to contain our ill cat. Bad planning part two. With Mrs. S’s help, I was able to navigate the doors and put the assembly back into the dining room on the work table I have set up in there. Everything looks pretty good:

In the middle of the night last night, I woke up and started thinking about things – as I often due on nights before work after extended periods of time off – and I suddenly realized that in order to attach the hammers properly, the keys have to be slid in under the hammers (I think). That means I’m going to have to take them all off the assembly again anyway. (I might be wrong about the reassembly order. I hope so.) Bad planning part three.

I have to say, however, I feel good about the progress made this past weekend. I’m getting close to major steps in the piano’s reassembly, not the least of which is reattaching the soft arm, which will allow me to finish restringing the piano. (Have to buy some new screws for the arm before I can do that.) I’m hoping, therefore, that the majority of the bad planning issues are out of my system and the remainder of the work will go quickly and smoothly. Time will tell.

Days 62 and 63 – Friday and Saturday, November 26 and 27 – Anybody have the phone number for China?

2010-11-28T11:42:00.000-06:00

Goals: Just get back to working on the piano, damn it!

Music: Mary Lou Williams’ “Free Spirits”; Eddie Condon’s “1927 - 1943”; Benny Carter’s “Further Definitions”; Clark Terry’s “Memories of Duke”; fight songs of Alabama and Auburn University. (Yes, I worked while watching football. And no, I didn’t skip a bunch of CD’s when I was working my way through the C’s in my collection; I got some new recordings and that’s what I listened to.)

Well, finally, I stopped making excuses or not making excuses and I just got back to work. On Friday, I worked on cutting little pieces of felt and leather to the right size to make the soft tabs for the soft board. I was a little dismayed at how hard it was to get my eyes to focus at a distance and then focus back up close while watching the football, and that made it go a little slower. By the time I had finished four tabs (eighty one more to go!), I was starting to think what a good idea outsourcing really is. I was not looking forward to Saturday at all.

And of course, on Saturday, Mrs. S’s first question to me was, are you going to work on that piano or not? (She said it a little differently.) So, I moved everything into the sunroom to take advantage of the better light, and I got down to it. I measured off and cut the felt and leather in three stages. As I cut each piece of felt, I also had to trim it to attach to the leather. Then, I cut the leather in matching sections, the same way I had removed the original ones from the soft board. When I had twenty or thirty ready to go, I brushed contact cement on the felt and then on the leather, then after attaching them, brushed the other end of the leather tab and then the marked spots on the soft board and attached them, going by the approximate number of the tabs that I matched the sizes to and compensating for slightly smaller or slightly larger ones by moving them a spot or two left or right. After two batches, I just had two sections not yet covered and I had original tabs from both the short and long ends of those sections, so I scaled my cuttings to match, repeated the gluing process, and four hours later, I forgot all about sending my piano to China. Here’s the end result:

Today, I’m going to do some heavy lifting, including felt and leather on the keys, reassembling the action, and moving the lid panels into the dining room to get them out of the bedroom before we have the carpet in there cleaned. Got to order some hinges for the panels, too.

I may have found a source for some of the parts I’m missing, too. I’ve started an email exchange and I’ll let you know how it goes...

No, not Thanksgiving either.

2010-11-24T16:50:00.000-06:00

Okay. Here’s the deal. No excuses. I didn’t work on the piano this past weekend because I didn’t feel like it. Instead, I worked out in the yard trimming the front bushes, crepe myrtles, and roses on Saturday, and putting up Christmas lights on Sunday. That was a lot of work. That came after working until 1:30 in the morning Friday night/Saturday morning on a server upgrade at work. (Let’s face it, I was not going to get anything constructive done in the tired state I was in on Saturday.) Sunday, I actually had a bit of spare time and thought I might get to the piano, but I practiced my minor modes of the scales for two hours instead. Monday, I had to go in to work at 5AM, so I was in bed by 9:15 anyway. That’s the bad news for the piano.

The good news is that I’m off today through Sunday, so I plan to crank up the music and get back to work in a big way. I’m going to start by cutting pieces of felt and leather for the soft arm so I can get back to restringing. I have to buy some hinges, and then we should be ready to put everything back together. I should be able to play some Christmas carols on my piano, no matter what.

The way things go, sometimes

2010-11-15T19:42:00.002-06:00

It was another lost weekend for me. I got started cleaning and organizing my room and just really never got out of it. I spent a good amount of time practicing my modes of the melodic minor scales and a tune or two, and, well, that was it. We’re still dealing with a sick cat and after the late night coming back from the jazz concert in Birmingham on Friday, I wasn’t very energetic. I pulled out some Christmas lights and started planning this year’s display, messed around on Facebook some, and never worked on my piano for even a minute. I’m thinking that if I don’t finish it around Thanksgiving break, it will be Christmas before I do finish it. It rained Sunday, I drank absinthe for the first time, and there are no other excuses. The weekend just slowly passed me by.

Speaking of the concert, Poncho Sanchez and His Latin Jazz Orchestra was Friday night, and honestly, it sucked. Their music was uninspired, their set short, and they kept exhorting the crowd to dance by playing an endless series of nameless salsa tunes. They didn’t do any really big hits, they did only one encore and yeah, some of the rhythm riffs they did with some unusual instruments were mildly interesting, and the horn section was tight, but I couldn’t shake the feeling they were more or less sleepwalking through the evening. They just showed up, played a few tunes, and left. It was disappointing.

Going into the “season” of concerts in Birmingham, I was most excited about Poncho, somewhat enthused about Bill Frisell, and basically unenthusiastic for Pat Metheny. But when the concerts were all over, I liked Pat Metheny the best, Bill Frisell second, and Poncho finished dead last. Funny how that happened.

Lost weekend = boring blog entry. Sorry about that, but that’s the way things go, sometimes.

Bill Frisell Review

2010-11-12T05:54:00.001-06:00

Last Friday Mrs. S and I drove down to Birmingham to hear Bill Frisell and his “Beautiful Dreamers” trio. With Frisell, one never really knows what to expect. Some of his work is way out there, and some isn’t. And while I consider myself a fan, I’m not what one would call a “big fan”, more of a casual fan. But I have to say, the Beautiful Dreamers music and trio (guitar, drums and viola) is very approachable. The songs are recognizable, the execution is original and exhilarating, and the musicianship on display is unsurpassed. Tea for Two was a knockout and for my money, Goin’ Out of My Head was just stunning. There were a couple of songs where Bill put a music box thingy against the strings of his guitar, getting some confusing but stimulating feedback and interference loop noise going, which they then proceeded to work into the foundation of whatever song they were playing next. In addition to working extensively with feedback and reverb from the guitar, viola and their various pedals and amplifiers, Bill also did a good job of playing bass and rhythm parts when support was needed for the viola. Another trademark of Frisell’s group was their use of repeated patterns – patterns that once they are set up, can be returned to or not, varied or not, transposed or not, soloed over or not, and then, you can go right back to it and it all sounds fine. I was actually more intrigued by that than anything else. (Let’s face it: holding a music box on the strings of a guitar just isn’t all that exciting for someone who’s only recently seen Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion concert.)

