IT’S A WARM SUMMER EVENING ON the corner of West End Avenue and 86th Street, and I’m sitting in a cavernous church. But I’m not in a pew, and I’m not taking Communion. I’m seated at a beat-up old grand piano, as a member of an amateur jazz ensemble. Twenty years after Freddy Wilson’s workshop, I’ve progressed from a converted garage to another repurposed structure. And it’s a broad church, too: all around me in the warrens of the building are acting classes, exercise classes, and self-defence and martial arts classes. But the jazz ensemble gets to play the main stage.
To my right sits Corporate Mike with his honey-coloured acoustic guitar, which he must have brought directly from his office downtown. On the other side of him is Marcellus from Washington Heights forty blocks north, who waits tables at Dizzy’s in Columbus Circle when he’s not playing his tenor. In front of me is the gently spoken Pablo on bass; and a pimply monosyllable is at the drum kit who, depending on the night, could be Joe, Sam, Scott or Dave. The drummers look like children, because they are, while the rest of us have a few more runs on the board. Sometimes we’re joined by a singer who crosses the Hudson from New Jersey to get here, and sometimes by an older guitarist who, when not practising his instrument, is a practising cardiologist. For a while during the summer we even had an elderly tuba player from Switzerland. A jazz ensemble is one of the few places on Earth where you will reliably find people from different generations listening to each other with attention, respect and genuine interest.
Tonight, like we do every week, we warm up with a blues tune. This time it’s Thelonious Monk’s ‘Blue Monk’. Playing a blues is the conditioning stretch for a jazz band, because it has a common twelve-bar structure that allows us to play ourselves into readiness for the more complicated chord progressions in the three or four other pieces we’ll play during the two-hour workshop. Within the twelve-bar harmonic progression of a blues song, almost infinite variation is possible, which is mind-blowing if you consider that the most basic blues progression uses just three chords—the first, the fourth and fifth—of any chosen key. So for a blues in A, for example, your chord progression uses A, D and E. That’s it. Its simplicity also explains why so many popular songs across all genres are, at their core, blues progressions (conjure up the Batman television theme song), and why—if you’re a pop guitarist, a jazz pianist or a budding singer of any stripe—learning the blues is one of the best things you can do to develop your skills. If you are so inclined, you have a lifetime of homework to do—listening to great recordings, practising chord voicings, learning to transpose into different keys, transcribing and imitating great solos—but for the beginner and the advanced student alike, it all comes back to knowing your scales in every key.
In the Well-Tempered Clavier, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a prelude and fugue for the keyboard in every one of the twenty-four major and minor keys. His purpose, stated on the dedication of the original 1722 publication, was ‘for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study’. In terms of the time I have to devote to the piano, and the level of dexterity I enjoy these days, I’m a long way from my early encounters with Bach’s foundational work, when I was one of those ‘musical youth desirous of learning’. But now in my forties, reflecting on the composer’s dedication, I’m struck by his second target audience: ‘for the pastime of those already skilled in this study’. He’s right—learning is a pastime, an endeavour worth doing for its own sake. As a formal student, whether at school or university or in piano lessons, I always associated learning with a goal or end point that lay beyond the here and now: good grades, graduation, the performance diploma. As an adult returning to the piano after a long and self-enforced separation, I’m taking up Bach’s challenge in the environment of the jazz workshop. I’m not sure what Johann Sebastian would think about my choice, but I’ve decided that I’ll be doing pretty well if I can learn to improvise over a blues progression in any of those twenty-four keys. There’s no greater goal to that pastime than improving how I play with other amateur musicians. And what a relief that is.
Once each instrumentalist has taken a chorus of ‘Blue Monk’, our teacher Ron, a professional trumpet player and arranger, asks the group which song we’d like to play first. We choose from a shortlist nominated by the students at the end of last week’s workshop. Our weekly homework is to familiarise ourselves with the chord charts for each piece, to learn the melody accurately and to study the basic structure, so that next week we can simply start playing it together.
‘When you go all over the world and you know a handful of tunes, you can speak to each other,’ Ron says, as if each of us were planning to sit in at a jazz club jam session the next time we’re visiting Paris. And just like Freddy, Ron is full of aphorisms:
‘There’s the notes versus the spirit of a piece.’
‘We have to play with confidence.’
‘Play it wrong but play it strong.’
