Now comes the boring part

This is a brief story of what happens when you skip establishing the proper foundation right at the beginning.

Scales

Having learned to play the organ when I was young, I never had any formal piano instruction until I began taking lessons six years ago. At the time, because I was an adult, and not very savvy about these things, I basically told my instructor, I don’t care how I play, I just want to sound good. Recognizing that he was half my age and he had to do what I said if he wanted me to pay him, he diligently taught me what I thought I wanted to learn. If I asked about technique and skill improvement, he helped me, but he never force fed me what I didn't want to eat. Not so my new instructor.

Scales

He said, before I really said much of anything about why I wanted to take lessons this time around, “Really, in order to play better, you have to improve your technique.” I knew what this meant, but demurely asked a one word question: “Scales?”

Scales

“Scales,” came the one word answer.

Scales

So, I’m playing scales. In the interest of getting the fingering down and not stultifying my brain too much right at the start, I’m doing contrary motion two-handed scales. That way, the same fingers are always doing the same thing at the same time, hopefully programming my muscles to hit the correct keys at the correct time. It’s not refreshing, but it is somewhat invigorating to be tackling these rote sort of tasks at long last. So this week’s project is contrary and parallel scales in C, G, D, A, and E. I’ll probably go ahead and push on to at least B so that by next week, I’ll be halfway finished. Honestly, I don’t know if I can get there by next Tuesday, but we’ll see.

Scales

Kids, learn your scales now and don’t cry. You’ll thank me later.

Sprucing up for a piano purchase

With the imminent purchase of a baby grand piano, we've been trying to figure out where to put all the furniture that is going to be displaced by it. As we've done so, we've made the realization that our house needs major overhauling in the process. The other realization that Mrs. S and I have both made is that our values have changed and as far as furniture and knickknacks go, we have a lot of stuff that we were once attached to which now we don’t care about so much. Along with everything else, we are noticing how neglected our house is and how much stuff needs attention. Rather than torture ourselves, we've decided to spend the money and get fixed what needs fixing. Here’s where we are.

Our big plan is to get rid of all the carpeting in the house. We are going to do that by replacing the worn, torn, cat-puked and pissed on carpeting in the last four carpeted rooms we have with hardwood in all four rooms. We’ll therefore have to buy some rugs to put down on the floors so we don’t end up living in a damn echo chamber and also to give the rooms a little warmer feeling. (We have in fact already purchased one hand-woven wool rug and a pad for under the piano.) The cost for having the flooring done will be substantial, but not unmanageable, and it will leave us with much more livable conditions. It’s a big first step that takes a long time to start, but we have already received two quotes, so we’re getting close.

I replaced two non-working blinds in my study with off-the-shelf faux woods blinds from Lowes. The room looks 100% better. We also ordered custom made blinds for the future music room. That will replace two broken blinds and displace one working blind that we will move to Mrs. S’s study, where we will dispose of the one that is broken in her room. Nice.

Tyler meditating behind the sun room curtains.

We looked around our sun room yesterday and were thinking about the furniture when we suddenly just decided to throw it out. I hauled a glider, three chairs, and all the necessary cushions, plus one for a chaise (long gone) to the curb. Within five minutes, we had somebody packing them into their Pontiac Vibe. After the furniture was gone, Mrs. S took the vacuum to the sun room and we moved our new cat condo into it, and wallowed in the extra space that we got from doing that.

Roosevelt posing on the cat condo.

Our kitchen sink backed up around the disposal and leaked water all over the rugs we had set there, so we took those out to dry them and are looking to replace them.

We gave away our fish tank, along with the fish and everything that goes with it, to a guy where I work. He even agreed to take the extra one we have up in our attic. Less time feeding fish and cleaning the tank, more time playing the piano.

Stuff for donation: two pieces of exercise gear, a printer, a scanner, some T-shirts, my Nintendo Wii, bunch of Mrs. S’s clothes. Like that.

I’m also going to throw out my old computer.

I threw out eight cans of old paint. I have about eight more that I need to get rid of. I need to clean out the garage in general while I’m at it, especially where the mice got into the birdseed. What a mess.

