Current gig:
As of April, 2011, I'm playing piano in the Montcrest
Big Band, which consists of four trumpets, four trombones and five
saxes, one of whom also plays clarinet; and the rhythm section, a bass
player, a drummer, and me. There's a top-notch conductor, a
retired
professional jazz musician who also teaches music. Their repertoire is jazz and
swing from the first half of the twentieth century. In addition
to being a social and musical outlet for me, I chose this group to
round out my volunteerism, since the band performs at hospitals and
retirement homes several times a year.
Music
in
my
life:
Music was important to my parents: my mother was an
accomplished singer, and music was an integral part of church
life so it was literally part of my father's job. He'd grown up
singing hymns in the village churches of Angola, in an age when
families also sang popular music together around the campfire and the
parlour piano.
They began training me early - not with a musical
career in
mind, but as a way to round out the development of a child. I had piano
lessons from Mom, and then had other piano teachers at an early
age. When we went to Africa they bought me an accordion to stand
in for a piano - a good choice, because I continued to develop my
understanding of scale and melodic structure through the keyboard, but
I also began to hear full-blown chords and progressions by employing
the chord buttons.
I was exposed to African rhythms and vocal harmonies
during those
formative years, and realized early that those harmonies didn't come
off a page, and weren't invented by a composer or arranger, but were
improvised extemporaneously by the singers. I wish more western
singers could and would do that - that's the kind of music I enjoy
participating in the most. There's something ridiculously
hesitant and cult-worshipful about how we approach and appreciate music
in Europe and N. America, in comparison. Not that we don't have
brilliant historical composers, but even in our folk music we defer to
recording artists and "charts" instead of learning to simply
understand, play and sing music by ear.
Back
in Toronto for a year in grade nine, I was
assigned the trombone in the high school band, and later
I picked up the trumpet - it was more portable. I continued my
piano studies intermittently, including theory rudiments and
composition, and taking
exams. I practiced to a grade eight conservatory
level and then spent a year at a jazz college in Edmonton, learning to
improvise and analyze jazz styles and chord structures. In my late teens and early
twenties I was able to parlay that effort into income, playing five
nights a week on the
bar circuit with a country rock band, and a jazz trio in a local
lounge, for
about three years - until I got sick of being on the road and going
"home"
at night to ugly hotel rooms, often joined by drunken bar patrons who
somehow got invited back to party after we closed down the bar.
When I was at home, I taught music to
beginners. In my early thirties, when I got home from teaching
English in
Austria and in Japan, I opened my own music teaching studio. I'd
worked
as
a hired gun in music schools belonging to other people, and
realized that I'd rather pocket the whole lesson fee than just a cut
of it. I did the nightly audit at a nearby hotel to make ends meet
until I had enough students to make a full-time income. After
my night shift I'd sleep, then walk around local neighbourhoods putting
flyers in mailboxes myself in the early afternoons, and taught in the
late afternoons and early evenings. My teaching studio quickly
became a successful, growing business with minimal capital investment;
students enjoyed my cheerful teaching style, and parents were happy to
pay month by month in advance. I had fun
with it, and had visions of continuing to grow until my little
teaching studio became a full-fledged music store of my own, but during
the second
year of operation, I applied and got accepted into teacher's college,
so I sold off my instruments, invested the money in a single stock, and
lost my investment that very fall, in the '87 crash. That was the
start of my education as a stock market investor.
While I
was working as a public school teacher, I ran a few elementary school
bands and could
teach the kids
to play all the notes on their various instruments, but I didn't play
much at all myself, for a whole decade; then I got involved with the Scarborough Concert
Band
because they rehearsed one evening a week at my school - how convenient
was that?! - and I stayed
with them for seven pleasant years.
I moved on to spend three years with
a neighbourhood
garage
band
of "mature" musicians. What an interesting saga this was.
