Another "In and out of jazz" story

I recently had the opportunity to make my second trip ever to lovely Greenville, South Carolina. If you’ve never been there, downtown Greenville is a nice little place, where many years ago, they had the foresight to narrow Main Street from four lanes to two, and widened the sidewalks and installed a bunch of greenery. The result is a quaint little boomtown, where sidewalk cafes, restaurants, bars, and snack shops proliferate. The two jazz clubs that I saw, however, we’re not proliferating. Both were closed.

L to R: Gage Banks, Garrett Graettinger, Morgan McGee, Roman Holder, Riley LePere. Damn! Are those great jazz musician names, or what!? 

Then I went to the first night’s reception of the event I was attending, the 40th annual SEUS-Japan Conference, and what do you know? There was a jazz band about to set to swinging. This jazz band was a quintet of young men, with the unusual instrumentation of alto sax, baritone sax and rhythm section. Of course, I had been drinking and I have no reservations about anything when jazz is involved, so I walked right up to them and said, “Play 'Scrapple from the Apple' ”. They looked at me quizzically, as this was not in their main repertoire from what I could gauge from their reaction. In fact, the leader, their pianist Morgan McGee looked at me funny and said, “What?” I repeated my request and they still looked confused. Then I goofed.

“You know, Monk!”

Roman takes a solo, while Riley plans his. (Morgan had already set them up with his bluesy lead.)

At this point, I think they wanted me to go away, but I didn’t. I said, “No, wait. That’s Charlie Parker. Play some Monk.” This they could relate to. They swung through a pretty terrific take of “In Walked Bud”, including piano and both sax solos. I complimented them and their solos, told them to play Miles when they saw me coming out, and left for the dinner. That, was that.

Riley and Roman go to the head ,with Garrett holding them up in back.

Or so I thought.

At the next night’s reception, there they were again, but I was on the other side of the venue windows. I waved, got their attention, made piano motions and mouthed “Monk, Monk!” Once inside, I introduced myself and my blog, and later on they did play “In Walked Bud” again, as I sat there and enjoyed myself and Mrs. S proceeded to ingest oysters that would eventually give her food poisoning.

Your blogger with the young saxophonists. I'm the fat one on the left.

So, I compliment Greenville on at least trying to have a jazz scene, and I compliment the young gentlemen you see pictured here on their pursuit of one of America’s greatest art forms (I would say, “the greatest”). Next time they see me, I’ll probably say, “In walked me, so you know what I want!” I’m sure that "Bud" will be close behind.

Something worth reading

I read about jazz every chance I get, so when I was offered a review copy of pianist Fred Hersch’s memoir, Good Things Happen Slowly, I gladly accepted. What follows is an edited version of a review I posted on Amazon.

Prior to reading this book, I was only vaguely aware of Fred Hersch and his accomplishments, and then, mainly only his work as a record producer. To find out that he is an accomplished pianist, composer, advocate of various causes, coma survivor, and now a writer, was a real revelation. Early in his career, he played with a lot of jazz luminaries who unlike Mr. Hersch, were late in their careers. Those nostalgic kinds of stories about late jazz legends are always enjoyable, especially for the perspective they give about bygone jazz eras. I was also interested to learn that he is a fellow Ohioan who is close to my age. So even though I do not share his sexual orientation, which drives a number of his storylines – and obviously, portions of his life – I found his tales highly relatable and not entirely without correlation in my own life. That sort of thing always makes for good reading.

I will say, however, that Mr. Hersch is not the best writer. What was really surprising is, I thought that the main thing lacking from his prose was rhythm. He just chooses too many goofy, not completely accurate words, so when the narrative starts bouncing around, there was a tendency to get lost and lose the entire track of the narrative. Then I would have to go back and reread passages to piece the story back together. It’s just like playing in a jazz combo, too, in that when the rhythm isn’t there, the musicians tend to make bad decisions. I think that is why his word choice was not always correct, where what he wanted to say was somehow conveyed, but in a convoluted or “out of rhythm” fashion. He also drove me crazy calling a cello a ‘cello. I thought that was just plain obstinate, especially because it wouldn’t have been much of an issue except he has worked with a lot of ‘cellists who play ‘cello.

The book will be on sale September 12, 2017.

For the most part, I enjoyed this book, but it was a bit dark and melancholic at times, maybe even morose. Just the same, Mr. Hersch has certainly led an unusual, and at times charmed, life. If his writing was as good as his music, this book would have been a lot better, but it’s still a good look at an interesting corner of the jazz world.

Composer’s Studio: The Resurrection

A couple years back, I set about buying a piano, which required me to not only think about space, but to actually organize it. At the time, I had a notion to turn our smallest room into a compact and efficient studio. Put my digital piano in next to my computer, have all my musical accoutrements in the near vicinity, install some music software, put all my nice instruments in a separate room with my grand piano, and I’d have anefficient little composer’s space. Its nativity was right on plan.