And, I start back to piano lessons on Tuesday with a different instructor. We’ll see how that goes.

A piano search update

Although I haven’t written about it in while, the piano search has actually been going quite well. I've started to find more pianos that are priced better and that are in decent shape, although I haven’t quite found the exact thing I’m looking for. I looked at a beautiful used C7. It was played by a woman who passed away and her husband is trying to sell it. It is actually only 30 minutes from our house, so we went to see it shortly after I found it. It’s in beautiful shape on the outside, with hardly a scratch or mark on it, with the exception of inside the fall board, which was badly scratched from the woman’s nails. The only other cosmetic defect was the sostenuto pedal was a different shade of brass from the other two pedals. I wasn't sure if that was a question of usage or something else, and I also wasn't sure if it was something that could be corrected. That made it just like the fall board in that respect, as I’m not sure that could be buffed or polished back to normalcy. I checked the tuning on the piano with my Korg electronic tuner and found the piano was perfectly in tune. Perfectly. In fact, it was more in tune than any of the other pianos I have looked at so far. There were two things that were amazing about this. One was that the piano had not been professionally tuned in three years, and the other was that the piano was thirty five years old. 

A 35-year old C7, nice as can be. Could still be mine, as far as I know.

In all honesty, at the price the guy was asking and given the overall condition of the piano, if it had been only 20 years old, I would already own the sucker. So, age is the first problem. The second problem is size. At 7’4”, it will have to be placed in our living room, which means our house will basically be taken over by that piano. Mrs. S says she wouldn't mind, but she hasn't heard me play Piano Exercises for Dummies for an hour and a half on a booming piano in the middle of our living room yet. I think by the second of third week of that, she might change her opinion.

The GC1 in a sea of pianos. 5 year warranty, 100% trade up value, no fussing with piano movers...yep, it's looking quite attractive...

For comparison sake, we looked at some new and near new pianos at the local shop, our second visit there (almost a year to the day after the first, too, I might add). There was a very young, very clean divorce sale C1 for sale, but it was a little pricey and not quite what I was hoping for. If that one had been a C3, I might already own it, but I think it was overpriced and unexciting for a C1. I did like an Indonesian built Yamaha that I looked at, until I found out it was Indonesian. Then I played a Japan built GC1 that I quite liked. We would have the option to trade up at full purchase price if I got that one and at 5’3”, it would be much more easily accommodated in our house and furniture layout plans. We are leaning in the direction of buying that piano, once we get our master bedroom arranged and our dining room painted and arranged for turning into a music room. We also need to buy a rug to put under the piano, which will also affect our painting scheme. Lots of considerations, but good that we are getting some direction if not entirely getting closer to an actual purchase.

I've also been fine tuning (get it?) my practice routine for the arrival of the piano, so that I might actually get good enough to play the damn thing when it gets here. I’ll write about that soon.

Edgar Meyer Redux

About a year and a half ago, Mrs. S and I had the privilege to see and hear Edgar Meyer as he performed his third concerto, a piece he was commissioned to write for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. At that time, I bemoaned the fact that his talent as both a musician and a composer was sorely under appreciated by the Alabama patronage. So when we decided to go see Mr. Meyer again in tandem with Joshua Bell in Nashville, I was, maybe not worried, but I was skeptical and doubtful of what kind of reception he would get. Fortunately, Messrs. Bell and Meyer’s performance was a bit more dynamic than Mr. Meyer’s solo work on his concerto, the orchestra was complete and well-rehearsed, and the piece itself was exciting, enthralling, and altogether amazing.

 

Edgar Meyer and Joshua Bell, hard at "work"

Of course, the dynamics of a piece written for solo violin and double bass are what make it so amazing. I mean, as somebody who has arranged a piece for a 17-piece jazz band, I understand a little better than most the difficulty of making dissonant, dissimilar instruments sound good when playing together. I can only imagine, however, the difficulty of getting the highest and lowest instruments of the same family to blend as well as Mr. Meyer and Mr. Bell made them do. Mr. Meyer also managed to hit a bunch of notes right at the low end of the bass neck, much higher sounding than you would ever think you could get out of a bass. It was a fantastic performance of a highly original and interesting piece.