‘Great solos have an arc, a shape to them.’
‘When we play we want to get out of our heads entirely.’
I’d say that last one is my favourite, though it remains aspirational. I still find myself counting bars as the other band members play their solos, trying to make sure I don’t lose my place. The pianist needs to give the soloist the occasional harmonic or melodic reminder as to where in the chorus he is—at the end of the second A-section moving into the bridge (or B-section); coming toward the end of the bridge and going back to A, for example—so it’s pretty important I know where I am. Inevitably each of us gets lost at some point during a workshop, but the beauty of the group is that usually we’re not all lost in the same tune at the same time, and so one of us can lead the others out of the musical wilderness.
In my early years of living in New York, I spent a lot of time attending jazz gigs by myself. At the Village Vanguard, the 55 Bar and Smalls, mainly, a short stroll from each other along Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village. Sometimes I’d have company, but the lack of it never stopped me attending a gig by a musician I really wanted to hear play.
One of the greatest aspects of the live jazz scene in New York is the sense of being among a community of kindred spirits. As a woman, I found the clubs to be an incredibly liberating environment. You can sit at the bar or stand at the back nursing your drink, and enjoy the music without having to keep your peripheral vision alert for the approach of unsolicited company. You can chat with the bartender if you want to, but there’s no obligation to socialise. As a woman by yourself, you will be left alone unless you initiate conversation. And those times when I did smile back at a friendly stranger or initiate a conversation, I usually found the interactions to be worth having.
After more than two decades of listening to live jazz performances, my enjoyment has not dimmed. I love watching the musicians respond to each other, fearlessly open in the moment of performance; unselfconscious so that they can react spontaneously, creating improvised lines of melody and accompaniment that are instantaneous but informed by years of listening, knowledge and practice under the heat of spotlights without a safety net. It’s fun, it’s inspiring, and at times it feels almost sacred. A transporting live jazz performance feeds that part of me not nourished by reading or friendship or travel or sex. The playful part that needs connection to others through music-making. And the desire to feel that connection is what, finally, drove me to seek out the opportunity to play again with others.
The fact that I’m the only woman instrumentalist in the jazz ensemble sometimes bothers me. It was the same in Freddy Wilson’s workshops, all those years ago. The only thing that has changed in the interim is that we now use an app to access music charts. Is this passion of mine really so gendered? Are there so few other women interested in playing jazz with others? I guess that other women my age have less flexible schedules—careers that demand long hours at the office, and children who demand long hours everywhere else. And perhaps young musical women are more interested in being singer-songwriters or are too busy either finishing a degree or paying off student debt. It’s a shame, though, because despite the ratio of men to women, I find the jazz workshop one of the most gender-neutral group settings I’ve ever experienced. In the moment of playing, each musician is equally engaged in the act of creation; their gender makes no difference.
In the workshops, nobody has a last name. Nobody has a past. Nobody wants to know what I do before or after the workshop, how I earn a living, or where I live. There’s no judgement, just constructive feedback on how to improve my ensemble playing and my solos; no goal greater than self-expression. There are no deadlines, no scaffolding of centuries of pedagogy, no examiners to assess my version of a work against generations of interpretations. It’s quite the opposite: the workshop actively encourages me to be myself at the piano, trying to express how I hear the world, within the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic constraints of an ensemble of players who accept them. This interplay of individual expression and group dynamics is why I’ve always regarded a jazz ensemble as the best expression of democracy in action: freedom of individual expression, facilitated and supported by a framework of musical conventions agreed by consensus.
And now, with Ron’s eyebrow raised at me to make sure I know it’s my turn, I take my solo. Use an element of the melody, use a rhythmic motif of the preceding soloist, use a musical idea that comes into my head in the moment. Double it, halve it, vary it higher and lower—experiment, fail, try again, fail better. Leave some space. Don’t fill every bar with notes; it’s okay not to play.
The experience of playing a 32-bar solo with a band is thrilling—playing with the knowledge that there is no meaning in it other than this dense and visceral moment in which time does its peculiar thing of expanding even as it goes by incredibly fast. A microcosm of life, really. There will be no final exam. There will be no recording for posterity—thank goodness. Just performance in the moment. To play like this is to embrace meaninglessness, in its best possible sense.
