‘He was the nicest man I’d ever met,’ my mother told me.
34
IT’S A WARM SUMMER EVENING ON the corner of West End Avenue and 86th Street, and I’m sitting in a cavernous church. But I’m not in a pew, and I’m not taking Communion. I’m seated at a beat-up old grand piano, as a member of an amateur jazz ensemble. Twenty years after Freddy Wilson’s workshop, I’ve progressed from a converted garage to another repurposed structure. And it’s a broad church, too: all around me in the warrens of the building are acting classes, exercise classes, and self-defence and martial arts classes. But the jazz ensemble gets to play the main stage.
To my right sits Corporate Mike with his honey-coloured acoustic guitar, which he must have brought directly from his office downtown. On the other side of him is Marcellus from Washington Heights forty blocks north, who waits tables at Dizzy’s in Columbus Circle when he’s not playing his tenor. In front of me is the gently spoken Pablo on bass; and a pimply monosyllable is at the drum kit who, depending on the night, could be Joe, Sam, Scott or Dave. The drummers look like children, because they are, while the rest of us have a few more runs on the board. Sometimes we’re joined by a singer who crosses the Hudson from New Jersey to get here, and sometimes by an older guitarist who, when not practising his instrument, is a practising cardiologist. For a while during the summer we even had an elderly tuba player from Switzerland. A jazz ensemble is one of the few places on Earth where you will reliably find people from different generations listening to each other with attention, respect and genuine interest.
Tonight, like we do every week, we warm up with a blues tune. This time it’s Thelonious Monk’s ‘Blue Monk’. Playing a blues is the conditioning stretch for a jazz band, because it has a common twelve-bar structure that allows us to play ourselves into readiness for the more complicated chord progressions in the three or four other pieces we’ll play during the two-hour workshop. Within the twelve-bar harmonic progression of a blues song, almost infinite variation is possible, which is mind-blowing if you consider that the most basic blues progression uses just three chords—the first, the fourth and fifth—of any chosen key. So for a blues in A, for example, your chord progression uses A, D and E. That’s it. Its simplicity also explains why so many popular songs across all genres are, at their core, blues progressions (conjure up the Batman television theme song), and why—if you’re a pop guitarist, a jazz pianist or a budding singer of any stripe—learning the blues is one of the best things you can do to develop your skills. If you are so inclined, you have a lifetime of homework to do—listening to great recordings, practising chord voicings, learning to transpose into different keys, transcribing and imitating great solos—but for the beginner and the advanced student alike, it all comes back to knowing your scales in every key.
In the Well-Tempered Clavier, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a prelude and fugue for the keyboard in every one of the twenty-four major and minor keys. His purpose, stated on the dedication of the original 1722 publication, was ‘for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study’. In terms of the time I have to devote to the piano, and the level of dexterity I enjoy these days, I’m a long way from my early encounters with Bach’s foundational work, when I was one of those ‘musical youth desirous of learning’. But now in my forties, reflecting on the composer’s dedication, I’m struck by his second target audience: ‘for the pastime of those already skilled in this study’. He’s right—learning is a pastime, an endeavour worth doing for its own sake. As a formal student, whether at school or university or in piano lessons, I always associated learning with a goal or end point that lay beyond the here and now: good grades, graduation, the performance diploma. As an adult returning to the piano after a long and self-enforced separation, I’m taking up Bach’s challenge in the environment of the jazz workshop. I’m not sure what Johann Sebastian would think about my choice, but I’ve decided that I’ll be doing pretty well if I can learn to improvise over a blues progression in any of those twenty-four keys. There’s no greater goal to that pastime than improving how I play with other amateur musicians. And what a relief that is.
Once each instrumentalist has taken a chorus of ‘Blue Monk’, our teacher Ron, a professional trumpet player and arranger, asks the group which song we’d like to play first. We choose from a shortlist nominated by the students at the end of last week’s workshop. Our weekly homework is to familiarise ourselves with the chord charts for each piece, to learn the melody accurately and to study the basic structure, so that next week we can simply start playing it together.
‘When you go all over the world and you know a handful of tunes, you can speak to each other,’ Ron says, as if each of us were planning to sit in at a jazz club jam session the next time we’re visiting Paris. And just like Freddy, Ron is full of aphorisms:
‘There’s the notes versus the spirit of a piece.’
‘We have to play with confidence.’
‘Play it wrong but play it strong.’
‘Great solos have an arc, a shape to them.’
‘When we play we want to get out of our heads entirely.’
I’d say that last one is my favourite, though
