Playing the Changes - Part Two

It is better to play one tune for twenty-four hours than twenty-four tunes in an hour. (Bill Evans, quoted by Dave Frank)

Wednesday: the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Elizabeth
For several years, I worked in my office a couple of mornings a week, eavesdropping on the Beginning Jazz Improvisation class next door in the music room. That is now bearing fruit, for most of the concepts I am learning this week are not entirely new to me.

In those days, I heard a lot of the tune “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy” – every week for a semester, and again the next year, and the year after that. Each fall, the new class was given the assignment of learning the tune and improvising on it. Each week, they would do it in a new key. In the class sessions, they would go around the room, each player/singer taking a four or eight bar phrase as a “solo.”

With that in mind plus my experience that in “learning” a tune, it is not your own until you can play it in other keys, I took the “Wind song” tune into E flat this morning. Sure enough, the initial struggles to control the chord progression returned with added intensity – I found it necessary to explicitly write out the chord progression in the new key – but once I got past that, it opened some doors that I would not have found staying in G major. I think I can work it into my Sunday improvisation; I could start in E flat, and the move to G later on would be refreshing. It was for me, at least.

There was no opportunity for the extended work I gave to it on Tuesday, beyond my usual half-hour at the piano before Matins; it was fifteen minutes here, twenty there. But on the whole, it was a day of considerable progress; I have advanced to sounding like a cliché-ridden pop pianist playing soupy background music.

Thursday: The Feast of Justin Martyr

Lots of Bach today; the two settings of Komm, heiliger Geist from the Leipzig Chorales on Sunday. Keith Jarrett talks somewhere about the difficulty of shifting between the classical and jazz mindsets; he said (I think) that he would never attempt both in the same program. I see his point, certainly, but I suspect he might agree with me that the two mindsets help one another. In my specific case, the perfection and compositional intensity of Bach stands in judgement at my poor improvisatory efforts, a reminder as to how far I have to go.

Mike Garson said in his videos something to this effect: “When I was young, I thought I understood maybe eighty percent of what there is to know about music. Now [he is around 70] I feel like what I understand is more like three percent. And less every year.” Amen to that.

Later in the day, I had a solid session at the piano; ninety minutes or so. I continued work on the “wind song” tune, and started considering more seriously how it might fit into a Sunday improvisation. I played a sample piece with introduction in G major, the tune in E flat, modulating to G, coda.

It is too quiet. Monochromatic. Boring.

I played around with Abbot’s Leigh, which is in the service and could be a contrasting tune. It didn’t seem to fit. Near the end of my session, I felt the need to play Song of the Holy Spirit (“A mighty sound from heaven,” 230 in the Hymnal 1982), which is the opening hymn on Sunday. I know that tune well, having struggled with it for past Whitsundays. It was a considerable relief to play something spiky and loud, so I stayed with it for about twenty minutes, taking the tune through six or eight keys. None of this careful work with a fixed chord progression, not for this. I reveled in alternate harmonies, most of them dissonant, definitely non-triadic.

I am left with a jumble, and no clear sense as to what I will play on Sunday. But now I have some materials at hand. And (if I go with Song of the Holy Spirit as part of what I play) it will not be soupy background music. What it will be remains to be seen.