tips & tricks for the rhythmically & harmonically-challenged
Piano Potpourri
The Legendary Lewis: Jazz pianist writes what he knows
Jun 20th
Ramsey Lewis is exactly where you expect him to be – at his grand piano, tinkering with his latest composition.
“Composing makes me feel like I’m 12 again,” said the celebrated jazz pianist, who turned 75 on May 27. “When I get up in the morning, I feel giddy and I’m so happy to get to the piano and start working.”
Lewis will pull himself away from composing to celebrate his more than seven decades at the piano with a special concert tonight at 7 at the Ravinia Festival.
He estimates he has composed between 500 and 600 songs so far and shows no signs of slowing down. His latest work, “Colors: The Ecology of Oneness,” is a seven-movement opus that will premiere later this year in Tokyo.
“I’m still in the beginning stages here,” he said. “I’m trying to get my mind out of the way and just compose from my feelings. Writing is about what you know. Composing is writing about what you don’t know and letting the music take you where it will.”
Ramsey said he can recall a time when he was less eager to sit down in front of those 88 keys, though.
“I started piano when I was 4. My teacher was our church organist, Ernestine Bruce,” he recalled.
“Most of the time I had good lessons, but my older sister – who was also taking piano lessons at the time – remembers one time when I didn’t look at the lesson and Mrs. Bruce hit me with a ruler on my knuckles.
“Had I known back then what I know now, I might have been able to say, ‘You don’t know whose knuckles you’re hitting; that was an original piece,’ ” he added with a throaty laugh.
He stayed with Bruce for seven years, at the end of which she told Lewis’ parents she had taught her pupil all she could. While she had imparted the essential musical fundamentals, his next teacher ignited his passion for music.
“My next teacher was Dorothy Mendelssohn, and after several lessons with her I fell in love with the piano,” he said. “There is a moment when you strike the keys and they sound these notes that seem to weave around you. From that moment, I was in love.
“I would spend four or five hours a day at the piano practicing or writing music – not for achievement or fame, but simply for the love of music.”
Although the early years saw Lewis trained in both classical and gospel music, he credited his father for first exposing him to jazz.
“He would bring home these records by Art Tatum and Duke Ellington. I heard the music and kind of liked it, but didn’t get into it,” Lewis said.
“Art Tatum intimidated me, though. He was the greatest jazz piano player ever and he played so much piano, it sounded like he had three or four hands at the keys.”
Lying about his age as well as his knowledge of jazz, Lewis played his first paying jazz gig at age 15 with the Cleffs.
“I had to join the musician’s union and you had to be 16 to do that, so I told them I was,” he said.
“They also thought I knew standards and jazz tunes, and when they asked me to play Charlie Parker’s ‘B-Flat Blues’ it ended up sounding like boogie-woogie by Meade Lux Lewis,” Lewis said.
The Cleffs’ band leader, Wallace Burton, saw something in Lewis’ playing, though.
“He ended up writing out some blues changes and told me to learn them,” Lewis said.
“He also told me to go downtown to some of the record stores, go into the listening booths that they had at the time, and learn what jazz is all about.”
And learn he did. Though Lewis still professes a love for European classical music, he said no other form of music speaks to him like jazz.
“If I wake up and I’m feeling a certain way, with other music I have to thumb through my music collection to find that tune that will fit the moment,” Lewis said.
“With jazz, I just sit down at the piano and express my feelings with my own notes. There’s a certain freedom there.”
Ravinia Festival president and chief executive officer Welz Kauffman said the birthday celebration was a bit of a no-brainer.
“Ramsey has been a part of the Ravinia family for a long time. Not only as the artistic director of our jazz program, but he’s been performing here since the 1960s,” Kauffman said.
“It is our honor to celebrate not only his longevity, but the breadth of music he brings to us.”
In addition to performing with longtime collaborators Larry Gray and Leon Joyce, Lewis will be joined in concert with three-time Grammy award-winning vocalist Nancy Wilson and 2009 Kennedy Center honoree Dave Brubeck.
Wilson said she wouldn’t pass up a chance like this.
“I’ve known Ramsey for forever. We were both with John Levy Management for a long time and he’s like an older brother. It’s always fun to watch and listen to him play,” Wilson said of Lewis.
“And, in addition to it being a birthday celebration, it’s hard to say no to Ravinia. It’s such a great venue and I enjoy playing there whenever I can.”
Since a music education led Lewis to his passion and gave him a career, it’s perhaps most fitting that students from Ravinia’s Steans Institute for Young Artists will open the concert with a set.
“Just because they’re stu dents, that doesn’t mean they aren’t musicians,” Lewis said.
“Those kids are good enough to hold their own up there. It’s an honor to be sharing the stage with them.”
BY MISHA DAVENPORT, Sun-Times Media
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Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons – A Poem by Diane Wakoski
May 16th
I’m sure you know by now poems relating to the piano intrigue me. So it’s no wonder that when I chanced upon this one by a Michigan State University English professor during the period of Mother’s Day, I had to blog about it. Personally, I thank both my parents especially my late father for piano lessons — and also a favorite aunt, I definitely can relate to parts of the message of the poem.
Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons
by Diane Wakoski
The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond as big as a shoe;
as if
you had just built a wooden table
and the smell of sawdust was in the air,
your hands dry and woody;
as if
you had eluded
the man in the dark hat who had been following you
all week;
the relief
of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
playing the chords of
Beethoven,
Bach,
Chopin
in an afternoon when I had no one to talk to,
when the magazine advertisement forms of soft sweaters
and clean shining Republican middle-class hair
walked into carpeted houses
and left me alone
with bare floors and a few books
I want to thank my mother
for working every day
in a drab office
in garages and water companies
cutting the cream out of her coffee at 40
to lose weight, her heavy body
writing its delicate bookkeeper’s ledgers
alone, with no man to look at her face,
her body, her prematurely white hair
in love
I want to thank
my mother for working and always paying for
my piano lessons
before she paid the Bank of America loan
or bought the groceries
or had our old rattling Ford repaired.