They weren't very good, frankly - always
too loud
to even hear themselves and each other. I had to wear earplugs at
rehearsals! They didn't, but one of them already had serious
hearing loss and wore hearing aids. They would play wrong chords,
forget
words and music, none of them could read and most of them imagined that
drinking beer and smoking a doobie didn't affect their ability (they
might have been
right, ironically), so they did that at every rehearsal. Although
they couldn't read, they kept dreaming out loud about playing a gig at
a resort or on a cruise ship, which was pretty laughable; I kept
my mouth shut about 98% of the time because they wouldn't have believed
that I could make any useful suggestions anyway, and they even found it
hard to get their heads around the fact that I wrote out my keyboard
parts
and played them consistently - the incumbent keyboard player didn't do
that, but I was using his equipment when he switched to guitar, and I
didn't want to invest in my own set of duplicate gear for a group like
that; nor did I want to step on his toes. They were fun
socially when you could get past the "band nazi" that often seems to
infect such groups, and I had a loyalty to my friend John who'd asked
me to help him play his sax with them, so I stuck it out for three
years.
We broke up very strangely. I'd given them plenty of clues
that I was capable of doing more for them, and as retirement approached
I began to consider investing in a decent keyboard and really helping
to carry the band. I knew I'd have more time to rehearse and to
write out arrangements for them, and help John with his sax parts, and
I began to suggest that I could play some parts other than trumpet in
some songs they were considering - I volunteered to sing a particular
hard-driving rock tune and do a harmonica part (they mentioned wanting
to do the song but didn't think they could reproduce the harmonica
part), and they seemed shocked that I'd consider myself capable of
that. I arrived as a mere trumpet player, and they seemed to have
a mental block about how well I could play keyboards (granted, I
underplayed my ability myself) even though I played keyboard on several
songs for them - they seemed to consider that some sort of weird
fluke. I was the only one besides the bass player who'd actually
played professionally for a number of years, yet the fact that I now sight-read
complex jazz piano charts with a big band only a year later would
surely boggle their minds. They knew that I'd played concert band
first trumpet, and could improvize jazz, and sing (although I always
held back from doing any lead with them because they were jealous about
letting someone else sing any of the songs we all liked), but they
never seemed to wrap their heads around what I was actually capable of
doing for them and how they might use me most effectively. I
could hear the bass player screwing up, but he couldn't accurately hear
the trumpet parts he was asking me to reproduce; they often asked me to
reproduce high passages that professional trumpet players laid down on
recordings, often with C trumpets or higher; or the sound of whole
brass sections with multiple trumpets. Standing beside the
keyboard player, I could hear him playing minor chords where everyone
else was playing majors, but when I tried to mention this quietly to
the band nazi he looked at me like I had two heads. He had a
decent ear, but I think the band played so loudly that he couldn't hear
it himself. He'd screw up himself, and curse and laugh about it,
but if anyone else screwed up he was merciless with withering
criticism. He was, frankly, a bully.
I never felt thoroughly comfortable with these guys, and
eventually their true colours were displayed. We played gigs for
three years and they voted to pay out part of the money but keep the
rest to invest in building up their equipment; the concept was that
we'd be co-owners of the equipment. Suddenly out of the blue,
after three years, they held a secret meeting - the very week I was
seriously shopping for a decent keyboard - and decided that they could
do better by downsizing, so we went our
separate ways. John was out of town when it happened, and
disagreed with the decision but never got a chance to speak to it; and
they got the lead singer to phone and tell me that I'd been cut.
Did they offer to pay out my share of the equipment? Hell,
no. Did I care? Well, it isn't like I needed the money, and
if they'd done it all honestly, openly and up front I probably would
have been pleased to forget about it, but it is the principle of the
thing - basically, they had no principles.
Anyway, I was getting ready to retire and travel through
the
winter months, so that all worked out just fine. We had
practiced weekly and we did a couple
of school fundraisers, 50th birthday
parties, and
casino gigs once in a blue moon - three gigs a year, we averaged. Not
much performing for all
that rehearsing. Mind you, the concert band had never booked more than
seven
concerts a year, and some of those would get cancelled for weather or
other reasons, so either way I didn't really get to play out all that
often over that decade.