As far as I can tell, they played all or almost all of the songs off the Beautiful Dreamers CD, which kept the session short and sweet and got us home at a reasonable hour thanks to the 7:30 start time. There were big chunks of seats in the middle of the theater that were unused, so we got to move over and have a little better view too. (It was an intimate setting to begin with – just 300 seats – and very comfortable.)
Tonight is going to be a bit more dynamic and a lot later night, with Poncho Sanchez and his Latin Orchestra playing in the big hall and starting a half hour later than Frisell’s trio did. But I plan to absorb all the energy I can. You might not recognize me come Saturday.

Day 61 –Sunday, November 7 – Close call:

2010-11-08T20:28:00.000-06:00

Goals: Continue restringing; get some felt work done..

Music: Dexter Gordon’s “Our Man In Paris” and “Go!”; John McLaughlin’s “Extrapolation”; theme and background music from Iron Man II.

On Saturday, I elected to take advantage of the weather to get some yard work done, and that pretty much kept me away from the piano. I was not, however, willing to let the work slide for a second weekend in a row, so on Sunday, I set myself to continue with the restringing. When I finished with the first size wire, I decided I had better make sure I had a clear delineation of the remaining wires so that if I had made a mistake in the first phase, it wouldn’t affect any of the later stages. I counted the wire gauges and quantities, counted the holes, lined everything up, and amazingly, everything matched. I was ready to continue with the stringing, and all I had to do was check one picture to see exactly where the strings run to on harp support frame.

It’s a good thing I decided to check the pictures, because not only did I notice I forgot to put in one piece of felt (which I corrected by loosening the wires and pushing the felt underneath), I also noticed that the “soft” board goes under the strings, and guess what? When I tried to fit it in, it doesn’t fit. I’m thinking it might be possible to run it below the strings through the hole where the hammers project, but that will be a pain and I’m not entirely sure it is even possible. So, that put an end to the restringing project until I can at least put the soft board in place.

Man, I shudder to think how crushed I would have been to finish the restringing only to find I left out the soft board and there was no way to insert. I’m sure I would have cried. (For real.)

No longer able to continue the stringing, I cut some felt pieces, punched some holes in one and finished reattaching felt to the key except for the backchecks. I’ve got a lot of the leather for the back checks cut, so I just have to replace a few pieces of felt and then glue the leather over them. It shouldn’t take long, and this week, I really am going to work on that when I watch TV during the evenings. I also have to cut the leather and felt for the soft board so I can put that back in and start stringing again.

I will say this: if I ever get depressed about my lack of progress on the piano or how not all the repair jobs are living up to my expectations, all I have to do is look at pictures of the piano from before I brought it home and as I started working on it. Seriously, it doesn’t even look like the same piano. When I finish, I’m going to post a bunch of before and after shots. Those will be one of the best sales tools for when I’m ready to part with the piano.

Next entry will be about the Bill Frisell concert last Friday. I’m not going to write an awful lot about the felt work…

Zombies Attack My Piano

2010-11-02T05:48:00.000-05:00

After getting all psyched up and bragging about how I would work on my piano during some weeknights, not only did I not do any work during the week, but I skipped working on the piano this past weekend as well. My only two excuses were, my back was still sore from the stringing job the week before, and, I didn’t feel like it. I did, however, practice a good bit, as long as my back would let me sit on a piano bench, but the minor ii-V-I cadences are doing me in, so I didn’t practice nearly as much as I should have.

Then this morning, after a rugged night of passing out candy, and not enough sleep due to staying up to watch “The Walking Dead” and waking up early with a stomach ache because of too much licorice, my back is a throbbing ball of pain, and now I’m in worse shape than ever. So, I’m going to keep it simple this week:

· Eat less (we passed out all the candy to the 98 trick-or-treaters we had, so that one’s easy)

· Exercise every morning (expecting good temperatures for this as well)

· Enjoy dinner and the Bill Frisell concert on Friday night

· Work hard on my piano over the weekend, and

· Practice

I’m targeting the Sunday after Thanksgiving to finish the piano. It must happen.

Days 59 and 60 – Saturday and Sunday, October 23 and 24 – Time to get a move on:

2010-10-25T20:30:00.000-05:00

Goals: Fill gaps in mother-of-pearl inlay; start restringing.

Music: Terry Gibbs Dream Band’s “Flying Home”; Jimmy Giuffre’s “Free Fall”; Benny Goodman’s “1938 Carnegie Concert”. (I’m skipping Dizzy Gillespie and one of my Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band CD’s, because we have them in regular rotation on our “get ready to go to work in the morning” play set. I hear them a lot lately.)

When I took a look at the mother of pearl inlay, I had my doubts I would ever be able to get it to look like much of anything. I decided that since I still had some bare spots and still had some nice blanks, I could do with putting in a few more pieces, so that was what I did. Actually, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. You can almost tell which pieces I did first and which I did later just by looking at the quality of the work.

After putting in all the pieces I was going to put in, I grabbed my black inlay filler, and had at that. It was a mess going on, but after everything was dry, I was able to take a wet cloth and clean up the board quite nicely. When I took it out of the sun, it looked pretty good. Since I was on a bit of a roll, I decided to go ahead with the gold painting.

Fortunately for me, Mrs. S has been into oil painting lately, so she had a couple of very fine brushes that would work for the gold paint application. Unfortunately, the lines are so fine and require such a deft touch that I could hardly put any paint on the brush. Working outside in the sun, by the time I got the brush to the board, the paint had literally dried right on the brush. Putting enough paint on the brush to keep it wet long enough to get it to the board left a line that was too thick and clumsy looking. I had to give up on the painting. I’m going to have to come up with some other solution. (Gold marking pen, maybe?)

I spent the better part of the afternoon on Sunday working on the strings. My new, longer tuning pins arrived Saturday, along with some rubber baby buggy bumpers for the lid and a replacement lock also for the lid, so I didn’t have any excuse to put off that hard work any longer.

I tried a new method of stringing: I measure the two runs from pin to hole center, add four inches for winding around the pins, and cut the wire to length. Then I string the wire through one of the pins and drive it in. Then I do the other. Once I line up the wire and the felt, I tighten the outside pin until it has at least one coil of wire. Then I do the other pin. Check alignment, tighten, check alignment, tighten, and repeat until the wire is tight. Then I tap each wire and rough tune until they at least have the same tonality. This method turned out to be remarkably effective, as I have yet to end up with too much or too little wire. It still is brutally hard work, requiring concentration, strength, good eyes, patience, intuition, luck, and lots of bending. No wonder my back and neck are really feeling it today (especially my back – where’s my methocarbamol?)!

