Am I blue? How about you?

Last night's piano lesson was a lot different than the previous week's. Without much of anywhere to go, we started with the blues and finished with the blues. The only song I worked on last week was Blue Monk, so that was what we played. I bragged about having learned all twelve blues scales and played a few riffs from, I think, an A-flat blues scale. My instructor goes, oh, I like that song. What is that? And rather demurely I had to answer, I just made it up. So, he was somewhat impressed that I'd gone from zero to sixty in just one week, and that made me satisfied.

For some reason though, Blue Monk gave me fits when we tried to play it. I just couldn't keep the rhythm straight. We put the metronome on, and that helped a little, but still didn't get me back to the head when I should have been there. We attempted to solo, but that went nowhere and I had to stop that after one pass. But I'd played and shown enough that my instructor was able to point out some things and suggest no less than five songs to practice in the coming week to get my blues playing sounding more like jazz and less like rock. (He said the blues I was playing was good, and it was blues, but it wasn't "jazz blues", which again, is something I have to work on.)

So my song list for the coming week looks like this:
-Blue Monk (get the rhythm right)
-Donna Lee ("it's time to play a Parker head")
-Don't Get Around Much Anymore (work on oblique motion, which I understood integrally but encountered musically for the first time last night)
-All Blues (because you can't get too much of Miles Davis, and, it's blues)
-Blues for Alice (maybe a little easier Parker head...)

Next week's lesson is important because I already know I'm going to miss the following week's lesson. Hopefully I can get my taxes done here in the next few days and have enough time to work on these songs over the weekend.

Creative Use of Drills

Back when I first started taking piano lessons, I spent a lot of time on drills. I felt (and still feel) it is important to continually work on the technical aspects of piano playing, and since my instructor and I are focusing mainly on learning "jazz", per se, we don't spend a lot of time or effort looking just at the instrument and accomplished playing of it. (Maybe we should. Jury's still out on that one.) I, therefore, took it upon myself to pick up a number of different drill books to more or less work by myself on playing better. I assumed that my jazz would get better as the drills did.

Probably some of you musicians, especially pianists, out there, know where this is going.

It wasn't long after this that I got pretty sick of drills. For a while, I could feel the difference the drills were making. I could tell my playing was better. I had more confidence. Songs sounded cleaner. My weakness is, I like to hear me make nice sounds, so once I reach a certain level of proficiency on a tune, I'm content to play it, as is, forever and ever. I never try to make it sound any better or any different, because if I do, I make mistakes and that makes it sound not as good as playing it the way I've learned it. And, of course, once the tunes flow, the drills are boring, even irritating, so I skip one day, and then the next, then I pull out the drill book and find I can't play anything at or just before where I marked where I left off, so I put the drill book aside to play tunes, and suddenly, it's five weeks later and I haven't touched the darned thing.

Yikes! No wonder I suck.

Some time just back when I started all this, I asked my instructor what to do about this problem of drills, sounding crappy, learning tunes, and getting better. I showed him a drill I was working on out of a stride piano drill book and he just said, "Put it in a tune." He grabbed the real book and quickly found a song with a lot of chords that last for one or more bars: Take the 'A' Train. And sure enough, it was simple for him to play a stride piano drill with facility through the entire song. When I got home and tried it, it sounded like crap, and while I knew that practice would improve it, again, I was too content to play something that sounded adequate, rather than try to get better.

Well, I hereby announce to all my faithful readers and myself: I'm going back to basics. I'm going to do drills, I'm going to put them into songs, and I'm going to play them and practice them, relentlessly, until they sound good. No more excuses. No more settling for "sounds good enough". Every song needs a new approach now and then. You never know what revelation awaits and how happy that sound will make you (or how much happier you'll be with your old sound because the new riff really doesn't sound all that good). Put more in, get more out. Put more in, get more out. I can do it. You can do it.

Let's do it.

When All Else Fails

Here are my ideas for what to practice when you just don't know what else to practice, or you don't "feel" like doing certain things. Basically, my plan to is compile a complete list, then find the one I most "feel" like doing, or at the very least, can tolerate long enough to complete. This list is officially a work in progress.

1) Circle of Fifths
There really isn't such a thing as "practicing the circle of fifths". I put it first because it has been recommended to me - both in my lessons and in many of my lesson materials - that whenever doing drills, a jazz musician will want to be able to do all the things he or she has to do in all twelve possible keys. The best way to cover all twelve possible keys is to do an exercise and go around the circle of fifths. So, any of the practice list items should start in any particular key and then be repeated following the circle of fifths. Go to Google and search images for "Circle of Fifths". Print out whichever chart you feel comfortable with. Have it laminated and keep it by your piano. (You won't need it for more than a month or two before you have the circle of fifths memorized anyway.)

