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PIANO IMPRESSIONS
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Ruminations, October 2006 Neil Slade
Recently I received a very nice email note about Piano Impressions From Another Dimension from a listener, saying that he had bought this CD collection of piano pieces from me many years ago, and hardly a day had gone by that he had not listened to it, and it never failed to have a positive effect on his mind.
I mention this, not to pat myself on the back (although this is a unavoidable pleasant consequence), but to illustrate how odd it is for me to be on the other side of this kind of thing...
Usually when I find an album that I really like- really really like- I will listen to it constantly over a long period of time, hundreds of times, and I will saturate my consciousness with the music to the point where I can hear it in my head—without the physical CD playing, without wearing my headphones.
Its very strange and granted quite gratifying to hear someone doing the same thing with my own music.
If you ask most musicians, they typically don’t listen to their own recordings very much after they are through recording them. The creative mind is inherently anti-narcissistic. If you focus too much on yourself and what you’ve done, you don’t go anywhere- you get stuck in a feedback loop and you stop growing.
It is different when you place yourself in another universe, listen to or immerse yourself in another’s work, because in this way you expand the boundaries of yourself.
Ideally, this is what one’s artistic education should be about, and so it was for me growing up, first listening to Bach as a seven year old- playing Fugue in G Minor for my little friends on my plastic GE record player… “Hey listen to THIS!” Then as a teenager, listening to Frank Zappa’s 1950’s doo-wop put-on, Rubin and the Jets, as well as his bizarre Edgard Varese inspired Lumpy Gravy orchestral instrumentals and timeless Burnt Weeny Sandwich piano solos.
Even when I watched TV I was tuned into the actual musical content of the soundtrack music of The Avengers, or The Man From Uncle as much as the story and good looks of Emma Peel as anything, to the point of transcribing the music and using it for my junior high school band performance tests, unlike everyone else who simply played a tune out of their music book.
For all of my formative years found myself on an entirely different plane than all of my best friends who thought the Grateful Dead was the pinnacle of musical delight. Thank goodness.
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To the surprise of many, the piano is considered a percussion instrument by musicologists because the mechanics of it involve hitting strings with little felt tipped hammers. The sound of a piano, however, is a universe of its own, and for hundreds of years has been the favored tool for composers of all kinds of music.
The variety of expression of the piano is great, and perhaps unsurpassed by any other instrument. Okay, well, this is a very subjective statement, probably objected to by anyone who plays anything else- but in western European cultures, and more recently embraced by Asian culture, the piano is the undisputed king of musical instruments, eclipsed only in popular music by the electric guitar, which fills a much more narrow niche in public acceptance. The fuzzy toned distorted guitar certainly reigns in popular mass media along with the back-seat drums and bass, but historically it still does not occupy the predominance that the piano and it predecessors like the harpsichord has for hundreds of years.
However, many a young child has been guided to piano lessons by unsuspecting parents, who before long learn to regret their fantasy that “my child will love music”. My suspicion is that there is a something like a 92% rejection rate of by kids who are coerced to the piano for a maximum length of two weeks before the novelty effect wears off. After that, the piano becomes a dusty piece of furniture relegated to become a very expensive cat claw sharpener in the corner of the living room or destined to be forgotten in the basement along with other forgotten trinkets of mostly lesser volume.
For me, this was not the case. My mother obtained our piano for $50 when I was no more than three feet tall. It was a 1890’s Kohler and Campbell upright console that had the perfect tone to play honky-tonk or ragtime music, and yes, it was a real U.S. hand made Kohler and Campbell before the name was adopted by a Taiwan manufacturer a hundred years later.
I tinkered around with it a little bit here and there as a tike, and then our family moved 1700 miles west from New Jersey to Colorado. By my mother’s foresight, we took the piano with us. She also had enough sense to not make me take piano lessons after I vomited after my second lesson from a bout with the flu, and took that discharge as an omen that perhaps I was not meant for regular prescribed study. Instead, she was content to let me wander into the converted garage and let me plunk away as my imagination and interest freely dictated. Not so with my alto saxophone, because that was a much more substantial investment of $365 and I was duly chaperoned to the music store every single Saturday of my life until I graduated from high school. Amazingly, I did not learn to resent or hate the saxophone, probably because of the revolving door of private instructors I had- a new saxophone teacher every single season, most of them providing me with a combination of musical tutorage and psychotherapy.
By the sixth grade I was composing little ditties on the ivories (and this instrument had real yellowed bone ivory keys donated by some unsuspecting elephant, likely like “Take It Away, A Way Way Way.”
As I grew a little older, the concept of playing in an ensemble grabbed hold in my neural network, perhaps with the lure of groupies and popularity, and before long I was “jamming” with friends in the basement, and making up piano and violin duets with my best friend Robert Kennedy (yes, that was really his name). Eventually, I did gravitate to a ukulele, mimicking the then popular novelty singer Tiny Tim, and then on to emulate Zappa with first a Mexican made $10 guitar, and then a three pickup Kay electric guitar that I foolishly tried to refinish into destruction years later.
But the piano was never very far away, lurking in the shadows of my awareness, teasing me with its possibilities now and again.
When I finally chose music as my LIFE, enrollment at the college music school demanded that I know at least a rudimentary level of piano proficiency. And boy, did I grab that bull by the horns with relish, mustard and ketchup.
I started out in the beginning piano level class at college, where students took group lessons and everyone plugged in with headphones to electric Wurlitzer pianos- hated then for their plastic construction, bouncy keys, and toy-like tone, but now coveted as highly prized jazz instruments, and heard on such 60’ s classics as Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock.
I found that I had a real interest in the piano, undoubtedly from exposure as a little kid from my mom’s classical records, and then through to my father’s interest in jazz, and then on to Zappa’s use of keyboards. It provided me with identity. I took to it like a duck takes to stale sliced bread crumbs thrown to it by little old ladies at the park. While most beginning piano students would play just enough to get a passing grade on this antiquated warhorse of an instrument, I practiced far into the night, and living at home often I was frequently reprimanded by parental units trying to get some sleep.
Within months after entering college, I began to compose music at any opportunity I could, including taking my tape recorder and manuscript paper with me to the local VFW’s Lotus Room during our family dining out for Chinese food.
My interest in Zappa’s music led me to some very unusual contacts, including with one young fellow my own age who actually lived with the man in Los Angeles for a short time, and who gave me a copy of Zappa’s hand written manuscript for a piano solo piece I had been listening to on my record player on his album Burnt Weeny Sandwich.
Eventually I memorized this composition, and after being told it was “inappropriate” for piano performance class by an anally retentive professor, I got my revenge one day anyway at my teacher’s own recital when I was asked to check out the piano in front of a full audience before the official program. I sat down to uncover and prepare it for the performance, and before anyone had a chance to chase me off the stage, I performed the entirety of the piano introduction to The Little House I Used To Live In before a packed house......
COMPLETE 16 page Adobe PDF Booklet CONTINUED IN THE DOWNLOAD>>>>>>>>
PIANO IMPRESSIONS FROM ANOTHER DIMENSIONDimension #28, Giraffe Music, Interruption, New Variations on the Dildo Waltz, CME, Opus Infection, Lewdus Preludus, Garbonzo Bean Waltz, Fugue In Z Minor, Dimension #29, Big Deal, 7-26, The Ameoba’s Hairpiece, Miss White, Piece of My Artichoke Heart, Fight All Traffic Tickets, Glenn Gould Memorial Breakfast Drink, My Money Is Gone.
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