Picking Up the Pieces

Showing Up Anyway It’s been an interesting stretch at the piano lately. Not dramatic or triumphant, that’s for sure. Just mentally ... expansive, maybe. Life outside piano has been intense, and I haven’t managed a full, uninterrupted hour at the keyboard in nearly a week. The good news is that I'm still showing up every day, sometimes twice a day when I can. Fifteen minutes here, twenty there. “After You’ve Gone.” Minor turnaround practice. Modulations. Transposing. Jonny’s “Love Progression” challenge. Tweaking my “You Are My Sunshine” arrangement. A feeble attempt at re-learning a cheesy love song from the 80s so I can submit a video for PWJ’s “Cheesy Month.” The kind of work that doesn’t make for flashy videos but does steadily rewire my brain. (OK, maybe the cheesy love song doesn’t ... but it’s a good exercise in sight-reading!) I am deep in my PWJ courses right now, especially the Minor Turnaround work, and it is seriously stretching me. Flat 9 inversions. Half-dimi...

This morning I worked on the “stride” section of “You Are My Sunshine.” I started writing it as kind of a joke, thinking, “How dissonant can I make this and have it still sound like ‘You Are My Sunshine’?” But then it started to grow on me, and I made some changes, applying what I’ve been learning in my “After You’ve Gone” stride course. So now this section is deliciously rife with 6ths, 9ths, and diminished chords. Not the epitome of sophistication, but I’m excited to move beyond triads and dominant sevenths. For some reason, I’ve struggled with the final measure or so of this section. With the left hand striding on F major, I descend chromatically from an F6 (3rd inversion) to a diminished chord—which diminished chord, I have no idea. Maybe an F diminished? On the keyboard, I’m playing B, D, F, and A♭. From there, the left hand switches to C7 and my right hand descends chromatically to a C9 (B♭ on the bottom), then plays what I think is a C with a flat 9, but which also look...

When I was a kid (and a teenager… and honestly even into my twenties), my greatest temptation at the piano was speed. If there was a run, I wanted it faster. If there were sparkling sixteenth notes, I wanted them to blur. I loved pieces like Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor (K. 310)  and Schubert's Op. 90, No. 2 because they gave me an excuse to race. I could play fast, or at least I thought I could. And I was more than happy to demonstrate that fact. The problem was that fast and good are not the same thing. Back then, my teachers would say things like, “If you can’t play it at 60, you can’t play it at 120.” I nodded. Then I went home and promptly practiced at 120. What I didn’t understand at the time was that playing fast before something is secure doesn’t save time. It adds time. Or, more accurately, it wastes it. I would “learn” a piece, but it was never really solid — never fully mapped in my head or dependable in my hands. If you’d asked me where the harmony was going, or why that...

 The sample tune for PWJ's Play Lead Sheets with 7th Chords course, Lesson 4 (Chromatic Walkup Progression), is titled "My Heart Is Jumpin'". The lesson focuses on that delightful chromatic walk-up progression, which is used in Ain't Misbehavin', Makin' Whoopee, and It's Only a Paper Moon. It practically begs to be played in a stride style! This progression has easily been my favorite so far. I spent about four weeks on this lesson. It was definitely more involved than Lesson 3 (Extended Turnaround Progression), which took about two weeks. Part of that was difficulty; part of it was me. I worked it in multiple keys, tried different left-hand approaches, and of course experimented with stride in tenths. So that took time. I made this "graduation" video earlier this week and have since moved on to Lesson 5 (Minor Turnaround Progression). I shared it on the PWJ page without expecting much of reaction (since it's just a Foundations course, no...

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to  IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...

I bit the bullet. I signed up for the Piano With Jonny Student Recital on Thursday, March 19. It’s in the middle of the workday, which means I’ll either be working from home with a very strategic “lunch break” or taking the day off entirely. Given how busy things have been lately, I kind of like the idea of a day off. What will I play? "You Are My Sunshine," of course! I’ve known for a while that the only way this arrangement will ever reach the finish line is if I give it a hard deadline. Otherwise, it remains "this fun thing I'm working on" forever. Now it has to become something real . Like the velveteen rabbit. So I have five weeks to prepare. I think that's enough time. Thinking Strategically Last night I divided the arrangement into 13 sections and tried to rate each one from 1 to 5, with 1 meaning “needs serious work” and 5 meaning “performance-ready.” The rating system fell apart pretty quickly, though. Some sections are musically finished but not d...