2) Hanon
Virtuoso pianist book or any of the jazz Hanon books available. Pick one out, play through the exercises.

3) Any other drill book you like
There are a million of them, maybe more. Doesn't matter. Just play.

4) Scales
Try improvising on a major scale, or a minor scale, or a blues scale. Try to duplicate the melody through the circle of fifths. I like to play the major scales like Levine recommends in The Jazz Piano Book, moving each scale through all the modes so that you end up starting and ending each scale on a different note. Then, after going up, going down. Then, to the next key in the circle. This week I've been practicing blues scales in all the keys. Surprisingly, it isn't hard and the blues scales are not as dreadful to listen to as straight up and down major and minor scales.

5) Rhythm practice
Get out the metronome or drum machine. Run your scales in straight eighth notes, or play your drills at various speeds. Make sure the notes are right and you are on the rhythm. Enlist a friend or familiy member to listen and tell you if you are on the beat or not. (Surprisingly, I often think I'm "right there" when I'm not, usually because I'm concentrating so hard on the music.) I also like to get out a CD of a song or two and play along, especially trying to keep the melody and comping going during the solos. I can alway tell if I kept the beat or not if I come back to the head at the same time as they do.

Those are the ideas I have for now. I'll post more the next time I hit the wall.

An Informal Survey into the Fame of Cole Porter

We have a safety slogan board at work, and I'm usually the one to come up with the slogan that goes on the board. I've been doing it for about four years, so I've been out of ideas for the last three. Yesterday, I came up with something that I thought would fly, and it did. I used Cole Porter's lyrics to formlulate a seasonal safety slogan to this effect:

Birds do it.
Bees do it.
Even educated fleas do it.
Let's do it.
Let's stay safe this spring.

(Yeah, I know.) After I put it up, I thought I would get some comments, but alas, no one said anything unless I asked first. Although when prompted several people said they liked the slogan, no one knew where it came from. So, I just started asking people if they knew who Cole Porter was. I estimate that I asked forty people. Most of them were older than me (I'm 44). Only five people knew or had heard of Cole Porter. Not one of them knew that the "safety slogan" I put up was a lame variation of a Cole Porter song. These were not the results I expected.

The youngest person to know Cole Porter was 30 years old. The oldest I won't say, but I think he's in his sixties. Of the five people who "knew" him, only three knew he was a jazz musician, and only one knew he was a composer. (A familiar reaction was, "I've heard of him, but I don't know what he sings.") I'm not disappointed, but I am surprised.

I feel privileged to be as "young" as I am and as familiar with Cole Porter as I am. Being a jazz musician does have perks, however insignificant they may seem to others.

The Makings of a Valuable Music Lesson

I am a recent (2007) college graduate. I took an operations management class as one of my management electives, simply because the schedule of the class fit mine. I was also helped by the fact that is what I do for a living. The class was neither particularly easy nor difficult, but the tests were usually very easy. This came about because the instructor stressed one set of principles and built the whole test around them, so after you finished the first page of the test, you could go back and forth between the pages, filling in the rest of the test. If you screwed up the first page, you might be in trouble, but the first page was usually about the relationships between different types of operations in a company, so it was actually (for me) a lot of common sense. There was also some subjective type stuff where if you explained a relationship adequately, it was considered correct. In short, the tests were not difficult and the test results’ bell curve was squashed down toward the A to high-B range.

About halfway through the semester, a busybody in the front – anonymously, but we knew who it was – told the instructor that the tests were too easy and she wasn’t learning enough in the class. So the instructor, at the beginning of one of the classes, stood up and announced to the class, “At least one student in this class says the course is too easy,” at which, me and my fellow working students, as well as the regular students who were just appreciative of not having to work too hard to get a decent grade, immediately panicked at the thought of our (relatively) easy A or B about to be taken away, or at least, made a lot harder. The instructor continued, “I told this student I would consider discussing this with the class…” I quickly raised my hand and was called on: “Dr. -, did you also tell this student that they only get out of the course what they put into it?” Several cheers and ‘yeah, that’s right’s went out, and all eyes were on the instructor, who was grinning at me. For good measure, I added, “I mean, last I checked, there’s a whole wing of management books over in the library that she (I stressed “she” but corrected), or he, could read on their own to learn more if they think they aren’t learning enough here…” Several more ‘yeah, that’s right’s went up. You could see this chick slump in the front of the room. The instructor said something like, “So we can continue?” and we all agreed, and that was that. (Later in the class, the dejected student got upset at something else and went off on the instructor, confirming what we all had supposed, but at any rate, the issue was laid to rest.)