While
my teaching
career was underway I neglected my piano and trumpet for a decade, and
practiced only the bare minimum required to help out at occasional
school concerts or to play in the concert band or the rock band. When I play now I'm riding on
the ghost of skills acquired and
then left behind as a younger man, but the joy of making music never
disappears in spite of the frustration of not being able to play as
well as I think I should. I occasionally sight-read piano and trumpet
arrangements
(pop and
jazz standards) at home, or play arrangements by ear, sometimes by
listening to
Youtube recordings, or
playing along to Jamie Aebersold, or Band-in-a-Box
backing tracks. BIAB gives you a consistent beat and control over
the
tempo, volume and progressions, with real sampled instrument
sounds. It sounds and feels like playing along with my own band,
right in my living room. I bought my first guitar and began learning to play it,
mostly so that I can accompany campfire songs with my family in Alberta
once a year. Last summer and fall I got out to a weekly living
room jam,
described
below, and sang once a week in a "jazz choir" - sadly, they were not
improvizational, they read everything, but some of the
arrangements were very nice; Java
Jive
became my earworm for a while.
I'll play with anyone, at least once. There
are enough music
snobs around, in all genres - I'm not one of them. I'm a knowledgeable all-round
musician with
a
good
ear
for
pitch,
progressions and harmonies, and a mediocre performer; but I
always did enjoy singing or playing
music with other people.
Maybe that urge has roots in the campfire singing we did as a family
when I was a child. I
have a clear voice with good range - hear the sound sample below -
but
not a powerful one.
I
avoided
joining
new
musical
groups
in
retirement
-
at
least
any where my attendance was critical - in order to have no
commitments when I
want
to travel, or go cruising in our sailboat. Because of my concert
band experience, I was invited to attend rehearsals with a big band, part of the
Sheraton
Cadwell Orchestra Group, but I had to give that up - in addition to
my commitment to be free to travel, my week is just
too full with other interests to accommodate the daily practice I would
need to get on top of their
repertoire. The band leader claimed to have a library of 5000 songs
(although I know that they actually rotated the same few hundred over a
number of years), and my folder had at least 500 in it. They were very
serious readers and highly skilled amateur players, but they rehearsed
half-way across the city, and I hate to commute.
I'd
love
to
connect with a small group of brass players close to home,
or a small vocal group doing what an acquaintance calls "cocktail sets".
Nature
vs. Nurture?
I described my early musical training, and ascribed
my "talent" to that, but I often wonder if there isn't also something
more innate involved. My immediate family can all sing on key,
every last one of them - not a tin ear in the bunch. Furthermore,
they can meet up once a year for a family camp-out and
improvise multiple blended and balanced harmonies around the campfire,
completely a capella, without any rehearsal
in between those rare occasions. Growing up with that, I never
realized
how singular the phenomenon was, and expected to find those skills with
every group of musicians I tried to work with, but after decades of
working with other musicians, I now recognise how unusual it is.
To find individuals who can not only sing,
but harmonize songs like the samples below with no
score to read, is rare. To find a whole family in which every
individual from ages 8 to 85 can do it is rarer still. The
following samples were recorded on a little handheld cassette player
with a tiny condenser mic in the family room of my parents' home one
day:
Quartermaster's
Store
Wimoweh
Ilkley Moor Bar T'at
Amazing
Grace
Here's a sample of my own voice, recorded one
day
while I was home from work medicating a cold with a few glasses of red
wine, and entertaining myself with a microphone and a borrowed analog
4-track recorder. This short stuffed-up-nose-sounding bit
demonstrates the same harmonic abilities, on an old Golden Gate Quartet
song that I've loved since childhood: Swing
Low,
Sweet
Chariot
I
can "fake" the melody, chord progression and bass line of any song I've
heard, on the piano - a skill that is technically referred to as
"vamping" - well enough to play along with other dance band musicians,
even without rehearsal (although my fluency with any piece improves
with repetition, of course). I know that there is a
sub-group of autistic individuals who have this happy gift, some to an
astonishing performance level; and perfect pitch is not unusual among
people with Aspergers. On the other hand, I can't easily remember
lyrics, and sometimes can't even remember the titles of songs I can
play; Deborah can often supply these for me. I remember faces
forever, even in dreams, but often forget names. Daniel Tammet,
an author and famous savant with Aspergers, can learn languages easily
and do high level mental mathematics, but can't remember faces - he has
to study still photos of friends and family before he gets together
with them. I find it fascinating that we each appear to have
different gifts and fall somewhere along several different continuums
of talent and ability, and that those on the extreme edges can often be
diagnosed as falling within some part of the autism spectrum.
