Paying my Dues, Making Mistakes

I have worked through the Mike Garson video masterclass, as I described here. At this distance, the most valuable lesson he taught me was how to practice improvisation, working from two directions: short etudes, as little as fifteen or thirty seconds, and extended “playing around” with a tune, an idea he learned from Thelonious Monk. That, and Garson’s attitude toward music as a gift from a higher power, and the responsibility that entails: gratitude, humility, helping and healing others with our music.

Recently, I found another “teacher” – Dave Frank, whose “school of jazz” is here. He has a series of free “masterclass” videos; I have watched two so far. They are enjoyable, and I got some ideas from both of them.

One of them was on the playing of Keith Jarrett, whom Frank calls “the greatest pianist of the recorded era.” As he explains, we cannot compare Jarrett’s improvisations with Bach’s, or Beethoven’s, or Chopin’s, for they made no recordings. But he is the best that we have had since it became possible to make recordings, in any genre – jazz, classical, whatever.

I am not prepared to agree with that, though Frank presents a convincing argument. But Jarrett is definitely one of the best. In some respects, his LP “Köln Concert” (the highest-selling solo piano recording of all time, over 2 million copies) planted the seed for what I attempt in my little piano improvisations. [Here is a YouTube version, one of many: this one includes a transcription of the first twenty-five minutes – the first side of the two LPs]

Jarrett’s improvisations were on the grandest of scale, and these concerts established his fame beyond the narrow circles of jazz enthusiasts. I purchased the album in the 1970’s when it first came out, and I pretty much wore it out. I still have it. I had never heard anything like it; Mike Garson’s “Now” music comes closest, and perhaps closer to what I do, for Jarrett explicitly quotes no pre-existing tunes and I do, always, for my work can exist only in the context of the Divine Liturgy and its music.

Yes, I would love to play like Keith Jarrett. Or like Mike Garson. So would a lot of other pianists. But there is a problem; I haven’t paid my dues. In this documentary, Jarrett said that the place where he learned most of his jazz tunes was the club in the Poconos where he played in his early teens. No one was listening, so he would learn tune after tune. Garson played a lot of club gigs, too, with few listeners and minimal pay, before he connected with David Bowie.

I haven’t done that. I do not know the jazz standards or the styles – which would take years of careful listening and imitation – and I will never be able to play in that manner.

But, as I considered these things, I realized that yes, I have paid some dues. This morning, the parish presented me with a certificate because I had mentioned to a friend that this is my fortieth year of working with choirs. More to the point, the youth choir sang me a song with lyrics they had written for the occasion.

Forty years. That is somewhere above two thousand Sundays. Plus weddings, funerals, revival meetings, Holy Weeks, Christmas Eves. And the practicing that goes with it.

That counts as “dues.” They are simply in a different school than the jazz club or the rock-and-roll band. I don’t know the jazz standards or the pop tunes, but I have learned a few hymn tunes along the way. I have not played in combos, which is where jazz skills are really developed (so far as I can tell), but I have been a part of a great many choral rehearsals, and I have collaborated with first-rate musicians and learned much from them, most recently Jean Littlejohn.

My Sunday morning piano improvisations are a continuing school, and the daily preparations for them the “homework.” I am grateful for my teachers, very glad to learn from these my fellow musicians, near and far.

Here is where I am on the journey:

All things bright and beautiful: Rogation Sunday 2017 (this morning).

I have put this on Soundcloud as an experiment. There are advantages – it is strictly audio, which saves me the most troublesome part of preparing a YouTube clip, which is locating pictures. I can post under a Creative Commons License. And you can download it, listen to it offline, put it on a CD, whatever you want to do with it. [Edited to add: I changed my profile name over there to "T. Andrew Hicks," because a Soundcloud search turns up a long list of other "Andrew Hickses", most of whom appear to be much younger than I, and who have a wide variety of musical interests.]

There will surely be disadvantages: I am limited to three hours of music without upgrading to a paid account. I note that as soon as I finished playing my track, it jumped immediately to another, by a pop musician named Travis Scott who appears to be “trending,” as they like to say. His work has no relation whatsoever to mine and I found the transition rather jarring. Clearly, Soundcloud would rather you listen to him than to me.

So it goes. As I read this week, “If you aren’t paying anything, you are not the customer. You are the product.”

In any event, my tentative plan is to put a few piano improvisations on Soundcloud, and leave other sorts of music (choral, organ) on YouTube. I want to be absolutely certain that no one can claim copyright on my Soundcloud material – as YouTube regularly does on any organ music I post, especially (for some reason) my playing of Bach. That lets someone else make money from ads. I do not like this.

Toward the end of today’s work on “All things,” I had a bit of extra “instruction” in the School of Improvisation. While moving my left hand up the piano, I accidentally struck an F natural (you can hear it at the 11’30” mark). In the key of D major.

Keith Jarrett said in the documentary that this is one of the hardest aspects of solo improvisations: whatever notes or ideas you play, you have to respond to them. I think the fear of such moments is what keeps many people from learning to improvise.

Well, you just go ahead and respond. I was limited by time, for I had to finish up within another minute or so, but I think I brought it around well enough. In retrospect, an analyst could say that it echoes the section earlier in the piece where I was in D minor. I can only say that I absolutely had no intention of doing that. And I can say that it made the ending more interesting – and better – than what I had intended. It does not always turn out that way – last week’s improvisation had some good music in places, but the bitonal direction the improvisation took in the middle was too jarring, and on the whole it proved to be not so good.

How do you learn to deal with such things? It comes in the practice sessions, when you are playing the tune for a half hour or longer at a time.

I had much trouble controlling this tune, so I was diligent this week, and made lots of “mistakes” along the way – and thus practiced working my way out of them.

I can well imagine young Keith Jarrett in that Poconos club making “mistakes” on new tunes as he learned them and working through them – in public – even though most of the public was paying no attention. That developed the skill and courage it took for him to walk onstage at places like Carnegie Hall, or the Royal Albert Hall, or La Scala with no preconception as to what he would do. Just him and the piano; sit down and play. For thirty or forty minutes, or an hour. An intermission, and a second improvisation. With a capacity audience, most of them enthusiasts who paid a lot for tickets, perhaps travelled far, expecting something miraculous like the Köln Concert. And the critics, who were often unkind to him.

I write in the past tense, for I learned that Jarrett no longer does extended concert improvisations of this sort. He had a physical/nervous breakdown in the late 1990’s, diagnosed as “chronic fatigue syndrome,” because these things were so hard on him. He took two years off entirely, and returned to the stage doing shorter-form pieces, jazz standards, etc.

Jarrett paid his classical dues as well, with a strong background in that area as a child prodigy, studying with Eleanor Sokoloff and others at the Curtis Institute before he got into jazz. He performed as a classical pianist for nearly thirty years alongside his other music-making.

I think I would like him. He is reclusive, living in an old farmhouse in New Jersey, the barn converted to a music studio. His life away from the piano is disciplined, simple, because he is all about the music. As I wish to be. What he would think of me is another matter; by most accounts he is notoriously prickly, and in general has a low opinion of classical musicians, probably lower still of church musicians, if he thinks of us at all.

It might be that we could find a point of contact in Bach. He has recorded the Goldberg Variations; I have performed them at least. He has likewise recorded both volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier, plus the French and English Suites and other music. I have played quite a bit of the organ music, some of it this morning at the third service and more to come over the next two Sundays. He wrote in a liner note that "Bach is about ideas, not grand flourishes." I agree.

There are worse places to find common ground.