And I keep tripping over cute pieces that contain echoes of the chords and colours I love so much. I love Satie and intend to make a decent recording if only for the family archive. So, for the time being my performances are rather more modest … but the harmony has to be there. but I’d need to study a Phd in jazz harmony as pre-requisite, as indeed he has. Ever heard of Sam Crowe of Native Dancer? To improvise like Sam would be a joy …. Even within today’s ‘cutting edge’ jazz scene. And as I explore the ‘serious’ composers, I hear echoes of the jazz giants all the time. I’ve love to be able to play his rich brew of harmonic shifts. And for anyone who thinks less of jazz than ‘classical’, think again. I walked into a music shop and asked for a teacher. My return to the piano, if we can call it that, was not a planned or deliberate act. It is probably not a coincidence that these composers were influencing and influenced by the emergence of jazz. But let me be clear, it’s the harmony that attracts me. I want to play the impressionists, Debussy, Poulenc, Ravel. What kind of repertoire do you enjoy playing, and listening to? For me, the sounds and the music itself has always been the draw. Here I am, forty-five years later, regretting I had not stuck at the awkward childhood piano lessons my parents had funded. A career in computing during the 80s and 90s took over, and real life (children, family) intervened.
And school (and my natural ability with ‘making’ and fascination with electronics) was steering me in a different direction. My young mind was racing ahead, my fingers less so. Some of these teenage pretensions were so complex I could hardly play them. But out of these naïve experiments came my first embryonic compositions. Had our piano been a musical box or fairground automaton, I suspect I would have been equally satisfied just studying its movements for hours on end in an attempt to discern its inner workings. It was a laboratory demonstration accompanied by a cacophony of dissonance, shifting and dancing in time with the intricate mechanism. I was not playing the piano, I was performing a physics experiment. I remember the occasions when I removed the front panel and watched, fascinated, as the hammers and levers, pecking and bobbing like birds at the taut strings, moved in synchronisation with my fingers. As a child, our modest upright was more an object of curiosity, an engineering marvel, than it was a musical instrument. The instrument is wide open to composition and improvisation. At this point I nearly lost the will to continue. This lost time led to a loss of skills which then had to be hard-won all over again. And, to make matters worse, I suffered a cycling accident pre-pandemic, just as things were coming together for me. The last eighteen months has not been easy, what with the pandemic. I certainly need to make more progress over the next year or two. I left a lucrative career to pursue the bewitching instrument and I am only too well aware of what I call my narrowing ‘window of opportunity’. Maybe got to G3, but my ‘gap’ and return to the piano is the ever-present chasm of forty-five years! I am, therefore, the proverbial ‘very late returning’ adult pianist. Before I say more, let me explain that, as a child, I did play a little. Piano coordination does not come naturally to me. She diagnosed me as ‘perhaps G5’ and suggested we work together to push to G6 and G7 with all due haste. However, I did play a lot of scales and arpeggios, some quite creative (modes, chord-scale theory etc.) At the end of this period of rather ad-hoc and chaotic learning, I felt I could play the piano (just) but now realised that I did need to find a ‘real’ piano teacher. During this period I had no classical piano training, preferring instead to focus on jazz harmony and song-writing. How long have you been playing the piano?Īs an adult, I spent 2 years with a jazz teacher and a few additional months working with a singer-songwriter.