Over the years, I’ve read many times that Miles Davis, when asked by young trumpeters how they might improve their own playing, would invariably respond: buy a piano. And certainly, Miles wasn’t the only trumpeter thinking along those lines; two of my other favorite jazz players, Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie, doubled on piano well enough to release recordings featuring them at the keys. Even a world apart, in the arena of classical playing, William Vacchiano, a long-time fixture of the New York Philharmonic’s extraodinary trumpet section, once famously remarked that, had he spent half his trumpet practice time at the piano, he would have been not only a better piano player, but a better trumpet player as well. When it comes to understanding functional harmony, there’s nothing quite like the piano, with no other instrument so linearly and visually laying out melodies, harmonies, and the relationships between them.

So, it is with serious embarassment that I must admit I am an exceedingly remedial pianist. I have a mean ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, and that’s about it. Yesterday, however, as I passed by Sam Ash, I noticed a handful of electric keyboards on clearance sale in the window. Years of accumulated non-piano-playing guilt sent me through the doors, and I came home last afternoon with a full-size Yamaha PSR-273 electric keyboard. Sadly, despite it possessing literally hundreds of other features I will never conceivably use, this model appears to lack the occasionally found karaoke add-on, dashing my hopes of making money on the side by inviting Asian tourists from nearby Time Square into my apartment for rousing rounds of song and drink. Still, karaoke or no, armed with a textbook (John Valerio’s Jazz Piano Concepts), I yesterday butchered my way through a first short practice stint. While it will be a long, long time before I’m ready to play in public, with the music theory I already possess, after several years of hard work I honestly believe I could even push my playing skills all the way up to somewhere just below mediocre.

This is slightly discouraging, considering how blazingly quickly I picked up my other back-up instrument, the upright bass, though it’s also a good reminder that I picked up the bass quickly not because I’m some sort of musical genius, but rather because the bass is really, really, really easy. Consider this classic jazz joke:

A young boy comes home one day and tells his father he’d like to learn to play the bass. Glad that his son is taking an interest in music, the father heads to the local music store, picks out a bass, and signs his son up for a week of lessons to get him off on the right foot.

The next evening, the father asks his son what he learned in his first lesson.

“Well,” his son replies, “I learned the first four notes on the fourth string.”

The following evening, after the same question, the son answers “I learned the first four notes on the third string.”

On night three, it’s “I learned the first four notes on the second string.”

The fourth night, the father again asks his son how his lesson went.

“Actually,” says the kid, “I couldn’t make the lesson today. I had a gig.”

In my estimation, this joke is only slightly hyperbolic, as after about two years of playing the bass I’m now occassionally called in to sub gigs, whereas after two years of trumpet playing I still basically sounded like a slowly and painfully dying cow.

By now, even after nearly seventeen years of trumpet playing, I still occassionally feel like I’m in dying cow territory, and I’m especially concerned about a relapse in that direction tomorrow. I’ve been hired in as trumpet soloist for St. Luke’s Easter service, where I’ll be playing a Baroque suite, and descant lines on most hymns. The pieces, requiring delicate, highly exposed and spritely playing throughought, would be a stretch even when at my best, and may prove altogether impossible when performed at a morning hour early enough that my eyes are still to bleary to read the music. Wish me luck.

Last night, I sat in with a great jazz combo playing at Ye Olde Tripple Inn, a bar a few blocks from where I live. The gig went well, and most of the group was exceedingly complementary – to their ears, I was told, I sounded like the re-embodied ghost of Woody Shaw. The bass player, however, knew otherwise – I could see it in his eyes. He was the only one who could tell I wasn’t playing complex harmonic ideas because I was intentionally sidestepping, substituting tritones, and building upper structure triads. I was playing complex harmonic ideas because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

For me, playing jazz is a bit like speaking French. Which is to say, I can’t actually speak any French at all. But I do have a remarkably good ear for accents*, and can pretend to speak French well enough to not only convince non-speakers I’m fluent, but even to convince those who’ve studied the language for a few years (apparently under the belief that I speak so fluently they just can’t keep up).

To be fair, the analogy between jazz and French isn’t precise; while both follow formal grammars, language conveys precise meaning in a way music is rarely meant to. So, at a certain level, sounding like you can play jazz and actually being able to play jazz are the very same thing. It is, after all, an aural tradition.