I’m finding out that in a lot of ways, pianos are designed to deter beginners from messing with them. For example, you have to start stringing from the toughest strings: the short, stiff, tinny sounding upper note wires. This is not to say that the bass strings are going to be any easier, but working with those short lengths of wire is tough. Now that I’ve got the majority of the high notes strung (something like an octave and three notes) I’m interested in seeing how the tuning pins and wires fare over time. Plus I can’t shake the feeling that I’m going something out of order and may have to start stringing all over again. (I just … don’t … know …)

Finally, I’m going to have to work on this sucker some evenings starting this week. This is dragging out too long and I’m afraid I won’t remember how to put everything back together. If I let it drag out much longer, I really will forget where everything goes and how to position it, and what not. Besides, I definitely need the keys back in to hear what the strings sound like.

It’s time to make a big push.

The learning process

2010-10-20T19:38:00.002-05:00

Prior to jazz improv class on Monday night, I had a good look at the piano (Yamaha concert grand) and noticed how cleanly and how neatly the strings are wound around the tuning pins. They are even, precise and consistent, nothing at all like the eight pins I did on my piano. I also discovered that mine aren’t even wound in the right direction. (My wound coils are above the insertion point of the wire, not below it, like they are on the grand.) The only reason I strung the coils above the insertion point is because there didn’t seem to be enough room to do them below the wire. Then, all of a sudden, I remembered that we purchased a set of pins that was a quarter inch shorter than the pins that came out of the piano, and that when I drive the new pins in, it doesn’t leave enough room before the wire insertion hole to make two windings of wire without touching the harp and pressing down too hard on the bridges.

Damn. Here’s a shot of my predicament and my shoddy wire windings:

So, I’m going to have to buy the correct length pins. That gives me an opportunity, however, to get the plated ones that look fancier, which is what I really wanted in the first place, even though it leaves me out of pocket for the $68 I spent on the set of pins I’m not going to use (unless I undertake another piano renovation soon – and that’s not happening).

This has me thinking that the best way to complete the finishing work on the piano is just like I did this weekend: finish a small portion of the job as best I can, then check online, check my piano refurbishing book, and look around and think about it, then decide if that is the right way or not. Then I can undo the small portion of completed work rather easily and quickly if it is wrong, or, I can keep going with no progress lost in the meantime if I happen to guess right the first time around.

This has definitely been a learning process, but the piano is getting closer and closer to being finished. My realization of the wire situation even is likely to get me to work on the piano on a weeknight for the first time in a while.

Days 57 and 58 – Saturday and Sunday, October 16 and 17 – Back on the Job:

2010-10-19T05:51:00.000-05:00

Goals: Work on the mother-of-pearl inlay; start restringing.

Music: Stan Getz’s “Focus”; Terry Gibbs’ “Dream Band”. (Focus is probably Stan Getz’s best work ever. It features him backed by a full orchestra, but due to the sudden death of his mother, the orchestra recording session went on without him. He recorded his tracks later and when his and the orchestra’s tracks were put together, magic!)

On both Saturday and Sunday, I worked on the inlay for about an hour and a half each day, without music, so I could concentrate on what I was doing. The result was quite good, but, I’ve decided I’m done inlaying. I’m going to paint the remaining gaps black and accent them with gold paint. Or, since I still have some blanks, maybe I’ll put just a few more pieces in, just to brighten it up a little bit. (I’m getting pretty good at it, but man, it is tedious work.)

Speaking of tedious work, after touching up the stain on the inside of the piano around the harp trim, I decided to start restringing. Holy crap, is that hard! I spent an hour and a half and finished four double strings. It is incredibly difficult to get the lengths of wire right and it is basically impossible to get clean spools of wire on the pins. The end result is it doesn’t look like much, but the strings are on and they make a semblance of tonal sound when struck. I’m not sure, but I’m thinking about redoing them. Probably I will just keep going, but if I reach the point where I can actually make the pins and strings look good, I will likely go back and make the first few crappy ones look more like the rest. That assumes of course that I will get some skill and actually become halfway talented at putting strings and tuning pins in, at some point, and hopefully before I get to the irreplaceable wound strings. (It would totally suck to break one of them like I broke the one that I tried to do slightly different to make a nice looking spiral. Enough about that, though.)

So, there is no way I’m going to finish the piano this month. There is just too much slow, hard work left. Thanksgiving is a realistic goal, but Christmas seems more likely. I definitely bit off more than I can chew with this project, but now there’s nothing to do but to keep eating until I finish the meal or start puking.

Piano renovation stops for actual practice (sorry - had to happen sooner or later)

2010-10-11T19:25:00.001-05:00

There are no days to add to the piano work. My mid-term exam in jazz improv was Monday night (more on that later), and I had to study. “Study” in this case means “practice”, as we had to be able to play three different musical patterns in any of six modes in any of 12 keys. (Yep, that’s 216 different combinations, for those of you keeping track.) We also had to be able to play a ii-V-I cadence in all twelve keys, plus we had to be able to play and solo over two tunes (Miles Davis’ “Tune Up” and Joe Henderson’s “Recorda-Me”). So, I didn’t have any time for working on the piano.

I had to be playing.

During the week, I pretty much had the tunes and 2-5-1 cadences worked out. What was killing me was the modes and keys and patterns. I developed an Excel worksheet with a random number generator so that I would be forced to work through the different patterns and modes and keys in an unpredictable sequence, which would hopefully help my retention and force me to think things through. Here’s the sheet:

Then I figured if I played through a completely randomized sheet two or three times, I’d have it pretty much covered. In working on the cadences and tunes and solos, however, I found myself lacking enough time to work through all the modes and patterns. In fact, working out solos in the correct keys for the tunes took up a lot of time, as did practicing them to the point of confidence. But working on the modes and patterns was also very difficult. Most of my problem had to do with my weak grasp of the major keys in general. A lot had to do with trying to play rootless voicing chords in the mix, which sometimes confused me, and some of it had to do with because I don’t know the key well, I had to work on the patterns repeatedly and slowly, taking way too much time. I mean, if one pattern took just one minute, I could be done in, what, 216 minutes. That’s three-and-a-half hours. True, some took just one minute, but some took two or three, some five (occasionally). In short, I only made it about three-quarters of that way through them all, and only once.

Not good. (It’s going to be even tougher during the rest of the semester, as we move to the minor keys right after our exam.)

I’m not worried about my mid-term, though. First of all, I did practice, hard, until my butt was sore. Second, it’s just music. Third, with only three students, I don’t have much to prove or much “competition”, so to speak. Even if I’m worst, I’m like the US field hockey team in 1932 – I’ll get the bronze medal because there’s only three contestants.

