Sometimes You Have to Just Listen

 Sometimes you just have to listen. Like the time my piano teacher told me as a 14-year-old, “You shouldn’t quit your piano lessons. You have potential.”

 

I had successfully played some google woogie and early 50s pop music at two parties and in a music class.  But ignored him and quit. One of my biggest mistakes.ever. My priorities changed. How many times have you made an error like that?

 

As an adult I was getting better at listening. I still dabbled in the piano, mostly playing by ear. But I listened to the lady in the next apartment play, and she kept making the same mistakes every time she played a song. I wasn’t going to fall into that trap.

 

So I resumed piano lessons at age 34. I enjoyed it a lot, but I couldn’t memorize songs anymore. Once I got into a quarrel with her over the song “Satin Doll.” She kept saying I was playing the dotted quarter notes wrong “But that’s not the way Duke Ellington played it,” I insisted.

 

I switched to a jazz piano teacher, jean Butler. She introduced me to the Real Book,  a “fake book” with only melody and chords. At the time, the book was illegal but later became a legal standard for the jazz world. I loved it!

 

I even performed at my own wedding, but I played mostly for myself for the next 35 yeasts on my wonderful Yamaha grand piano. But all of a sudden, in 2017 I was working with a teacher on sight singing, when I laid down a few bars of jazz at his request.

 

“You have GOT to join a jazz band,” he said. I was listening. I surprised him when I really did. My friend Ron Worthy jammed every week with a group in the basement of someone’s house in a mostly African-American section of Washington. It was a jazz musician’s dream! These guys were pros, and I loved it. But I was in over my head and decided to switch to a class in Tysoons Corner, where a guitarist, saxophone player, trumpet player and a drummer and I played along with professional guitarist xxxx. It had the great feel of a jazz combo, and the next year I played with Jeff Antoniuk and his group in Annapolis. Perhaps the highlight of my music was playing with this group Twins Jazz, one of the prime jazz venues in Washington. My friends came. What a thrill that was!

 

But I wasn’t finished as I moved to South Boston. A week after Tunnel Creek Vineyards opened in Roxboro in 2001, I admired their Chickering grand piano and asked if I could play it. When I did, the owner said, “Can you come back on Saturday?” I listened.

They paid me well for Saturdays and Sundays, even giving me billing in their d ads. What a thrill!  Th only instruction I got was to play softly so as not to interrupt the talking. They weren’t listening to me? Well fine, no pressure. I could play whatever I wanted. But the long hours they wanted me to play took a toll on my arthritic hands, and I had to quit after three months. I recently boasted to one of the many follow-up big-time acts they host that I was first. They are impressed.

 

After playing for some receptions and parties in the area, I listened again when Nan, the 89-year-old pianist Mt. Carmel Presbyterian Church, was out with hip replacement surgery. “We need a pianist,” was the call. I have stepped in, but hymns are difficult for me. I am playing with chords out of a hymn fake book.