In 1895, in the last months of her long life, Clara Schumann’s daughters insisted she write down some of the preludes she improvised daily before she practised her scales. She did so, but described the difficult work of notating them: ‘[I]t is so hard because I do it differently each time, as it occurs to me as I sit at the piano.’59 She had abandoned formal composition at twenty, but improvised new music every day for decades. The demands of the former made her doubt herself; the confidence and liberation of the latter meant that she felt no need for the constraints of writing down the music she made up. How difficult it is for some of us to value a skill that comes easily, whether it’s creating music or teaching a child.
For most of my adult life, I had castigated myself for abandoning thirteen years of piano studies and the love of accompanying other musicians for an adult life conducted without much direct contact with a piano. I chose a professional life in book publishing and limited my participation in music to passive consumption: attending live performances and listening to recordings. Like thousands of other musical girls, adulthood had taken me a long way from the piano stool.
My twentieth high school reunion had made me confront that choice and wonder about what I’d lost as a result of making it. At first I despaired at the roads not taken, the lives not lived. I jumped to the demoralising conclusion that all those years of practice, competition and exams had been for nothing. I castigated myself for not using the same time to study a foreign language or HTML, even if the latter had been possible in the 1980s.
As it had been for my grandmother Alice May Morrison Taylor Lloyd, intensive music study and performance had been a crucial part of forming my identity. And, like my grandmother, in response to a crisis I chose to renounce my musicianship. Her decision to leave her burgeoning professional life in Scotland as a choirmistress and well-regarded soprano was much more significant than my decision to abandon the piano and any glimmer of a life in music, but in each case the choice involved a shutting down, rather than an opening up, of possibility.
In her strange new life in New South Wales, Alice taught local students and was the Yeoval Baptist Church accompanist, but her performing opportunities were limited in number and quality. It must have been supremely frustrating to live with the contrast between the musical life she led in her adopted country and the variety and esteem of the one she had left behind. Perhaps the discrepancy gnawed at her unconsciously, because she didn’t teach my aunt Charlotte or my father John to play. One must form a fairly negative impression of the value of a musical education to possess that knowledge and not pass it on to your children.
In my own case, I had become so focused on solo performance for the sake of competition and advanced grades, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed playing with others. It was fun, it was pointless, so I stopped. I had renounced any participation in making music and spent years grieving the loss of it, when I’d had no reason to do so other than a misplaced sense of shame at no longer being able to play with the same dexterity or focus I had as an adolescent. My metabolism isn’t as fast as it used to be either, but I still eat.
Participating in the jazz ensemble is a humbling lesson every week in the importance of fun. For me it’s the perfect meeting point of learning and enjoyment—the same state of joyful self-improvement I had intuited as a child about Schroeder’s devotion to the piano in Peanuts. I attend each workshop with the refreshing confidence that there is no shame in being an amateur musician. But embracing my amateurism took me a very long time.
Whether we’re falling in love, playing the piano, or trying to be a good parent or friend, we are all amateurs. Through study and practice we can acquire expertise or discover a special talent. In most acts of living, though, we’re all doing it for the first time, improvising as we go. We connect, we lose, we try again. We’re all making choices in limited time within the parameters of our educations, childhoods, the opportunities we’ve had or lacked. We’re all learning to balance the melody and the harmony. To survive, we have to learn how to play solo, and how to play with others.
Each week’s workshop is also a sober reminder of my responsibility in the decision to abandon my musicianship: that it was I who had been so afraid of failing, who had used my perfectionism as an excuse to isolate myself, who had cost myself years of enjoyment by closing myself off to the sheer fun of playing music with others. I had learned early in life that isolation was a safe place to be. Later, as a widow, I had done the same thing, closing myself off for many years to the possibility of a new relationship. Now, in our Brooklyn apartment, as I practise on the electronic keyboard that Nate bought me for Christmas, I see they are variations on the same theme.
I believe that my grandmother made a similar choice in coming to Australia and renouncing her musical life in Glasgow: a choice to withdraw rather than embrace, to isolate rather than connect. Even though she established a new life for herself, marrying George and having children, she stopped performing and taught other people’s children for money rather than her own for pleasure. I remember how scared I was of her, how little I knew of what she’d loved, lost and left behind. When I think about Alice May Morrison Taylor now, I think of her lovely soprano voice, and how I never heard her sing.
The writer and literary critic Terry Eagleton recently proposed that the very meaning of life is like the workings of a jazz band.