And, in fact, I do know the grammar of jazz. It’s just that I know it only academically, intellectually, rather than having the myriad chords and scales and all their variants seamlessly enough under my fingers to play them through without conscious thought. So, under the heat of the moment, as tunes fly by, I fall back on my ear, on simply playing what sounds right.

Hence my new resolution: going forward, I’ll be working hard to bring my academic jazz theory up to practical jazz theory. Running patterns again and again to ingrain the harmonies deep enough in my subconscious that, when, as I do now, I let whatever music is in my head push through the bell of my horn, it pushes through in a form that’s, jazz-wise, unimpeachably grammatically correct.

Until then, though, I’ll be faking it by ear and heart. Unless I’m looking to impress last night’s bass player (or any of the other small handful of extremely well trained listeners who can actually tell the difference), that seems to be good enough.

*side story: While underage, I drank for years on an Australian fake ID, managing a 100% success rate (even in front of Australian bartenders) in passing both my accent and the ID off as the genuine article.

I’ll be up in about four hours to head off to Denver for a slew of investor meetings. No rest for the wicked.

Actually, I had originally intended to make tonight an early evening, but instead ended up heading off to an audition of sorts for a fairly recently formed jam band. The group sounded remarkably good playing through a handful of Rolling Stones and Zeppelin tunes, as well as a few originals, and though my chops were certainly not at their best, I still had a remarkably good time letting loose and blowing through some rock solos – something, having recently focused in on classical and small combo jazz playing, I hadn’t done for much too long.

Oh, and continuing the theme of happy serendipities: the group’s sax player was one of the talented two from the tragically poor jazz rehearsal I’d been hired in to play two weeks back.

None the less, as Denver trips are always rich blog fodder, I’m sure I’ll have plenty to post about over the next few days. Stay tuned.

Yet another reason why the Treo 600 is the greatest thing since sliced bread: with a simple piece of software, I can use it as a wirless modem for my laptop, allowing me to access the internet on my PC anywhere I get a cell signal.

Direct off the train back from Boston last night, I headed to the single worst rehearsal of my entire life. I had been hired into a small jazz combo (trumpet, two saxes, singer and rhythm section), meant to play for several local ballroom dance schools’ upcoming dances and competitions. The group was led by a ballroom dancer-turned-guitarist, and by the end of the first tune, I was mainly thinking, “this guy should have just stuck to dancing.”

Beyond starting the song several times in completely wrong keys, the guitarist continued to misplay chords, fall out of time, and lose his place in the simple twelve-bar form. As he was the only instrument laying down the chord changes, his poor playing dragged us all down, making playing the melody coherently (much less soloing in any approximation of jazz style) virtually impossible. Things went from bad to worse when, after butchering our way through a couple of standards copied out of a fake book, he whipped out a set of arrangements he wanted us to work on. Unfortunately, the arrangements weren’t for jazz combo, but for string quartet.

Still, the situation wasn’t completely unredeemable. At one point, the guitarist stepped out to find another power plug for his failing amplifier, giving the rest of us a chance to talk amongst ourselves.

“Look,” one of the saxes pointed out, “if we can convince him to bring in a piano player and a bassist, we can definitely make this work.”

“That might work,” responded the singer, “as long as we also turn the volume on his amp all the way down.”

So, when the guitarist returned, we all chimed in (as respectfully as possible), pointing out that perhaps a pianist and bass might help us achieve a more dance-appropriate traditional big-band sound, as well as free up the guitar to play soloistically rather than simply strum out chords for us to follow. Apparently, we were rather convincing, as we left at the end of the rehearsal deputized to call pianists and bass players we knew who might be able to help us redeem the situation.

Still, there was at least one upside to the evening (two, if you count that I got paid): as poor as our playing was as a group with the deadweight of the guitarist dragging behind, it was still remarkably clear that the rest of the players were really, really good. I got home and started woodshedding, practicing hard the jazz skills I’d let slack off slightly over a stretch of months predominated by orchestral and classical chamber playing. With a solution to the guitar problem in sight, I certainly didn’t want my bandmates leaving next week’s rehearsal thinking, “sure, that was better, but now how are we going to cover up that trumpet player as well?”