Hard to miss a big guy in suspenders and bow tie, but most people did

They did not announce any autograph session with Bell and Meyer, so Mrs. S and I went about our normal intermission routine of stretching our legs to and from the restrooms. While I was waiting for Mrs. S, I noticed a guy in suspenders who looked suspiciously like Edgar Meyer run past the top of the stairs with a bottle of water and up the stairs into the foyer. I followed him and found that it was indeed Mr. Meyer and Mr. Bell was already seated with him at a table with a long line of autograph seekers already queued. I went downstairs and retrieved Mrs. S and we went to join the autograph seekers. We succeeded in getting a few good autographs and a few mediocre snapshots (what you see around here).

Mrs. S adds to her pile of Joshua Bell photos. (You could tell he does this a lot more than Edgar does.)

The performance after Meyer and Bell was some long Mahler symphony that was not completely depressing. The first violinist had to finish the performance with just three strings, as he broke the E-string just before the start of the final flourish. After the clapping and “bravos” I caught his eye and I said, “Next time, maybe you should just start with three.” He laughed a little bit and said, “Yeah, maybe it is just in the way.” After that we went back to the foyer to mingle with some of the orchestra members. I talked to the first viola about his ear plug. (I’m interested in things that not everybody notices or cares about.)

And, one of three CD's we now have with both their signatures.

Not sure why I didn't write about this concert earlier, as it was the start of our bourbon country mini-vacation (May 31), but like my blog, better late than never.

Coming soon: The piano search update.

Jean-Yves plays jazz, he just “Don’t think much about it!”

So last week, I wrote about Yakov Kasman, a pianist who I heard play for the Huntsville Chamber Music Guild and who, at his educational event, forthrightly told me that he doesn't play jazz. This week Mrs. S and I took a drive through rainy 40-degree weather to visit Nashville, enjoy a scrumptious dinner at Merchants Restaurant and see another classical pianist perform with the symphony orchestra, Jean-Yves Thibaudet. He performed a modern classic called Piano Concerto No. 3 “The Mysteries of Light” by James MacMillan.

This is what Merchants looks like if you eat as early as we do.

Let me be succinct and clear about what I heard. This is supposed to be some kind of theologically inspired piece about “mysteries”, but what I heard was a fantastically abstract and intricate piece that simply blew me away. There was one “movement” where Thibaudet had to play two completely different lines, in what sounded like completely different meter, that overlapped and threaded their way around each other, and I swear to God, my brain was fried trying to make sense of it. I just don’t see how you can get two hands to play such completely different lines using one brain. In fact, I would say those would have been immensely challenging  lines for two pianists to play accurately. I just never heard anything like it.

This is what Merchants looks like if you drink as much as I do.

Thibaudet, was a true master, but the orchestra was also in top form. A lot of the piece revolves around a certain amount of confusion and cacophony in the sound. There are lots of bells and chimes and while they seem to be echoing the lines coming from the piano, they didn't always match, which was obviously part of the design. Thibaudet was playing a Steinway (very cool when it rose out of the stage), and compared to the Yamaha CF6 we heard DaniloPerez play with Wayne Shorter three weeks ago, it had a duller, more uniform high-end, which I felt was exactly suited to this bit of music. In fact, I’ll go so far to say that the resonant low end, the deep, commanding middle register, and the tinkly, baby-spoon clang of the high-end on the Steinway particularly lent itself to the piece. I think the CF6’s clarity and icicle like sharpness would have broken up the MacMillan piece too much.

This is what Merchants looks like if you think too much about photo captions.

At intermission, we got some CD’s signed and spent a few minutes getting photos and chatting up Jean-Yves, who was immensely personable, smiling, and pleasant. After taking pictures with me across the counter, when Mrs. S asked for one more, he brought her around the counter with him. Just a real nice guy, class act, and superb pianist.

I can't even make my hands move separately when I'm not playing...

