Baby Stuff

In my twenties—since when, alas, a goodly number of years have gone blurring past—I was nuts for the piano. A friend came back from his first year at college with a bunch of jazz albums, and we played and played them and in time I developed a deep passion for jazz piano.

It's not that easy to learn an instrument after childhood, but I sure tried. I practiced all the time, and took lessons. One teacher was a phenomenal musician, but as time went on I came to have some doubts about his approach to teaching, and I wasn't so sure about his approach to life either. The teaching was pure technique, no songs or anything. Scales, chords, sight reading, lots of other elements of music, but no actual music. I asked him when I'd start playing songs, and he thought about it, and said in about two years.

It was hard to argue with him—he was a prickly, irascible person. We were talking in his driveway one day—he lived with his parents—and the family dog came cringing up to him, and he kicked it hard. It stayed by his feet, whining. He looked down—there was some of the dog's fur stuck in his sole. "F---er got hair on my boot," he said. And kicked the dog again.

For sight-reading practice he gave me a book from Bela Bartok's beginning piano series "Mikrokosmos." I'm no expert on musical theory, but from what I've read, Bartok didn't care much one way or the other about tonality. Beethoven and Mozart are tonal, and so is almost every form of music people actually like to listen to. After hearing a Bartok chamber piece one time, I remarked to a musician acquaintance that I just couldn't figure out how to enjoy the piece. He furrowed his brow, thinking. "I don't think it's meant to be enjoyed," he said. He didn't elaborate, but I supposed that he meant the music was an intellectual exercise to which we were to listen in respectful puzzlement. Atonal music provokes that response among most people, if it gets listened to at all. If you haven't heard anyone going around lately whistling tunes by Anton Webern or Alban Berg, believe me, there's a reason for that.

Anyway, I hated the Bartok stuff. It might as well have been random notes. I didn't enjoy it, certainly, and it wasn't all that great for sight-reading practice because I literally could not be sure I was playing the right notes. I said so, and the teacher predictably snarled at me: "Ya want me to give you baby stuff?" I said no. But one day I called him and said I didn't want to take lessons from him any more. He sounded like he was going to cry, said I had a strong attitude toward practicing, but we parted company. A friend saw him in a bar afterward and said the teacher was calling me unpleasant names. Not long after that I was told that he had dropped dead of a heart attack. I sifted my feelings to see if I felt bad about it, and I didn't.

I kept learning, and eventually I was good enough to play in Top 40 bands. We'd play jazz for the dining crowd. I spent six nights a week for a couple of years in bars, but eventually the raffish fun of it wore thin and I got out of the business—I realized  that I was wasting my life playing bad music for bad money for bad people. But I kept a piano at home.

Life went on, and for long stretches I wouldn't sit down and play more than three or four times a year. But in the past couple of years I've been playing a lot more, practicing every day, and it's coming along. I get together with a bass player friend and people don't run out of the room or anything when we play. And lately I've been practicing my sight reading with easy classical music, because I like the classical at least as well as jazz.

Yesterday I went out and bought more easy piano books, the easiest I could find. Baby stuff, in short. It's what I need to sight-read. You need practice in seeing groups of notes at a time, and reading ahead of what you're playing, and seeing the patterns so you're not trying to read individual notes.

And the music is pretty. This isn't the made-up stuff from the instructional books, you know, "Dance of the Leprechauns" and so forth. These are simple melodies with simple harmonies, but they're also original music by Mozart and Beethoven and Haydn and that gang. Pretty little melodies, and it's nice, awfully nice, to sit down and actually play them. They're like music-box tunes—some cheerful, others wistful, all pretty. And if you really listen, there's something about it, something profound. Haydn, for instance, wrote lots of pretty little tunes. But if you read about him, you'll see he had a pretty hard life, with much that he could have chosen to be bitter about. But instead of kicking the dog, he made pretty music. Baby stuff, some call it. But it's charming. There's delicacy and tenderness in it, and often a trace of poetic sorrow. It's fragile. vulnerable, and your heart goes out to it. And it's meant to be enjoyed, at least, and I do.