After three years of eisteddfod competition, I was yet to win. It hadn’t occurred to me that I didn’t excel because of my reservations about the rote learning of fully notated works. And yet everyone around me took my musicianship very seriously indeed. Mr McFarlane spoke to me as if I were a real musician who had a professional future. At school my teachers and classmates applauded my solo performances. My proud parents sang my praises to anyone who would listen. I wasn’t complaining, but for some reason I couldn’t trust their judgement. A born sceptic, I assumed my piano teacher was paid to take me seriously, that my school lacked other precocious pianists to compare me to, and that my parents neither wanted nor sought third-party validation for their loving compliments. I felt like a toddler praised for sliding down a slippery dip when all I believed I’d done was obey the laws of gravity. Playing the piano came easily to me, I reasoned, in the same way that other girls swam fast or attracted boys. It felt like a natural affinity that had emerged with the good fortune of domestic encouragement and expert teaching, more than something I was actively pursuing on my own behalf. My career in classical piano music had come to feel, in short, like a performance in and of itself. In getting close to but never reaching the pinnacle of eisteddfod success, I confirmed my suspicion that while I might be highly competent, I was far from exceptional.
Having grown tired of my Highly Commended certificates and runner-up trophies, I decided it was time to come out about my preference for syncopation and flattened seventh notes. I asked Mr McFarlane if I could enter the Jazz Instrumental section of this year’s competition. Wanting to win, I hoped I would fare better in this section because there were fewer competitors. And if I had been honest with myself, with my teacher, with my parents, or anyone else for that matter, I would have admitted that I cared more for Brubeck, Ellington, Gershwin and the Australian jazz singer-songwriter Vince Jones than I did for the Mozart sonata I was also performing in competition.
There was a long pause while Mr McFarlane digested my question. I was usually as inscrutable as the Sphinx, and had never asked him for anything before. ‘What piece would you like to play?’ he said, eventually.
I didn’t hesitate. ‘“Blue Rondo à la Turk” by Dave Brubeck.’
‘From Time Out?’
Now it was my turn to be surprised. Released in 1959, Time Out was an album of original compositions in unconventional time signatures. The critics disliked it immediately, and it became the first jazz album to sell one million copies. It reached number two on the Billboard 1961 pop album chart, and the album’s famous track ‘Take Five’ made it to twenty-five on the Billboard Top 100 in October that year. Perhaps my teacher did not, as I had assumed, listen only to Brahms and Beethoven.
I had bought a book of Brubeck compositions from Allen’s Music Store, whose jazz section was like my social life at the time: small and frequently empty. The broader reaches of Allen’s printed music aisles were only slightly more populated, dotted with young men whose faces were in turn dotted with pimples. If only I’d been able to join the dots and smile in their general direction, I’d have had something to do on a Saturday night. But just as the solitary giant panda subsists strictly on the soft shoots of the bamboo tree, I grazed in the piano section, sniffing out musical morsels. With my pocket money I bought the two-volume Edition Peters set of Beethoven piano sonatas, feeling triumphant at finally being able to return my teacher’s copy. But it was acquiring a prized example of the late twentieth-century piano repertoire—the collected works of Billy Joel, in three tasty volumes—that really made my mouth water. And like the pandas, I wasn’t interested in mating: my promiscuity manifested only in an insatiable appetite for new music to sight-read.
The glossy cover of Jazz Masters: Dave Brubeck featured an extreme close-up of his face washed in a deathly blue that did nothing to make the grey-haired fifty-something pianist seem any younger. Were it not for the fact that the book contained my only access to a notated version of ‘Blue Rondo’, the composer’s looming countenance would have been sufficient reason to avoid going anywhere near it. Instead I took it home, where I was forced to look at him several times daily whenever I opened or shut the book during practice.
In Mr McFarlane’s studio we listened to ‘Blue Rondo’ on a cassette player to ensure consistency between the music on the page and the recorded version. As an approach to playing jazz music, imitating a great player is the stuff of training wheels, but I had to start somewhere. While I sat beside my teacher, I wanted to nod my head, move my shoulders and bounce my knees, but my instinct—however mistaken—told me to remain perfectly still. It was excruciating, and not just because of Mr McFarlane’s body odour.
The piece is composed primarily in 9|8 time, a rhythmic meter I hadn’t encountered in any classical repertoire. Nine fast beats per bar are divided into a rapid-fire one-two one-two one-two one-two-three. Then every fourth bar the feeling changes to a more waltz-like three plus three plus three in 3|4 time. Brubeck had based