Who wants to write a song here?

Then I started getting more involved in online reviewing, and products started to roll in. Pretty soon, my composer’s space had deteriorated into a miniature Amazon warehouse. It was good to have the delineated space for tax purposes and for keeping some of the clutter out of the house, but it was bad for composing, of which I did none. Something had to change.

Before the junk

After the junk

The first thing I did was cut back on the reviews and declutter. That at least gave me some ground to recover the space. With the addition of a dedicated music making computer and some MIDI controllers, however, I was soon recompacted into my tiny space. It was then we decided to sell the pool table and use the billiard room as a studio.

View of the future studio from the top of the stairs

Unfortunately, the billiard room was essentially unused for about ten years, other than to store boxes and gizmos Mrs. S and I had lost (or never had) interest in. That meant it needed refurbishing – wall repair, new switch and socket covers, a paint job, a working toilet, usable furniture – before it could be used as a studio.

View of the future studio back toward the stairs

That’s where we are now. The contractors – a plumber, an electrician, a painter – arrive Monday. Also arriving Monday is the nascence of my new composer’s studio.

Goat rodeo and a banjo player

While Mrs. S has had multiple opportunities to see the cellist Yo Yo Ma perform, until recently, I had not. But for our season ending concert at the Nashville Symphony, we were second row front and center for Yo Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer (second time to see him in two months), and Chris Thile, that is, three quarters of the Goat Rodeo, perform some Bach pieces. This was interesting and unusual for a couple of reasons.

Yo Yo Ma always looks like he is having a good time. Probably, because he is.

One was that performing in Nashville, they could have easily found a “fiddler” to fill out the quartet and perform the goat rodeo pieces. Another is, the pieces they performed were mostly not necessarily composed for trios. In fact, most of them that were announced were organ pieces that had been adapted for a trio. This of course glosses over the fact how you make a fugue work for a trio consisting of a cello, double bass, and mandolin. Second of all, I think Edgar Meyer is the only local, so even getting three fourths of the band there was no small feat. But it gets better.

This is about as casual as Edgar Meyer gets.

During the encore, they were actually joined by Stuart Duncan, who was either in the audience or was there to perform the encore. In the end, I felt a little cheated that we could have been listening to classical bluegrass and instead had to listen to Bach trios. Then again, I had a certain familiarity with the Bach pieces, so I appreciated them enough as it was.

The Goat Rodeo Team

But the real highlight might have been something else.

At intermission, we followed our customary “beer first, bathroom later” plan. As often happens, for some reason, the men’s seems to take a little longer, so even though Mrs. S was waiting for me when the five minute bell rang, I didn’t know she was already out. As I’m standing there waiting, Bela Fleck walked right by me and into the men’s room. So I’m waiting for Mrs. S and she finally shouts at me from upstairs, and I say, “It’s Bela Fleck!” and she goes, “That’s what I thought!” Just then Bela comes out, so we started to chat. We were dressed like brothers, and he seemed impressed that I even knew who he was. When I rattled off some concerts of his I’d been to while Mrs. S took pictures, he was kind of like, “Shouldn’t we be getting back to our seats?” and I was like, let’s walk and talk, and we did. Very personable friendly guy.

Brothers from other mothers: Bela Fleck in black T with jacket, me in black tee with jacket.

When we were leaving at the end of the concert, we walked right by him and the people he was there with, as he was waiting by the stage door to (I think) go backstage and hang with his musician friends. He greeted us again, and my brain fleetingly thought about pulling out one of my “Late to Jazz” business cards (which I always have with me for just such these purposes) and asking if he could get me backstage. But, I felt I’d imposed enough on the guy, so I merely bid him good night and we left.

I told the story to quite a few people, but unfortunately, Mr. Fleck is not as well known in my circle of acquaintances to make a decent impression, so I just have to share the story, and pictures, here with my late-to-jazzers.

I don't know, but they seem to be having a good time. I want to be a professional musician 

So there you go. Not a bad conclusion to another eventful concert season.

What a front row stage level seat makes you think about at the symphony

I started to think about this about a month ago, as I watched and listened to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra perform Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”. Then, this past week, when we went to see and hear Ravel’s “Bolero”, I had the point finally driven home and decided to write about it.

Possibly the best shoes at the concert

I’m talking about, in general, all the things that have to “go right” for a symphony orchestra to pull off a two hour musical performance. The things that can go wrong are myriad and varied: broken strings, fainting spells, turning the wrong score pages, instruments going out of tune, principal soloists catching cold, and any number of imaginable mishaps, however unlikely. What goes unnoticed in waiting for something to go wrong is how many things have to go right.