A jazz group which is improvising obviously differs from a symphony orchestra, since to a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performances of the other musicians…There is no conflict here between freedom and the ‘good of the whole’, yet the image is the reverse of totalitarian. Though each performer contributes to ‘the greater good of the whole’, she does so not by some grim-lipped self-sacrifice but simply by expressing herself. There is self-realisation, but only through a loss of self in the music as a whole. There is achievement, but it is not a question of self-aggrandising success. Instead, the achievement—the music itself—acts as a medium of relationship among the performers. There is pleasure to be reaped from this artistry, and—since there is a free fulfilment or realisation of powers—there is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because this flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak, remotely and analogically, of a kind of love. One could do worse, surely, than propose such a situation as the meaning of life—both in the sense that it is what makes life meaningful, and—more controversially—in the sense that when we act in this way, we realise our natures at their finest.60
Is it crazy to aspire to live like a jazz musician? There are worse things than playing solo and playing with others; expressing myself honestly rather than hiding from vulnerability; aspiring to exist in reciprocity, love, respect and acceptance.
There’s an improvised coda to my life’s work that no one, not even I, saw coming: my daughter Hazel, who arrived when I was well into my forties. Many women understandably rail against the medical term for a woman who becomes pregnant for the first time after she turns thirty-five, but I could not be happier to have been an elderly primigravida.
Hazel sits on my lap and bangs her tiny palms on the black notes and presses her right index finger on the tip of the white ones. Sometimes she likes to play the notes highest up the keyboard, or simply turn the pages of whatever music manuscript is propped open on the stand in front of her. She’s partial now to selections from the Peanuts Illustrated Songbook, especially the unmistakable ‘Lucy and Linus’ that so enchanted my ears as a child. At eighteen months, the printed music fascinates her; most likely due to the high-contrast black marks on white pages. Hazel is getting to know the same piano I started learning on when I was seven, in a house in Sydney not far from the one I grew up in. This apple, via the Big Apple, has landed not far from the tree.
I have concluded that the authorship of one’s life is a form of improvisation in which each of us is engaged, like members of an infinite jazz band. While jazz isn’t exactly the meaning of life, the dynamics within a jazz ensemble provide a model of community to which, with Eagleton, I believe human society should aspire. Eagleton suggests the goal would be ‘to construct this kind of community on a wider scale’, while acknowledging the political challenge in achieving it. Utopian, yes, but I’d still vote for that.
Perhaps other girls at the piano didn’t regret giving up their lessons or no longer playing with other musicians. Perhaps they did, and got over it. Or in the frenetic jumble of long hours, high-pressure jobs, deadlines, school drop-offs and ballet pick-ups, they folded up and packed away that passionate amateur—the girl obsessed with drawing, or photography, writing, dancing, singing—who was never seen again. In my case she didn’t go away, nor did the desire to play music with others, no matter how much I sublimated that desire in attending live jazz and listening to recordings. The physical act of playing the piano was too important to my identity, too central to my first experiences of joy, envy, love, pain, exhilaration and despair.
‘The piano was my first mirror and my first awareness of my own face was through blackness, through its translation into blackness, as into a language dark but comprehensible,’ Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in ‘Mother and Music’. ‘That is how it was my whole life: to understand the simplest thing I had to plunge it into poetry, to see it from there.’
Writing about my relationship to the piano has shown me how much I need music and writing in my life. I had always considered them to be intense competitors struggling against each other in a zero-sum game for my attention; they are in fact opposites that depend on each other in the same way that the strength of a bridge is reinforced by equal tension from both sides. Learning the piano intensively for such a long time shaped my way of seeing and hearing the world, reflecting me back to myself. My ‘pianohood’ of self-discipline, attention to detail, careful listening, exponential learning, competition, failure and the discovery of improvisation affected so many choices I made later in life. It turns out that I have, in fact, been doing something with the piano all my life—living with the sensibility and preferences shaped by the experience of passionate attachment to the instrument. These effects of early music training are largely invisible but unmistakable, the ripples in the pond. It’s a long way from how my old schoolfriends had expected me to apply my musicianship. If I ran into a former classmate today, I would confidently tell her that yes, I still play the piano. That I love to play it, I need to play it, and at last I understand why. I may never again play with the skill or frequency that I did as a teenager, but I will always think of myself as a pianist.