So, my piano project drags on as my jazz immersion goes slowly forward. It’s a trade I was forced to make, but I think I can make up for some of that by working weeknights this week. (Columbus Day screws up my movie schedule with Netflix.)

Post class update: Unbelievably, and tragically, my instructor’s father passed away last night. Class was cancelled. No mid-term test for at least another week. It is as likely as not that I will lose a good portion of next weekend to my second round of last minute practicing. Sometimes, life sucks, but never as much as death.

Final comment: I really, really want the piano to be finished. I promise. It’s going to get done and soon, one way or another.

Pat Metheny Concert: A Review

2010-10-06T20:20:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, Mrs. S. and I traveled to Birmingham AL to sit in the front row of the Alys Stephens Center and see Pat Metheny live. Careful readers of this blog will know that I’m not a big fan of jazz guitar and I’ve never been a big fan of Pat Metheny, as I just never found his music that interesting or stimulating to me. So why would I go to see him live? Well, because he is probably the single-most famous living jazz guitarist, he has won 17 Grammies, and because you never know: the live experience might just turn it around for you. Metheny was to perform alone with his “Orchestrion”:

The original orchestrions were player pianos that manufacturer’s starting adding instruments to in order to try and stop radio from eroding their market share. They added violins, guitars, anything they could get to work with a piano roll and the piano roll motor.

Metheny’s Orchestrion is a stage covering monstrosity. It includes two full-size Yamaha grand piano disclaviers, an accordion, a bass guitar, a rhythm guitar, a marimba, a xylophone, a vibraphone, two set of glass jugs, castanets, a full drum set, congas, sleigh bells, and more. All of these devices were rigged with solenoids of one type or another, and all were controlled from a specially built guitar hooked to bank of switches and foot pedals. With the guitar and pedals, he could tell each instrument or group of instruments what rhythm to play, what tones to play, and in what sequence to play them in.

But before he got to that…

He started off with a solo number on a regular guitar. Then he did another solo number on a different guitar. During the second song, I had something happen to me that never happened before: I was listening so intently to the music and so engrossed in the moment, I completely forgot where I was. Essentially, I lost consciousness. When I came out of it, I felt dizzy and couldn’t remember where I was. I felt as though I needed to wake up from a dream. I’ve never had a piece of music move me like that, ever. It was downright scary. Then he brought out his 42 string pikasso guitar.

That should’ve been the song I got lost in, but I was too enthralled in just watching him play that instrument. After that, he got to work with the orchestrion.

He played for almost two and a half hours. And although I can’t say I feel any differently about Metheny’s music in specific or jazz guitar in general, I have to say, I certainly respect Mr. Metheny as a musician and musical innovator and I’ll damn sure go and see him in concert anytime he gets within 150 miles of me. It was simply an amazing concert.

Day 56 – Sunday, October 3 – Feels Like Progress:

2010-10-05T18:55:00.002-05:00

Goals: Re-install the harp.

Music: Gil Evans’s “Out of the Cool”; Bill Frisell’s “Unspeakable”; Stan Getz’s “Big Band Bossa Nova”. (I elected to skip Ella Fitzgerald, because I have nineteen discs of her music, having succumbed to temptation and purchased the complete songbooks with the complete Louis Armstrong. At this point, I’m more interested in experiencing the breadth of my jazz music collection, rather than the depth of it.)

I re-installed the harp.

Because I could.

Here's the last shot of the harp and piano separated from each other:

I scraped the inside of the piano a little and chipped some of the varnish on the soundboard, but I got the harp in without any major problems and no injuries to myself. I even had the right number and sizes of screws (which I bought a complete set brand new, except for the irreplaceable 8-inch long one). I added new trim around the edges. Everything went smooth and I’m glad to have a bunch more tools back in the toolbox and parts off the floor and back in the piano. Here's me at work on the trim:

After I touch up the inside, I may try my hand a restringing, even though I still have a lot of work to go on the keyboard and decorative trim. I’m anxious to fill back in all the holes before I completely forget what all goes where.

That’s all the work I did on the piano, because our jazz improvisation mid-term exam is next week and I’ve been practicing for that. (I simply can’t put that off any longer.)

In my next entry, I’ll be writing about the Pat Metheny concert I attended last Friday. You don’t want to miss that one; it was a hell of a show.

Day 55 – Sunday, September 26 – Stain in the Rain:

2010-09-28T05:29:00.001-05:00

Goals: Finish (maybe) the staining; finish (maybe) painting the harp.

Music: Art Farmer’s “Farmer’s Market”; Chico Freeman’s “Destiny’s Dance”; Bill Frisell’s “Have a Little Faith”; Errol Garner’s “Concert by the Sea”.

After raining a good portion of the night and with a light sprinkling in the morning, it was obvious I’d be taking a big chance if I decided to do any staining yesterday. Thing is, there was only one more coat left to go, and I couldn’t wait to finish, so I made up my mind to move the car out, turn on the ceiling fans (which I installed when we were still playing poker in the garage), and even with the high humidity, go ahead and stain the lid.

And so I did.

Since this was the final coat, I had to be careful how I did the edges and make sure I didn’t get any marks on either side, so I put some masking tape on the sawhorses and got my fingers pretty dirty picking up the half dried boards to touch them up after I applied the final coat. The lid panels do not look perfect. They never were going to, due to the defects in the veneer, both antique and recent, and some of the repairs being more obvious than I had hoped. I am of a mind, however, that when the panels are completely dry, they should be able to be waxed and polished and that should make them look pretty good. Whatever, they look way better than when I started.

Same goes for the harp. I hadn’t planned to repaint the whole thing, but once I started touching it up, I could tell the paint color of the brush-on paint from a can was just different enough from the spray (same maker, same color: Rustoleum Gold) that I would need to go over the whole thing. It turned out a little uneven, but it gives the harp a rather classic effect of having been burnished and unevenly polished. Like the lid panels, it had a hard time drying in the moist air (it was not warm enough to turn on the air conditioning), but it did get dry enough by the late evening to pick it up and prop it back against the wall.

I’m thinking that with the staining, varnishing, and painting finished, I ought to be able to replace the harp, and if I want, even go ahead and string the piano. I’m double-checking with my piano expert to make sure I haven’t overlooked anything, but I think one evening this week, that is what I’m going to be doing. I should even be able to string the piano before too long, even though the keys and such are not ready yet. (That’s the next area I have to focus on.)

Yes there is still quite a ways to go, but we are definitely getting close to the completion of this project.

A brief interlude and plug for Craigslist

2010-09-26T13:08:00.000-05:00

I don’t know how many of you have ever bought or sold anything on craigslist, and I don’t own stock in it or it’s would-be majority owner (e-bay), but I’ve got to tell you: craigslist is da bomb!

