DAY 30 JAZZ CHALLENGE END
Here is my full 12 minute set: Autumn Leaves, Triste and Blue Bossa.
For a really quick side by side, you can see me solo over Autumn Leaves before and after the 30 day challenge.
Reflection
Jazz piano is very hard.
Hundreds of hours face to face with a piece of plastic that sings seldomly will teach you how strange and beautiful it is that one can learn to speak without the voice. My piano is still mostly meaningless babble but now I know what Oscar Peterson is saying at the start of his trio’s rendition of Triste — only I can’t translate it into words.
At this very moment, I’m taking a break. The last few days were exhausting. I was afraid of embarrassing myself and rented a piano room many hours many days in a row. I got better, but in a way that cost me. Now, I need a small break
Managing energy is far more important than managing time.
It became quite hard to focus after the first hour. By the end of the second hour, the dull ache in my wrists complemented stale feeling when I touched the keys, and my appetite for making and practicing music had been thoroughly quenched.
I underestimated the energy needed to raise from 1 hour/day to 4 hours/day
Some things that kept my energy up:
Playing with others. I would reliably be energized to play for another hour or two after practice with teacher
Time-boxing practice. After the 50 minute timer went off, I would make myself stop and take a break
Listening to beautiful solos. Like this one.
Goal evaluation
My original goals:
Be able to solo for 4 minutes on Autumn Leaves (or Gm ballad) and Triste in a way that is: rhythmically tight, expressive, engaging
Be able to do very rudimentary comping on simple jazz ballads I haven’t seen before
Have I succeeded? Sort-of. Not really.
Is my Autumn Leaves soloing ‘tight, expressive, engaging’? It’s tighter than it was, but I wouldn’t call it tight. Because I only has access to my 30-key Yamaha on the first day, the solo I recorded had no real left hand chord component. Rhythm is much easier when you only need to pay attention to one hand. My playing isn’t as tight as I’d like, but I’ve been able to add the lovely harmony of a rootless voicing in my left hand and mostly stay in time with my right hand.
Yet in the midst of soloing, I have certainly learned new ways of losing myself in the music. Most concretely, I’ve transitioned from randomly soloing over the 7 notes in G minor to ‘playing the changes’ (e.g. the movement from Cm7 to F7 to Bbmaj7 to Ebmaj7 for the first 30 seconds of the song). I’ve also absorbed snippets of solos from Evans, Fukui, etc.
In all honesty, I was pissed off right when the challenge ended. I was pissed off that I hadn’t made the progress I expected, that I wasn’t ‘good’ yet, that my wrists were tired.
But after rewatching my solos over the month, I’m gratified. There is a clear difference between Day 1 and Day 30.
Now, this challenge wasn’t just about getting as good at the piano as I could; I wanted to immerse myself in a single-minded pursuit in an art that I loved. Yet, somehow, in the last final days with the threat of public embarrassment hanging over me, I had forgotten about the means and had become subsumed by the ends.
I will continue my pursuit of the piano, but with a renewed emphasis on what has been missing this month: jamming with others. Beauty when shared is immeasurably heightened.