Picking Up the Pieces

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...

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...