I bring this up because I had a, well not completely horrible, but “weak” piano lesson yesterday. We listened to some music, played through a tune, worked on some blues riffs, and that was it. I wasn’t up for anything else because I wasn’t prepared. When it comes to my music, I need to take my own advice and start putting more in so I can get more out. Of course, I’ve already documented having hit the wall pretty hard this week, so what I plan to do is work on some drills, go through the blues scale in all twelve keys, and work on just the one song (Blue Monk) that we talked about working on. I’ll still play for my enjoyment some, and with my poker game on Saturday, I won’t get quite the level of playing in that I would like, but like I said, I’m definitely going to take my own advice on this one.

Next Wednesday, my piano instructor won’t know what hit him.

The Jazz of Madonna

I’m this close to rushing out and buying a book of Madonna sheet music.

Readers will already know that I’m not a big jazz guitar fan. But I have a sudden, call it “fuzzy” feeling that Bill Frisell has put me on the road to change that. I’ve been listening to Frisell’s Have a Little Faith for two days now, and it is growing on me. I don’t like everything on there, but I’m really starting to dig his takes of some “pop” standards, like Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman and Madonna’s Live to Tell. Last night, I woke my Madonna CD’s from their hibernation and listened to them, trying to see if I could tell what makes them viable jazz songs. They don’t sound particularly jazzy, after all. (Do they?) But I suppose the bridges and turnarounds she uses are closer to jazz chord progressions than pop chord progressions, if one breaks them down and analyzes them. For me, at this stage, it is hard to tell. But man, I’m telling you, Frisell does some really cool turns with the melody and harmonies in Live to Tell, and it is fascinating. He lets the percussionists get a little carried away in the middle of the song, but then he brings it all back together with his guitar. I’m not a guitarist – although I plucked one for a summer way back in grade school – so I’m not sure how he even gets his guitar to sound the way it sounds. Half the time, the string doesn’t sound like it was picked at all, just, like, he looks at it, or strokes it or twiddles his ear at it, and a smooth, round, full sound comes out. Mysterious, like.

I’m determined to explore what makes Madonna (and Dylan) more suitable to jazz than other music. I mean: The Real Book only has two Beatles songs in it, telling me that the Beatles’ music is not particularly suited to jazz. (Of course, we’ve all heard Beatles songs in movies, elevators, slide shows, merry-go-round calliopes, kazoo compendiums, and solo Jew’s harp performances, and even some esoteric things, so, maybe I shouldn’t conclude what they are or are not“suited” to – maybe they’re suited to everything and jazz musicians just don’t want to take that ball and run with it.) (And, yes, I know there aren’t any Madonna songs in The Real Book … yet.) Anyway, Bill Frisell had a reason for picking those songs, and I don’t have his phone number, so I’m going to have to figure out on my own what makes Madonna rock when her music is played by a jazz musician.

I don’t think it has anything to do with the clothes she wears (or doffs).

Facing the Wall

My instructor gave me a “learn jazz” project that, so far, is not going well. I’ve been working on Someday My Prince Will Come. I tried writing out some interesting chord inversions, but that didn’t do much for me, so when I was about to ask him to help me with the chords, he goes, “Here’s what you do: make a Bach fugue using those chords.” Since I’m already trying to play a couple of Bach preludes as lead-ins to certain songs (like a prelude in G-minor prior to breaking into It Don’t Mean A Thing…), I didn’t think anything of it, but he appeared to be joking. Then, just as I realized he was probably joking, he realized I thought he was serious, and that was enough for him to decide it was a good idea and he said, yeah, do that. I worked on it quite a bit yesterday. I got a few of the chords moving around nicely, but nothing spectacular. I just can’t do much with the left hand other than comp right on the beat. It’s highly uninteresting, but not completely unsatisfying to listen to. As luck would have it, without consciously thinking about it, I put on Bill Evans’ Portrait in Jazz when I was out running errands Sunday, and of course, SMPWC came on. And of course, I realized how far away from accomplishing much of anything I am. Since I’m not doing well being creative on my own, I’m thinking I might start trying to work from my books of transcriptions, to see if I can’t gain some insight from them. I glanced at Bill Evans again yesterday, and it was really hard, but I think it is probably the way to go because Oscar Peterson is way out there and I don’t have many of his recordings. If I learn just a few of Bill’s chords and get used to some of the funkier inversions and variations, things will probably go more smoothly when I try to play something on my own.

I probably could also do with working on some drills. Oftentimes for me, working on mechanics actually brings the music back around to sounding good so that I feel like trying to do something with it. I could try that, I suppose.

The other problem all this presents is: I’m running out of time to prepare for an audition, or to prepare a recording of music to get considered as a pavement performer. It is starting to look like all that is going to go to the wayside.

Even jazz musicians run into walls.