I was going to ask him if he plays jazz, but I’m glad I didn't  Turns out he has two “jazz” recordings out, so we went ahead and Amazoned (online purchased) them. I did ask him how he got his hands to play those two contiguous yet conflicting lines so nicely, concluding with, “I don’t see how anyone can do it.” He said simply, “I don’t think much about it.” There was a definite glimmer in his eye. Probably a tear from thinking about how many hours he sat on a piano bench to learn those lines. I don’t know. It scares me, so I don’t think much about it either.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet and me.

The question I’m asking myself is, if it is possible that I was more impressed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet because he does play jazz, keeping in mind that I didn’t know he played jazz when I first heard him last night? The answer is, I think, almost certainly. Maybe it’s jazz, maybe it’s something else, but there's a different quality and dimension to Thibaudet's playing. Regardless, I promise you: You’ll never hear that MacMillan piece performed any better anywhere else, than it was last night with the Nashville Symphony and Jean-Yves Thibuadet.

Dude sure gets a lot closer to the ladies, no?

Yakov don’t play jazz. Jean-Yves don’t think much about it.

I do (play jazz), and, I do (think much about it), but maybe I will (play jazz) and I won’t (think much about it) from now on. 

Yakov “Don’t play jazz!”

As a sort of concession to Mrs. S and because I had some other chores that required my presence at home, I decided to take the day off last Friday and see if I couldn't get some stuff done, and then end the day at a chamber music concert featuring the pianist Yakov Kasman. We saw Kasman with the Huntsville Symphony some years back and got a CD signed by him, and since Mrs. S spent the whole year going to chamber music concerts by herself, except when it was Joshua Bell, I agreed to accompany her. I had been fence sitting, but then we learned that Kasman was going to have an “educational event”, and after the valuable master class we had with Gary Burton, I decided that was worth making Kasman’s lecture and concert part of my free day.

At the educational event, Yakov talked about how he developed his affinity for Alabama and ended up artist in residence at UAB. He didn't talk much about pianos or technique or anything like that, instead dragging his daughter on stage to play some of the four-handed pieces that were going to be featured at that night’s concert. It was a bit of a letdown.

Yakov's signature on our Moussorgsky CD. Or did Mrs. S drop the Sharpie on it? I'm not sure.

Finally, after the music history lesson, he agreed to take questions. It was a lot of the usual: how much do you practice (“a lot”), how many pianos do you have (“three”), and (from Mrs. S) what kind of pianos do you have (“a Steinway, a Yamaha, and a Kawai”), blah, blah, blah. Since his daughter had mentioned that he starts playing as soon as he wakes up and doesn't stop practicing until he goes to bed, I thought I had a question that was intelligent and the most probing of the bunch: Do you play just classical music or do you play other things? Turned out to be not so probing: “Just classic.” He seemed to suggest that was a stupid thing to ask. His tone and facial expression were all “OF COURSE a classical pianist only plays classical music, nincompoop!” Since I had the floor and his attention, I pushed ahead, but I made the fatal mistake of leading the interrogation by suggesting what he could play. I asked: “You don’t play jazz or something to break it up?” He smiled a plastic smile like a politician talking about a master’s degree from the Cayman Islands or the mysterious disappearance of his last two female interns, and then Professor Kasman crisply pronounced, “No, I don’t play...jazz!”

The word "jazz" rang out in hissing, sardonic tones. You could substitute just about any word for jazz and it couldn't have sounded more incredulous: jazz, hip-hop, badminton, trash can lids, marimbas, Parcheesi,  Texas hold'em, no, NO, I don't play those!!!!

I could comment here about not being able to grow musically or a missing dimension to one’s playing by stifling oneself in one genre of music, but what do I know? Kasman won the silver medal at a Van Cliburn competition, and I’m struggling with “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in a broken intervallic mode. He performed in front of a thousand people on Friday night, as did his17-year old daughter and his 12 (10? 8?) -year old daughter. I'm lucky if Mrs. S pauses for twenty seconds as she wanders through the dining room while I'm pounding on my forlorn Yamaha digital.

No. Yakov don’t play jazz.