Since making a conscientious decision to declutter my entire life of unnecessary people, things, theories, beliefs, and habits, I’ve been pulling stuff out of the closets, attic and garage of our home, most of which I was only vaguely aware of us owning, and much of which I hadn’t seen, touched or thought about in years. A sampling: First 8 volumes of OMNI magazine; volumes 2-6 of WIRED magazine; ninety pounds of weight plates; a Black&Decker Edge Hog; magazines for learning Japanese; about 200 vinyl LP’s; A microphone (?); two artificial Christmas trees.

There’s more, but all that stuff I mention above? I’ve actually found people who would buy from me. Part of it is, my prices are usually very, very reasonable. Part of it is, there are actually people who want/need this stuff. The Japanese magazines? Lady’s daughter is studying Japanese. Edge Hog? Guy had one for years and it broke. Mine needed a new blade, but he had an extra one, anyway! The records? Guy with 4000 records wanted more and I had some he didn’t. OMNI magazines? Big sci-fi, William Gibson fan. (He ended up getting the leftover WIRED’s after I sold half my collection to a guy in Arizona.)

I’ve sold most of my philosophy books through amazon. I sold my two nudie books of Brooke Shields and Madonna on e-bay. I’ve made right around $400 in just the last month, selling what is to me, junk. And you should see my garage! I can actually get in and out of all the storage areas.

Check out craigslist.org today. And while you’re there, buy some of my stuff!

Days 53 and 54 – Saturday, September 18 and Sunday, September 19: MOTHER OF ...

2010-09-26T08:51:00.000-05:00

Goals: Stain the damn lid; work on the inlay.

Music: Eldar’s “Live at the Blue Note”; Bill Evans’ “Complete Village Vanguard Recordings 1961” (all three discs); Bill Evans’ “Portrait in Jazz”; Art Farmer’s “Portrait of Art Farmer” and “Blame It on My Youth”.

This was to be an unexciting entry, anyway, so it is about a week late. My schedule was upset by having to serve on a U.S. District Court jury last week to convict a guy who trafficked in 15-year old prostitutes who were illegal aliens to boot. (Like I said: we convicted.)

Enough about that.

I’m one coat on one side of the lid from being finished with it. When I’m finished with that, I’ll be finished with staining except for any touch-ups I have to do on the inside after I install everything. I’m looking forward to that.

The mother-of-pearl inlay work is no fun. No fun at all. It is very tedious, very time consuming, very slow, very precise, and dirty work. I’ve inhaled so much old wood and varnish I’ve developed a dry hack that is pretty serious. To make matters worse, the mother-of-pearl that I bought looks new, while the MOP on my piano does not. I’m not sure how to spruce up the antique inlay or how to tone down the modern inlay. I’m back to thinking about scrapping the inlay board all together and installing something else. Or, I may go against Mrs. S’s suggestion and just go ahead and let the modern and ancient MOP mix on that board, for better or worse.

I just want to be done.

Next session will be completing the harp and completing the lid.

Regaining perspective

2010-09-17T05:23:00.000-05:00

Attentive readers of this blog will have noticed that of late, I have not been nearly as enthusiastic about my piano these days as I was in the first few days (and weeks, and months) after I got the thing. The reasons are numerous and varied but it all comes down to perception and perspective, namely that, when I look at my piano, in pieces spread out around the dining room and bedroom, it just looks like so many pieces of antique junk. Repair efforts improve upon the general appearance, but nothing ever quite reaches the level of expectation generated by pictures of other restored pianos that are online.

But that changed Monday night.

I answered an ad on Craigslist selling an 1854 square grand piano. I made an appointment to go look at it after school, and it turned out the owner had another piano she was willing to part with as well, “buyer’s choice”. The first one, a J & C Fischer, was actually in pretty decent shape. But as old as it is, its structure is completely different, and since I was basically just looking for parts for my piano, it wouldn’t do as it didn’t have the same kind of parts. The other, a Chickering, was more or less exactly the same as my piano. Neither one played. Both were missing key tops and strings. Both had pedal lyres that were completely disassembled and would require extensive repair. Neither had a sustain or soft mechanism that worked. Both were disasters on the surface, making we very nervous to look too closely on the insides. One was missing the prop arms for the lid (the Fischer), the other was missing one of the lid panels with the large one split on one end. The more I looked, the more I began to realize: by comparison, my piano is a gem. It’s got almost all its original parts. It worked when I got it. The keys were intact. All the mechanical parts worked. Nothing was missing or broken on the frame or exterior. And sure, I paid a lot more than the $500 that this young lady was asking for one of her pianos, but I got a helluva lot more piano than she had on offer. When all was said and done, I felt pretty good about my piano again, even re-energized, I might say.

I already know I’m not going to buy either of those pianos, but the owner did ask me to make an offer. So I plan to explain to her quite sincerely and in a straightforward manner, I’ll buy the whole piano for a few dollars, but I’ll buy the parts I need for just a bit more than that – basically charging her more (by paying her less) if I remove one of the pianos for her. I doubt she will like that offer, but she may surprise me.

But, the C&H Stone piano that I own? It’s much more of a gem than I realized. I’m lucky to have that piano after all.

Day 52 – Sunday, September 12: Moving forward again

2010-09-14T17:42:00.000-05:00

Goals: Finish cleaning up the three lid panels; repair any veneer damage; start staining if time allows.

Music: Eldar’s “Eldar”; Bill Evans’ “Conversations with Myself” and “Portrait in Jazz”

I got my contact cement back out and began fitting the little chunks of veneer back in the holes they came out of. Some fit better than others. Some I had to fabricate from scratch. Some stuck to my fingers and got crushed or broken and had to also be fabricated. Some holes were too small to mess with putting in pieces of veneer, so they had to be filled in with wood filler. It was tedious, time consuming work.

While waiting for the glue to set and the wood filler to dry, I took my small, sharp scraper and removed most of the last of the old finish. Some of it was more stubborn than others, and the bits around the edge were pretty solid and even more stubborn, so I got out the Dremel and used it to clean up the last of the old finish. When I had nothing but bare wood, I sanded down the wood-filled and glued veneer. That left me about an hour before lunch, and with a good breeze blowing, I stained all of the sides that did not have any repairs on them.

It was a solid, productive weekend. This week, I’ll be using the evenings to work on the internal parts to get them ready, and next weekend I hope to tackle the mother-of-pearl inlay, plus continue staining. I hope it rains next weekend. I need an artsy-craftsy sort of atmosphere to have the right mood to work on the delicate stuff.

We’re getting close now. It will still be at least another month, but we are getting close. I mark my progress on the piano by the stuff I put away. This past weekend, I put away the sander, the varnish, the wood glue, and the wood filler. Although I can’t imagine what I will be completing next that will eliminate the need for any tools or materials, I hope there is at least one thing I can set aside next weekend.

