Practice regimen

I’ve been thinking about my practice regimen lately. (As opposed to actually practicing, which would require that I sit at the piano and work, which I just haven’t been in the mood for lately.) Back in March, I developed a sort of plan, a list made up of things that I thought might be useful to practice on a regular basis. I put it in a spreadsheet so that I could print out a sort of tracking grid to actually be able to see what I was practicing and when and how often and sometimes (if I noted it), for how long. It was an excellent idea and I kept at it for one whole month before it got shunted to the wayside. Since I’ve been working on some new things in my lessons, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit it, add to it, and start using it again.

Here it is:


Obviously, there is far too much here to practice it all every day, unless you maybe do so for just a few minutes on each exercise or practice for at least two hours – which is out of my reach at the moment due to a lack of discipline. I would think that a minimum of ten minutes per area is required to realize any sort of advancement, but I find I have to spend more than that on most things before I feel I’m doing any better on it (like scales and stride work.).

One of the important things missing from the sheet is tunes. I feel that after practicing, one must make time for playing. That can be playing just to play, or playing to implement what was practiced. More often than not, for me, it’s the latter, because I think that’s what makes me sound better, but I also an not entirely against the idea of just playing a few songs to make me feel good in general and forget about the burn in my knuckles.

And so, having written all I can write for the moment about practice, I think I will go and actually do some. School starts pretty soon and if I’m going to take some classes, I’m going to have to audition, so, I’d better practice.

The Audition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First jazz piano audition: Part 1

Well, I had my first ever audition as a jazz pianist two days ago. As I mentioned before, I’ve decided to take some music courses at my alma mater, the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I enrolled in jazz improvisation and jazz ensemble. In order to play in the ensemble, a student must audition with the director of the ensembles, to allow him to place the students in groups of a similar level and knowledge. It took me a little while to get in touch with the guy and schedule the audition, but I finally succeeded. As it would happen, my piano instructor, who also graduated from UAH, knows the jazz ensemble director very well, so I asked him to prep me for the audition during my lesson on Wednesday.

He told me that the director would probably have me play a ballad, so we worked on A Child is Born for just a little bit. Then he said, he’ll probably have you play a blues in B-flat, so we worked on Blue Monk for a little while too. Then, he’ll probably have you sight read something. Since we’d never played Tune Up before, we sight read that. Mind you, my instructor was giving pointers all along the way, so many in fact, I was having a little trouble processing them all. Then he says, for another sight reading practice, let’s look at Blue Bossa. Well, there was another I’d never bothered to look at, and even though I like Kenny Dorham, a lot, I’d never even heard the song. So, we tried to play it. I couldn’t do much with it, other than bring everything together at the final C-minor chord. (That made my instructor laugh a little.) It wasn’t long before my thirty minutes was up, and he summed up that I should just remember the key signature and play with confidence.

Due to things being pretty slow at work, we are trying to encourage everyone to use up their vacation and take unpaid leave, including salaried folks like me. So, even though I had planned to go to work early and leave early for the audition, I decided to just take a half day off and practice. I worked hard on Blue Monk and It Don’t Mean a Thing, which was going to be what I played if I had to audition without looking at the music. Both of those turned out to be wasted efforts.

Tomorrow: The Audition

Another small realization...

Last night I learned that a local outdoor shopping center is auditioning "entertainers", and I immediately decided that even though I'm not good enough, if they are interested in me as a piano player, and they'll supply a piano, I might go ahead and audition and see if I couldn't get paid to play piano a few hours on the occasional weekend.

To wit, I figured I needed to start adding to my repertoire pretty quick, to wit, I thought it might be easier to learn songs I had started to learn and stopped rather than try a bunch of all new ones. So last night, I revisted McCoy Tyner's version of Afro Blue. First thing I realized is the chords I'd been playing when I was fooling around with it were nothing like the chords that were written for the song, so I corrected those. Next thing I realized was the tempo I was playing was all wrong and there wasn't much "Latin" flavor to how I was playing it, so I worked on that. Then I put the CD on and played along while listening to Tyner play it.

The solos are long and are played over a 3/4 minor blues or an F minor, only. But I noticed something on Tyner's solo (on the version I had from the library) that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been playing along: with the song in A flat, the scale includes only three white keys. Of course. And while this is an over generalization, for the most part, it sounds like McCoy plays a lot on the white keys, even though there are only three of them. I started hitting C-F-G in various riffs and combinations, high and low, up and down, just smack, smack, smack - and they all sounded perfectly fine with the CD in the background. I tried it again, and again, success. I could play just those three notes, make some tight sounding chords, dainty and not so dainty arpeggios, anything, and it sounded fine. Throw in an occasional E-flat or A-flat when the fingers were positioned "safe", and that sounded okay too. Then, as I was spreading out the notes and playing them just in chords of various inversions, guess what? G-C-F is a quartal voicing. Yeah, no big deal, but I didn't KNOW that. Now I do. And once a jazz musician knows that, he knows all he has to do to "get by" is find a quartal voicing in the scale of the key the song is written in, and go crazy. Something tells me, too, that no matter what scale or key you are in, there is probably at least one "safe and easy" quartal voicing that will work. (I'm planning to experiment on that hypothesis tonight.)

I'm convinced these small realizations are what will continue to help me improve as a piano player. Solo in A-flat over F-minor? I can do it all day long with just three notes, they're all white keys, and they're easy to play. And anyone asks me what I was playing after the fact, I can look at them and go, "Some riffs I developed, using inversions of quartal voicings, with a minor blues scale thrown in for spicing up, man."

Late afternoon follow up: I talked to the talent contest organizers. The shopping center would require me to tote my own piano around. I've only got the box it came in, but I might be encouraged to buy a travel case for it, if I had a reason and need to do so. Then, I'll also need a travel stand. Which means I'll have to take apart and re-affix my piano after every gig. Which means,

I probably will not be auditioning. Maybe I'll audition and just turn down the job when (if) they offer it. It's something to consider.