Earlier this evening, after breaking my Yom Kippur fast, I headed off to a brass quintet rehearsal near Lincoln Center. The rehearsal room we normally use was locked, however, and after about fifteen minutes of us all milling around outside, the trombonist suggested we head down to a rehearsal space he knew in Hell’s Kitchen. We managed to find an empty studio there, and played through a good rehearsal. At the end, as the rest of the quintet packed up their instruments, I started screwing around with a salsa riff, trying to remember a piece I had once played.

Midway through one version, a Latino guy popped his head in the door. He and another singer were recording a demo down the hall, he said, and he wanted to know if I’d be willing to sit in with their horn section. Flattered, I agreed, and followed him down to a small recording studio stuffed with twelve or thirteen musicians – a piano, a bass, an alto flute, a trombone, a guitar, two singers, and five or six percussionists – all of them Latino. Sure, I got some skeptical looks as I came in the door. But I held my own while reading down the first chart, and soon I was blending in.

Towards the end of the second chart, however, we hit an extended trumpet solo. And I tried. I really did. Still, at the end of the song, the bandleader looked up at me and said something like: “Oye ese, nex time choo take a solo, try not to play so fucking white, eh?”

Well, to be fair, he didn’t actually say that. But from his look, I was pretty sure that’s what he was thinking. And things continued to go downhill on the third song. Just before we laid it down, the pianist launched into a long instructional monologue about some changes he had apparently recently come up with but hadn’t yet had time to put in the parts. Knowing Italian, I could vaguely understand maybe half of what he was saying; the rest was completely lost. And, believe me, if you’re the only one to miss key instructions like “when we get to bar 374, even though it says to play fortissimo [wailingly loud], we’re all going to suddenly drop down to super quiet”, people will notice. And not necessarily in a good way.

Sure, things smoothed out over the next few songs. As I relaxed and fell back on the years of Latin music I’d played before, I even banged through a couple of pretty decent solos. Still, at the end of the evening, as I packed up my trumpet and shook hands with the rest of the group, it occurred to me that, no matter how much my salsa playing improves, I’m still basically just really, remarkably, painfully White.

If you go for a little over a year without cleaning a trumpet, you’ll probably be absolutely amazed by the sheer volume of gunk that comes out when you finally do.

As I’ve always been a fairly fast learner, over time I’ve come to perversely value those things I’m painfully slow to pick up.

Take, for example, playing the guitar. Having loved the sound of classical guitar since my early childhood (when my parents would play a record of Julian Bream lute suites to lull me to sleep), about six months back I decided I really wanted to learn to play classical guitar myself. So I picked up a copy of Alfred’s Basic Guitar Method at the local Sam Ash, quietly snuck my roommate’s guitar off of its stand, and set to work.

By all logic, I should have been off to a roaring start. After all, I’d not only played the trumpet for more than fifteen years, I’d even played another string instrument (the upright bass) for long enough to perform publicly without too much embarrassment. But neither of those instruments, I soon realized, were chordal – on both the trumpet and bass, no matter how many notes appeared on my music page, I could deal with them sequentially. The guitar, however, introduced the dangerous world of chords, and (worse) polyphonic melody – two different things going on at the same time – something for which my simple, one-note-at-a-time mind was wholly unequipped.

By now, half a year later, by slogging slowly along, I’ve made it to the second book in Alfred’s series. And, frankly, I still suck something royal. But I intend to keep plugging away, with the hopes of one day making it through complex flamenco concertos (or, at least, through the version of “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” on page 7, my current nemesis) without anyone in the room cringing visibly. It might take years, but I’m sure I’ll get it. And when I finally do, I’ll be picking up a cheap electronic keyboard, a basic piano method, and opening up yet another whole world of musical pain.

Was brought in as a ringer to play first trumpet for the New York Lawyers’ Orchestra last night. The second half of the program consisted of Berlioz’s wonderful Symphony Fantastique, appropriately enough a piece about love unrequited, considering I spent most of the post-concert reception unsuccessfully trying to find my way over to a 24-year old blonde violinist while concurrently dodging the advances of a 42-year old brunette woodwind player. Who says classical music is dull?