"Parlour Music": In the summer
and fall leading up to retirement, I played "pick-up" with various musical groups, and sang in
a teachers' choir with
Deborah. After retirement I found a few
informal groups to get out and play with, including a
once-a-week
living-room band - the modern 21st century version of the 19th century
practice of "parlour music". The weekly gathering attracted seven
to nine participants in any given week, out of a pool of twice as many
musicians on the contact list. I improvised
keyboard
bass for them, in the absence of a guitar bass player; that's
simple and stress-free for me because I have a good ear for
progressions and I know my chords and scales - but I could also come
and
go as I please, since the membership was
fluid. I could sing harmonies and sing lead once in a while, play
trumpet, and contribute keyboard
sounds like organ, piano, strings, etc. I enjoy this
approach to music making more than anything else, at this stage in my
life. Maybe I always did.
The parlour music tradition is alive and well across
the continent, and some groups, such as the Harlem Parlour
Music Club
(interesting that they spell "parlour" the Canadian way...), are
accomplished enough to have made recordings. Related concepts are
the
down-east ceilidh
kitchen party, the singalong, and the "song circle".
The
musicians
aren't
there
to
get
paid
to
play
for
an
audience
-
they
are
the audience, as well as the
participants. It's
fun and laid-back;
the creativity and improvizational freedom of a group like
this is a joy, and because it isn't limited like a gigging
group that stays small on purpose so that they don't have to divide
their pay too many
ways, you often have interesting new combinations of instruments and
players. Sometimes the song falls apart and you laugh it off;
but it often comes together really well and you soar, musically
and
emotionally. Four hours flew by for me, every time I was able to
join in.
Here's something I wrote to the
friend who organized the weekly Thursday parlour music
group. I wanted to call it the "Beaches Parlour Music Club", but
his wife's name is Luanne and she was the main singer, so he refered to
it instead as "Lu and the Living Room Louts":
"Did
you
know
that
that
you
are
part
of
a
two
hundred
year
old
tradition
called
"parlour
music"?
As soon as
North Americans could afford to buy pianos for their homes and pay for
piano lessons, the sheet music industry exploded - back in the days of
Scott Joplin and earlier. "Parlour Music" clubs sprang up in
peoples' homes. There was harmony singing, and other instruments
were brought in - banjos, ukes, guitars, etc. In New Orlean's,
where U.S. Army units used to disband, brass instruments became part of
the tradition, especially snare drums and cymbals, muted trumpets and
saxes. Fifty years later, rock'n'roll developed out of the loud
stompin' and shakin' gospel music tradition, radios were widespread and
mobile, there was a booming market for vinyl records, music groups that
were any good became limited-personnel bands and moved out of the
parlours, into studios and onto stages. In smaller venues,
jukeboxes replaced live musicians. Somehow by the 60's,
intimidated by all the top talent that they could hear on the airwaves,
and not as keen to invest in electric guitars and amps as furniture for
their living rooms, people just weren't as interested in making their
own music anymore.
"One of the cool
things about parlour music is that
you can do ballads and interesting "listening" tunes,
because there's no pressure to keep a dance floor filled. You can
take breaks when you feel like it, even while
the other musicians are playing; enjoy a
beverage while playing, stray from the charts and try some interesting
improvizational changes without freaking out the band leader...I prefer
jam sessions and parlour music to treating music like a job, playing in
a band."
Sadly,
the project didn't last into 2011, so by the time I came back from
Australia I had to look for a new group - this time I found the Montcrest
Big Band, mentioned above.
Concert-going: For years, our
friends Pat and Clare
Taplin
have invited us several times a year to Tafelmusik
concerts, where they have the four best seats in the house, and we go
to a variety of other random concerts that strike our fancy, including
the monthly Acoustic Harvest series, which takes place in a local
church basement. The last group we heard was terrific, and
representative of the talent and type of music to expect - folk
and bluegrass, as often as not. There are sound samples on their
website: Moo'd Swing. Another
example is the duo-led group My Sweet
Patootie, who also have sound samples on their site. We
also heard James Taylor and Carol King last summer, live at the Air
Canada
Centre.