I was a quiet child,
afraid of walking into a store alone,
afraid of the water,
the sun,
the dirty weeds in back yards,
afraid of my mother’s bad breath,
and afraid of my father’s occasional visits home,
knowing he would leave again;
afraid of not having any money,
afraid of my clumsy body,
that I knew
no one would ever love
But I played my way
on the old upright piano obtained for $10,
played my way through fear,
through ugliness,
through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases,
and a desire to love
a loveless world.
I played my way through an ugly face
and lonely afternoons, days, evenings, nights,
mornings even, empty
as a rusty coffee can,
played my way through the rustles of spring
and wanted everything around me to shimmer like the narrow tide
on a flat beach at sunset in Southern California,
I played my way through
an empty father’s hat in my mother’s closet
and a bed she slept on only one side of,
never wrinkling an inch of the other side,
waiting,
waiting,
I played my way through honors in school,
the only place I could
talk
the classroom,
or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary always
singing the most for my talents,
as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering
her house
and was now searching every ivory case
of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black
ridges and around smooth rocks,
wondering where I had lost my bloody organs,
or my mouth which sometimes opened
like a California poppy,
wide and with contrasts
beautiful in sweeping fields,
entirely closed morning and night,
I played my way from age to age,
but they all seemed ageless or perhaps always old and lonely,
wanting only one thing, surrounded by the dusty bitter-smelling
leaves of orange trees,
wanting only to be touched by a man who loved me,
who would be there every night
to put his large strong hand over my shoulder,
whose hips I would wake up against in the morning,
whose mustaches might brush a face asleep,
dreaming of pianos that made the sound of Mozart
and Schubert without demanding
that life suck everything
out of you each day,
without demanding the emptiness
of a timid little life.
I want to thank my mother
for letting me wake her up sometimes at 6 in the morning
when I practiced my lessons
and for making sure I had a piano
to lay my school books down on, every afternoon.
I haven’t touched the piano in 10 years,
perhaps in fear that what little love I’ve been able to
pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets,
will get lost,
slide away,
into the terribly empty cavern of me
if I ever open it all the way up again.
Love is a man
with a mustache
gently holding me every night,
always being there when I need to touch him;
he could not know the painfully loud
music from the past that
his loving stops from pounding, banging,
battering through my brain,
which does its best to destroy the precarious gray matter when I
am alone;
he does not hear Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary singing for me,
liking the sound of my lesson this week,
telling me,
confirming what my teacher says,
that I have a gift for the piano
few of her other pupils had.
When I touch the man
I love,
I want to thank my mother for giving me
piano lessons
all those years,
keeping the memory of Beethoven,
a deaf tortured man,
in mind;
of the beauty that can come
from even an ugly
past.
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The Piano – An Animated Short by Aidan Gibbons
Apr 10th
I’m still trying to get back to posting my original articles. So, in the meantime, enjoy this animated short of an old man playing the piano (Yann Tiersen’s evocative and reflective “Comptine d’un autre été: l’après midi”) while reminiscing about his life…
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Piano Lessons – A Poignant Poem by American Poet Laureate Billy Collins
Mar 25th
I enjoy a good poem once a while. So I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon one that’s on piano lessons and then some — and what more penned by a renown poet!
It’s been said that a picture paints a thousand words. Well, sometimes words paint beautiful landscapes too! Hope you take the time to read and soak in the poignancy of the words like I did… 
And then enjoy the music clips (as mentioned in the poem) that I’ve included for your listening pleasure!
PIANO LESSONS by Billy Collins
1.
My teacher lies on the floor with a bad back
off to the side of the piano.
I sit up straight on the stool.
He begins by telling me that every key
is like a different room
and I am a blind man who must learn
to walk through all twelve of them
without hitting the furniture.
I feel myself reach for the first doorknob.
2.
He tells me that every scale has a shape
and I have to learn how to hold
each one in my hands.
At home I practice with my eyes closed.
C is an open book.
D is a vase with two handles.
G flat is a black boot.
E has the legs of a bird.
3.
He says the scale is the mother of the chords.
I can see her pacing the bedroom floor
waiting for her children to come home.
They are out at nightclubs shading and lighting
all the songs while couples dance slowly
or stare at one another across tables.
This is the way it must be. After all,
just the right chord can bring you to tears
but no one listens to the scales,
no one listens to their mother.
4.
I am doing my scales,
the familiar anthems of childhood.
My fingers climb the ladder of notes
and come back down without turning around.
Anyone walking under this open window
would picture a girl of about ten
sitting at the keyboard with perfect posture,
not me slumped over in my bathrobe, disheveled,
like a white Horace Silver.
5.
I am learning to play
“It Might As Well Be Spring”
but my left hand would rather be jingling
the change in the darkness of my pocket
or taking a nap on an armrest.
I have to drag him in to the music
like a difficult and neglected child.
This is the revenge of the one who never gets
to hold the pen or wave good-bye,
and now, who never gets to play the melody.
6.
Even when I am not playing, I think about the piano.
It is the largest, heaviest,
and most beautiful object in this house.
I pause in the doorway just to take it all in.
And late at night I picture it downstairs,
this hallucination standing on three legs,
this curious beast with its enormous moonlit smile.
[Original music clips used here solely to complement the poem.]
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Creative Piano Ad!
Mar 10th
(Click on image for a bigger view.)
What a brilliant and creative tear-off piano advertisement! Now, if one were to make an 88-key version…
—————
Courtesy of 9GAG – What the Fun!
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