I do. And that's good enough for me. 

My Miles Davis “bucket list” gets Shorter, literally

I've kind of developed this fascination with Miles Davis and a while back, I set my mind to trying to see as many of the living and performing musicians who played with Miles Davis as humanly possible. So many of the greats died so young and so long ago ( I won’t even try to list them). That makes the ones that are still around that much more “valuable” to the current jazz lexicon.

The set up

Certainly, meeting and greeting Herbie Hancock was one of the highlights, and seeing Sonny Rollins fairly limp around on stage while honking his sax brings home the point of how little time is left to see these stars while they are still performing. McCoy Tyner was another one who could barely get on stage, but once he did, performed wonderfully. Chick Corea, on the other hand, still has plenty of energy and musicality left in him, which leads to diverse shows ranging from vibraphone and string accompaniment, to a duet with a banjo. Some other “Miles’ musicians” jazzing around that I have yet to see: Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, Ron Carter, Marcus Miller, and John Scofield, among others.

 

Wayne Shorter's axes in front of the CF6. Check out the harp's reflection in the lid. Wow, I'll take it!

The most recent I’m now able to check off the list is Wayne Shorter, who performed some new pieces (I think) from his latest album with a killer quartet consisting of Danilo Perez on piano, Joe Patitucci on bass, and Brian Blade on drums. The quartet was really together but the star of the show, for both Mrs. S and I was Perez, who was playing an awesome Yamaha CF6. I've never heard a brighter, more dynamic piano than that one, and at intermission, I asked the stage manager (or whoever he was, the guy moving Wayne Shorter’s stuff around) what it was, and he kept turning his head so I couldn't hear him, but I did hear him when he said they couldn't get a CFX. That's why I assume the piano was a CF6, the next model down. Whatever. If I ever get a spare $100K, I’ll probably pick one up.

This is the guy who almost told me what kind of piano Danilo was playing

After intermission, the orchestra came on and joined the quartet to play some Shorter arrangements of tunes he wrote for quartet and orchestra, and Esperanza Spalding also came out to sing Gaia and played bass and sang on Midnight in Carlotta’s Hair. I enjoyed the concert fairly well, despite the fact that I would have preferred to hear some of Shorter’s bop and post-bop songs in a more intimate style. I was fairly impressed by Esperanza, too, whose voice has clarity and a soft vibrato that I favor over the more lavish voices of other jazz singers of late. (Carmen McRae comes to mind.)

Ready for the show...

Really the only disappointing thing was the rude Nashville audience. I’ve really been noticing of late that people just don’t appreciate the performing arts the way they should. After about the second song of the second half, there became a steady stream of people leaving the hall. When Esperanza came on, despite her presence making everything a lot more interesting, more and more people got up and walked out. The ones who I wished would walk out, like the couple in front of us (husband drunk and sleepy, wife just sleepy, and the two of them fighting over a bottle of water – don’t ask), kept nodding off and snipping at each other for doing so. They'd've done everyone a favor if they had left.

Still, Wayne Shorter is probably the most prolific living jazz composer, and with the exception of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis (maybe), possibly the foremost jazz composer of all time. The chance to see him live and in concert was truly worth the effort and expense. If I ever get a chance to see him in quartet format again, I will definitely do that.

Didn't even know there was a French single malt, until I drank this one. Sweet! 

Dinner by the way was at Etch, right by the symphony hall. Despite a brief allergic reaction to the Japanese short ribs (something in the oil, maybe?), Mrs. S and I still enjoyed a lovely meal, topped by a glass of single malt whiskey from France. Did that beat all? Yes it did. Nashville, we love you. Now please move 50 miles closer so we don’t have to.

And no night would be complete without some eerie coincidence: The same couple that sat one table over from us at the restaurant sat one table over from us at the concert, too. Hundreds of restaurants in the city, dozens of tables at the restaurant, dozens of tables and hundreds of seats at the concert hall, and they we are. Right next to each other at the same time at two completely separate events. I tell you, the Universe aligns for me, sometimes for a reason, sometimes for none, but at times, it's really weird being me.