Day 51 – Saturday, September 11 – Curses

2010-09-12T09:18:00.001-05:00

Goals: Figure out what to do to make the lid portion look good

Music: Duke Ellington’s “Never No Lament” (disc 3), Duke’s “Newport 1956") (both discs)

Friday night, the management team and spouses from my company were having a send-off dinner for our boss of eight years. The topics ranged from golf, to fishing, to music, to the meaning of the letter ‘H’ in Japanese, to my piano. Several people asked how the renovation was going and when they might expect to hear it played. I told them honestly that of late, the project had not been going very well, and that I was leaning that when dealing with an antique piano, every time you make a little bit of progress, something comes and bites you in the ass. Typically, (I explained) when you try to fix something wood, it chips or cracks, and when you move something, a fitting or other part requires adjustment, screw holes don’t line up, wood doesn’t take stain, etc. etc. I recall I did not knock on wood at any point in the conversation. (I’m not sure the fiberboard of the Chinese restaurant’s table would have qualified anyway.)

So, on Saturday, I’m hard at work on the piano lid. I had been unhappy with the appearance of the first coat of stain, as I could clearly see the sander’s tracks in the old coating. So I decided to sand the hell out of the big board that was giving me the headache. Six pieces of sanding paper at three different grits and an hour later, I was left with a slightly more manageable mess, but I was not at all happy with how the board looked. The curse of retracing my steps is still not dissolved. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that I did not want to take a step backward on this project, and that I shouldn't have done anything with the sander and just lived with the result. The curse of regret, again.

But the can of chemical stripper was calling to me.

I took out the stripper, applied a liberal coat, and scraped away most of my problems. The veneer came off in a few places, but I rescued the pieces for regluing later. I decided to do the back and the other two pieces with the stripper as well. And that’s what I spent the rest of the afternoon on. Here’s the result:

Three uncoated lid panels – shiny spots still need scraping, bright spots need veneer repair

One cut (thumb) and one missing skin chunk (disinfected very nicely with highly acidic tri-phosphate wash)

Some chemical burns when a panel almost fell off the sawhorses.

Things should go better today. I think the curse on the piano is finally starting to wear off.

Day 50 – Monday, September 6 – The Pain of Stain:

2010-09-08T06:19:00.002-05:00

Goals: Keep staining

Music: Duke Ellington’s “New Orleans Suite”

I carried all three of the lid panels out to the garage, lined them up on the sawhorses, and stained one side and all edges of all three of them. They dried pretty good after I brushed them down, but they’ll need another coat. They don’t look very good. Mrs. S. says I’m too close to the project and my sensibilities when I’m looking at the piano are “paralyzed”. She may be right. Personally, I’m no longer working on this piano for some future buyer. I’m working on it for myself. So, like I said in my most recent entry, I’m going to tolerate of lot of the imperfections in the interest of finishing up this project without undue delay.

The good news is, I’m playing and practicing a lot, both for my jazz improve course and for stuff my piano instructor and I have been working on. That is all the more reason to finish up the piano and hear it play again.

Days 48 and 49 – Saturday, September 4 and Sunday, September 5 – Never No Lament:

2010-09-06T08:48:00.000-05:00

Goals: Get back in the swing of things, stain and seal the piano, get the lid ready for the same, stain and finish the harp trim, finish the harp.

Music: Duke Ellington’s “Never No Lament” (discs 1 and 2); Bill Evan’s “Everybody Digs Bill Evans”

I’d be lying if I said I am not a little disappointed in how the piano is turning out. I can’t say it was wholly unexpected and that my disappointment is even surprising, just that my expectations were high and now they are not so.

I began finishing the piano, starting with the piece of veneer. Honestly, it looked really good until I stained it, but after staining, every little imperfection came out. I thought briefly about redoing the veneer, but that is too big a step backward that I just don’t want to take for the back of the piano. I mean, don’t get me wrong: before I put the veneer on, it was a torn up, scratched, water-stained, sun-bleached nightmare. It looks 2000% better than it did, but it looks only about 85% as good as I hoped.

So, I stuck with the plan and stained the entire piano, then I went back with the brush and added the texture and depth and removed the excess stain. Even with the windows open and the fan blowing, it barely dried in time to do a second coat the next day. The second coat improved the appearance of the veneer just that little bit more. It’s okay, just not great. I found it funny that I was listening to "Never No Lament" while pondering the piano's appearance. It's good I let those thoughts go.

At the same time I was doing that, I was also outside staining the harp trim. That was just a little tricky, but I managed to get it completed and they will probably be dry enough to handle sometime today.

When I had gotten the staining out of the way, I got to work on the three pieces of the lid. The first step was to make the hinge slots a little bigger to hold the new hinges I bought. That required some delicate cutting and carving, and sure enough, with the brittle old wood, one of the pieces gave up a chunk of wood between the hinge slot and the edge of the board, and that will require extra repairing. Cosmetic this, cosmetic that. I removed the rubber baby buggy bumpers from the holes where they had been stained and sealed over, trimmed the hinge slot edges, then sanded the heck out of all three pieces, including the veneer bubbles which despite my best efforts simply cannot be repaired, due to age and the poor condition of the wood. I mean, to be fair to myself, most of the problems I’m encountering are completely unavoidable. Sure this sounds like scapegoating and rationalizing, but I’m willing to bet at least 50% of the people who might have undertaken to refurbish this piano would have long since given up. Seriously. I’ve often thought about just gutting the damn thing (in this case, leaving it gutted), and making a desk out of it. Either that or I could just cut a bit of hole to slide my Yamaha keyboard in and make a fancy “antique digital piano”.

But no. (never no lament, never no lament...) People will understand that 120-year old things don’t look perfect and they will, I hope, focus on the nice new color, the clean looking harp, the bright copper strings, and the scarlet red felt, and the lovely sound, when all is said and done. Yes, the veneer has bubbles, some of which are over a hundred years old, but you’ll be lucky if you make it to that age and don’t have a few blemishes of your own.

Today I’m finishing the harp and starting on the long hard process of staining the lid. Right after I cut the grass.

Oh, and I have to find rubber baby buggy bumpers, or, these things.

If you know where I can get any, let me know. I need four of them.

Day 47 – Sunday, August 22: Not much, but it’s something

2010-09-04T13:21:00.000-05:00

(I'm about to get back into working on the piano. Here's an entry from the spell when I was hardly working on it, the last three weeks.)

Goals: Get back in the swing of things as much as the heat will allow.

Music: Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Kirkatron”

This has been a recurring theme these last three weeks, but, it’s been hot outside. It prevents working on the piano top, doing any outdoor stain work, or opening the windows to do indoor stain work. And, stain work is the next thing that needs to be done. So I’ve been looking for the odd jobs that don’t depend upon putting the piano back together. I still have to touch up the harp (again, need open windows, probably), and about half the felt work on the keyboard (a job that can be done any time and doesn’t need special attention. Then there’s cleaning and staining the stool, and doing the fine engraving work on the mother-of-pearl inlay. That also requires outdoor work to keep the dust to a minimum, and even as hot as it was, I decided to give those last two a try.

