Picking Up the Pieces

This month’s Piano With Jonny challenge is the first verse of Danny Boy. The assignment itself is simple enough: play the melody with the basic chords. But because I'm both a glutton for punishment and a music theory nerd, I've made this something much larger. The version in this video is in the original key of C. I’m in Lesson 2 of the challenge (root-position chords + one-note melody) and am pretty much playing it as I should, with a few slides added. I play slides all the time in blues, but I suspect I got the idea here from spending the past few days listening almost obsessively to Bill Evans's recording of Danny Boy. I love the spacious, reflective sound to his version, so I definitely think I'm channeling him here (minus the complex chords). So I hope you'll hear that when you listen. What you won't hear, though, is the humming busy-ness inside my brain as I play! There's a whole lot happening behind the scenes. Behind the Scenes Right now several cou...

I have completed Lesson 4 ("Hands Together") of the PWJ "After You've Gone" course! Well, not exactly. I completed the first phase, which was being able to get it hands together, no matter how slow. I'm still at a relatively slow tempo, though it's picked up quite a bit in the past week. I was finally able to post this progress video on Feb. 28 (my goal was to have something to share by the end of the month, so goal achieved!). The next goals for this piece: Slowly increase the tempo to the 100-120 range. Practice playing a solo Possibly work out an intro and outro Lesson 5 is on soloing. I've already watched it, and it's pretty basic: just use the four notes in whatever chord your left hand happens to be playing. So, if the left hand is on F6, then just play something that only uses F, A, C, and D. Pretty easy. I think the hardest part will be coordinating--switching to the next chord solo in the right hand, and remembering the order of the p...

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in Lesson 5 (Minor Turnaround Progression) of PWJ’s Play Lead Sheets with 7th Chords course. It has some weird (to me) chords—half-diminished, iv7s, etc.—and at first I wasn’t sure I would like it. It just sounded so lugubrious . But I'm a good little Piano With Jonny student, so I bit the bullet and started the lesson. There are four suggested lead sheets for learning and practicing this progression: In This Quiet Hour (Jonny’s 8-bar educational tune for the lesson) Lullaby of Birdland You Don’t Know What Love Is Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise I started with “In This Quiet Hour” and then began listening seriously to the other three. I made a playlist with multiple recordings of each song and listened while driving, working, walking. I didn’t know any of them when I started, but now I know and love them (except maybe “You Don’t Know What Love Is”… just too depressing!). Then I printed out The Great Gig Book as a birthday gift to myself, an...

Folks, I have finished writing my You Are My Sunshine (YAMS) arrangement! Is it ready for performance? No. Will it be ready for the PWJ Student Recital on March 19? Probably not. But are the uncertainties of “I’m not sure what I’ll do in this section” and “I eventually need to figure out an outro” finally behind me? Yes. Do I have every note picked out? Not exactly. But the structure is there—and if the structure is there, the notes will follow. It’s like when I was in college and graduate school, writing papers. The hard part was always the outline. I would spend hours shaping it, developing my thesis, moving pieces around, deciding what belonged where. Once the outline held, the fun began, and I could write a brilliant paper. I don't know how brilliant YAMS will be, but I have to admit that I'm pretty darn proud of it. These two videos are very rough, as I was still working out the structural details, along with a few stylistic ones. In the “Solo” video, I’m experimenting wit...

The PWJ "Love Progression" goes as follows: I - V (over 3) - iii - vi (over 3) - IV - I (over 3) - ii7 - V - I In the challenge, you play each chord (as broken chords) in the left hand for one measure before moving to the next. So in 4/4 time, you have four beats per chord. I decided to experiment and change chords every two beats instead of every four ... and I liked it! The slower pace has an open, contemporary feel. The faster pace feels more circular and driving. A little more Pachelbel, a little less Yanni. Both approaches work, but I decided to submit my faster version for the challenge. The audio quality of this video leaves much to be desired, and reminds me that I need to run the sound directly from my phone into my phone with a cable. Yet another project for my to-do list. For now, enjoy this slightly fuzzy-sounding improvisation on the "Love Progression" for PWJ's February Challenge!

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...