A selection of men's and lady's

Shoes, for instance. 79 pairs of shoes have to comfortable, broken in, shined, and functional, enough that 158 feet go completely unnoticed and un-thought-about for the 79 owners. This is important because as anybody who has ever had sore feet or a pair of ill-fitting shoes – which is probably every person who has ever owned shoes – knows, you can’t do a damn thing or concentrate or think of anything other than your feet when they hurt. You wouldn’t think of shoes being important to a concert performance, but I would argue, it could be one of the most critical aspects to a successful performance. Then, of course, you get into the rest of the clothes and personal grooming aspects. Underwear has to be comfortable. Skin has to not be itchy. Underarms have to not be irritated. Horn players’ lips have to be moist, supple and strong. String instrument players’ fingers have to be uncut, firm, and flexible. Percussionists arms have to be loose and responsive.

Those are sharp!

Then the surroundings: The stage has to be supportive but quiet. Music stands have to be upright, straight, and adjustable. Chairs have to be firm, comfortable, secure, and also adjustable. The AC or heat has to come on. The lights need to work. The doors need to be unlocked. 79 cars have to be in good working order and have to find roads that are passable between the performers’ houses and the concert hall. They need to not have accidents on the drive in. They all need to have gas in the tank.

No surprise, these are probably my favorite

Really, given everything that has to happen and not go wrong, it’s amazing there are such things as symphony performances at all.

Visiting my piano’s birthplace

Yamaha's Kakegawa piano factory

Not long before Christmas, Mrs. S and I made our way over to Taiwan and Japan for a bit of vacationing, catching up with family, and eating beef-and-rice bowls (among many other Japanese foods we can’t get in Alabama). I didn’t particularly want to go, but when a dirt-cheap plane ticket came available, I was compelled to make the trip. Mrs. S wanted to know what I wanted to do there, but I had no agenda, so she came up with the idea of visiting the Yamaha piano factory in Kakegawa, near Hamamatsu, as another enticement to keep me on the trip.

In front of the one time home of my piano that now lives in Alabama

The factory is not easy to get to, but like most of Japan, it isn’t particularly hard to get to, either. Getting that far off the beaten track somewhere north of Nagoya was interesting, to say the least. It was actually harder to find a place to eat lunch than it was to visit the factory.

One of the nicer looking pianos in the lobby

Prior to the start of the tour, there is a large reception area with one or two of every musical instrument that Yamaha makes, plus about ten different pianos. There were even two concert grands in an isolation room, one of which was the one-millionth piano ever made by Yamaha. I spent a while playing that, trying to feel like the great pianist, Richter, for whom it was basically custom made. Needless to say, my halting renditions of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “Maple Leaf Rag” did not do much to promote those feelings.

Perspective skewed by the camera makes the piano look about five feet long...

...but it's much, MUCH longer than that (almost ten feet).

I wasn't kidding: their one millionth piano. Numbers guy me loves that.

The tour is a conducted affair that takes about an hour and a half. They do give English tours, but ours was in Japanese. We were one of two couples, joined by a small eight or ten person group of (possibly?) music students. The tour starts with two videos where they show you the “3K” parts of piano production, 3K translating from Japanese into the 3D: dirty, difficult, and dangerous. So, we didn’t actually see any tree cutting, wood fabricating, hardware casting, painting, or frame assembly. After the videos, the guide took her time showing us whippens, hammers, felt, and things like that, which I had seen plenty of when I took my square grand apart. The factory was all about pin and string insertion, action assembly and adjustment, and tuning.

Some other pianos that could be tried out

For me, there were two particularly impressive things. First was the sheer number of people they have working on pianos. Of course, anyone who has worked on a piano knows how labor intensive it is, but the point is really driven home when you see how many people are working on the very mundane, but meticulous tasks of piano adjustment. The other thing was, Yamaha doesn’t make all of one piano at a time. If you stand at the top of one of the production lines and look down, you can see that the pianos are (mostly) all different sizes (lengths). It is not uncommon to see a couple G1’s or G2’s, some C1’s, C7’s and C5’s, and never see two in a row the same size. It’s actually kind of disconcerting. Not surprisingly, the parts racks are meticulously labeled and mixed all together. It’s kind of unbelievable.

Some boxes to test different string types

The tour culminates in a listening room where there are three identical pianos that each sound completely different from the other two. The guide played a bit of Fur Elise on them, and the differences were hardly subtle and quite noticeable. Again, for three identical pianos to come off the line within a few days (hours?) of each other and yet sound so different, it really makes a statement about the craftsmanship that goes into each piano. Truly remarkable. We also each received a keychain made from an authentic piano hammer embossed with the Yamaha logo. It was nice that Mrs. S and I both got one, so we can use one and keep the other clean and safe as a trip memento.

"Been there, done that, in their anniversary year" photo

It seems highly likely that I will never buy another acoustic piano, given how well my C1-X holds tune and how I will probably never live in a house larger than the one I’m in now. But I do know that if I do buy one, it will come from this factory. I owe it to myself to get the best possible musical instrument, and that is what the Kakegawa factory makes. I saw that for myself.

Our souvenirs.