My new engraving tools for the Dremel really work great. I was able to clean out all of the old glue from where the mother of pearl pieces had fallen off the decorative board. What I was finding, however, was that whoever did the original job use some kind of plastic resin filler that looks like mother of pearl, but isn’t. That drastically increases the amount of work that board is going to require. So, I spent about an hour cleaning that. Then I went to work on the stool. I cleaned up the stool for about an hour as well. I was dripping with sweat, so I stopped. I did not attempt any more jobs inside or outside on the piano.

So, as the title says, it wasn’t much, but it was something. I’m working on my piano, again, even if in a limited fashion.

Where I’m at

2010-09-01T21:47:00.002-05:00

Before you jump to any conclusions, let me just say that I have not forgotten that I have an antique square grand piano taken apart in my dining room (and bedroom, and garage). The problem – and yes, I’ve been using this excuse for weeks now – is the heat, because I have nothing but outdoor jobs that I need to do next: staining, sanding, engraving, etc. My original estimate for completion of this project was Labor Day. Needless to say, that isn’t going to happen. I’m thinking the end of this month might be possible if I really get going again, but sometime in October seems a lot more feasible. At least with the temperature getting down into the 60’s at night again (finally!), I should be able to get to some of the sanding and refinishing. That sort of work energizes me to work on the artsy jobs (felt work, engraving) to keep moving toward completion. Number one, though, is to get the harp back in. I just want that off the floor.

Without the desire to work on the piano, I’ve been concentrating on my playing. UAH actually decided to hold the jazz improvisation course with just three students, and we have to play every week, so I’ve been practicing. It’s amazing how much my playing actually improves when I’m practicing. Honestly, I was a little bit surprised. But as I said before, I’m really only trying to make sure I’ll be able to play half way decently when my piano is finished, because I’m sure anyone who sees it will want to hear it as well.

So, yes, I’m procrastinating a little, but don’t worry. Late-to-jazz will be getting more piano updates before long.

Finally, I need everybody to send me a couple bucks so I can buy one of these:

http://www.sonymusicdigital.com/miles-davis/details/5506623

I REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT ONE!!!!

What a song can do to you

2010-08-22T09:46:00.002-05:00

In the last two weeks, I’ve probably heard Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s version of “This Masquerade” maybe four times. It’s positively one of the greatest versions of one of the greatest songs ever recorded. And how delighted I was when I found it in one of my real books. And how much more delighted I was when I found I could practice bass-chord technique that my instructor and I discussed and worked on in an effort to revive my playing. But what really revived my playing, more than trying to get back the chops from months ago when I was playing every day, is trying to get that one song to sound right. It just makes me want to play it again and again. Even Mrs. S came into my room one morning when I was practicing before going for my morning walk, long about 5:20 AM. “You’re playing the piano?!” she exclaimed/asked. “Every morning.” And I have stuck with it. I’m actually back on track with my playing.

So this weekend, when I launch back into working on my piano, I’ve got to just keep up with my playing, and in a month or two, the whole package should come together.

Oh, and if you didn’t already draw this conclusion, I bought the CD recording of Kirk’s “TM”. (You can get it on a fantastic double LP on one CD: Kirkatron/Boogie-Woogie String Along For Real.) I'll be listening to it all weekend.

Concert schedule

2010-08-16T19:54:00.003-05:00

With the severe heat taking both a psychological and physical toll, not to mention preventing any work being done outside (sanding the piano lid) or inside with open windows (finishing the piano), I took a pass altogether on working on the piano this past weekend. I also started to realize, that if I don’t start playing the piano on a regular basis, when I’m finished with the piano, I’ll be relegating to spending all my time regaining my chops instead of making fine music on my restored antique instrument. So I started working on Hanon and my stride playing, as well as my 2-5-1 chord progressions around the circle of fifths and generally doing some “grunt” work in the musicality area. It served me well, I think.

So, here’s a non-piano related entry I wrote earlier in the week and didn’t post:

After Mrs. S and I made a trip down to Birmingham AL for a Joshua Bell concert a few months back, and it turned out to be not so hard to drive down and back in one night as we thought, we decided to try and attend more concerts in our state’s largest city. Fortunately, in addition to having another concert with Mr. Bell next January, there are also a number of big name jazz stars making their way to The Magic City, and we decided to see the majority of them.

With the likes of Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, and Poncho Sanchez headed our way, we decided to beef up our music collection. Since the only Metheny I have is the collaboration with Brad Mehldau, and I don’t much care for it, we are picking up “Bright Size Life” to beef up the jazz guitar area of our collection. (We already have two Frisell works, including the classic “Have a Little Faith”.) For the prolific Poncho Sanchez, who we had not a single CD of, the choice was not as clear, but we decided to go with “Psychedelic Blues” and “Latin Soul”. I decided also to get Ted Nash’s “Portrait in Seven Shades”, since we heard four of them at the Jazz at Lincoln Center concert in March, and Nikki Yanofsky’s “Nikki”, because I’ve heard three or four tracks from that recording and they are all sensational. (Cracks me up when reviewers on Amazon are like, “She’s going to be really great someday when she gets older.” Those people are obviously not listening closely enough and are making a judgment due to bias and not age impartiality. Neither here nor there…)

I seldom need excuses for buying music, but if I get excuses, like the ones above, I’m sure to get some music.

Lots to listen to when I work on my piano this weekend. (But like I said, I didn’t work on my piano this weekend.)

Day 46 – Monday, August 9 – Making Use of TV Time:

2010-08-10T17:46:00.001-05:00

Goals: Anything that can be done while watching TV and drinking wine.

Music: Themes from “American Pickers” and “Pawn Stars”.

Yesterday I finally tracked down the screws I needed for the damper arm assemblies. (I actually tracked them down last week, but they were special order; I picked them up yesterday.) With the felt just having been put down, I had no good reason not to reattach the damper arms to their frame. Still, I decided to work on the key felt first.

Although it was not as sticky as I hoped, I had some two-sided tape that was just the same width as the keys, so I decided to attach the small felt pieces using it instead of glue. Some of my double felt pieces had some overlap or were a little uneven and such, so I had to do a lot of trimming of felt. Long story short, in about an hour, I got felt attached to about a third of the keys. I could probably have finished the lot in one night, but it was so tedious and tiring (do you know how hard it is to focus 46-year-old eyes on a TV fifteen feet away and then a piece of quarter inch felt a foot and a half away, then TV, then felt, then TV, then felt…for an hour?), that I decided to work in stages on that and instead moved to the damper arms.

I was able to reattach all the damper arms in exactly one hour.

That was a helluva productive night compared to most Mondays.

Next Monday is the first night of class. I’m enrolled in jazz improvisation, but word has it there are only two students signed up as of now, so it is unlikely the class will be held. We’ll see.

Days 44 and 45 – Saturday, August 7 and Sunday, August 8 – Plugging Away:

2010-08-09T18:41:00.001-05:00

Goals: Finish the harp; do any job that is still open that is preventing me from re-installing the harp; continue with the felt work; clean and felt the keys.

Music: Miles Davis’ “The Complete ‘In a Silent Way’ Sessions” (discs 2 and 3); Kenny Dorham’s “Round About Midnight at the Café Bohemia” (both discs); Down to the Bone’s “Urban Grooves II” and “Supercharged”; Eldar’s “Live at the Blue Note”. (We’re in the ‘E’s now, but we had to skip Miles Davis’ Complete Columbia Recordings, and we have a slew of Ellington to work through…)

I wish there were some way to better organize the remaining work on the piano, but it seems that everything comes at me sideways, so I’ve been content just tackling whatever job comes my way whenever I think of it. So on Saturday, all I did was punch out all the felt I needed for the damper rods, then reassembled the damper rods. (All 61 of them.) It required a lot of regluing of punchings, as not all of them took to the wood glue. I used a hole puncher to punch out little circles of two sided tape. That worked pretty well. Tedious, but at least the music was good.

Sunday ended up being odd jobs day. I washed all the keys (85 of them). The black ones I just used dish detergent and water, but the white ones, I tried using the Dremel with a kind of scouring pad, but after three keys, it was completely worn out, so I washed them with Soft Scrub with bleach and a good stiff brush, and they came out looking, well not new, but clean and antique. I had to repair six of them, but the end result was a nice looking set of piano keys.

As I washed them, I pulled off all the old felt and the tattered leather strips from the back checks. I took the Dremel and two wire brush fittings to get all the leather and felt remnants off. I’m not really looking forward to putting those suckers back on, but I think if I want to take it slow, I can maybe do that job while watching TV. At least that way, I won’t go insane like I would if I tried to deal with all those tiny felt squares in one sitting.

After completely cleaning the keys, I set about removing the two broken screws that held the center portion of the harp. I used my easy outs to grind away as much of the old screws as possible, then I just drilled until I could insert my screws in the holes. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s feasible and it will look nice.

I briefly sanded the veneer where I tried to cut out the bubble. I’ve decided I’m going to live with it the way it is.

I cut out two large pieces of felt: one for the underside of the damper cover, and one for the damper arms. That was very tricky due to the slight curve of each piece, but it turned out that my felt was almost the exact length when the two pieces were lined up, so I actually did not use much felt to get those two pieces cut out. Gluing them was a little tricky, as I had to use thumbtacks to stretch them to the right size and shape, but they look really nice. I did a good job.

It was definitely a full weekend. Next step is to refinish the piano so I can set about reinstalling the harp. I need a break in the weather to do that, though, as I’m going to want to open the windows to keep those fumes from penetrating the entire house.

Day 43 - Wednesday, August 4: Pain from a punch

2010-08-06T05:40:00.002-05:00

Goals: Make some felt punchings

Music: Charles Mingus' "Mingus, Ah, Um"

My punch kit arrived yesterday, so last night I was anxious to try it out on the felt. It did not work like I hoped or expected, at all. In fact, I’m going to have to come up with some kind of solution. I mean, I was able to punch out one piece of felt, but I did so by pressing and rotating the punch because no amount of pounding would get the punch to penetrate the felt. I was using soft-ish backings, so I guess I really need to get a solid piece of wood that I can bang the crap out of to get the punch to go through the felt. But what a pain. I just wanted to sit and watch TV and snap these things out in short order with little effort and distraction. I don’t really want to have to get a hammer and solid surface and pay attention in order to open up 61 holes. But it looks as though I have no choice.

On another note, the University of Maryland, curator of the Howe Collection of Musical Literature, and whom I contacted about getting some information about C. H. Stone and Company, has notified me that they have two catalogs from the 1880's available for photocopy or digital copy. I'm in the process now of getting one of them sent to me.

Very exciting.

Day 42 –Sunday, August 1 – Somebody give me a punch

2010-08-02T18:34:00.000-05:00

Goals: Finish the damper rods; start work on the stool; clean the damper rods.

Music: Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue”; Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch”; Kenny Dorham’s “Afro-Cuban”.

I thought it would be a relatively straightforward kind of productive workday. I saw the tasks laid out before me and was sure I’d be able to get right through them and have them done in an efficient amount of time.

I thought.

Turns out I spent most of my time looking for tools or researching tools or materials that I will need to complete the jobs I saw before me.

The biggest obstacle was a hole punch. Mrs. S is a big-time crafter, hobbyist, jewelry designer, one-time shadow-box-maker, with boxes of tools and craft supplies. I felt sure she had a hole punch that I could use to punch out some felt to finish the damper arms. And while she does indeed have a veritable library of hole punching and design punching tools, a plain old 3/8” round hole punch, which is what I needed, was sorely lacking. I tried a quarter inch punch, but the felt punching that resulted was just too small to do anything with. A failed preliminary search on the Internet led to a two-person tandem search that took a little more than half an hour, and resulted in me buying a hole punch kit (to be delivered by this Wednesday).

So, no punchings to finish the damper rods. I did glue the ones I bought for the upper side onto the wooden disks, so they are ready to attach once I can make the rest of the punchings.

All that, along with polishing the damper cover knobs, occupied the entire afternoon.

Polishing the damper cover holders was fun because, they were a very uniformly, not terribly ugly, flat black, and although I knew they were metal, I suspected they were just lead or tin or something and I was wondering what kind of paint I would use to brighten them up. Turns out a Dremel with a wire brush fitting and a little patience was all it took to bring them back to their glorious shiny brass origins. The before-and-after photo below tells all:

In the morning I used my sanding mouse and the Dremel to start cleaning up the stool parts. Very tedious work, that. Those Dremel wire brushes aren’t cheap, but I’m going through two or three every weekend. When I was completely soaked through with sweat and couldn’t keep from dripping on the stool anymore, I gave that up for the day.

Oh, also in the afternoon, I washed the damper arms. Murphy’s Oil Soap, a bucket, and a sponge. It looks like the upper portion of those arms was some kind of paper, so some of it scraped off, especially on the corners and edges. I’ll either have to leave it as is with that look of worn authenticity but uniformity, or else I’ll have to glue some of my own paper of some design onto it. Not sure how I’ll feel once I’ve got everything in place.

By the way, one of the damper arms had already been broken and repaired once. It needed re-repairing, which was easy enough, but as I’ve been saying, I’m running into a lot of task interference on these various jobs.

I’m not sure that Labor Day is feasible as the day when I’ll be able to play this piano again. We’ll just have to keep pressing forward and see what happens…