The Mystery of Bitcoin

She IS a great teacher and I'm impossibly lucky to have found her here in Southern New Mexico. But...um...she's actually a little older than that? Anyway six year's worth of twice weekly lessons and I'm a largely incompetent pianist.

 

@nosborne48 "Piano Red" (Willie Lee Perryman) might be your go-to guy. Or maybe "Speckled Red," Rufus George Perryman - his brother, another great player. I've heard both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Red
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speckled_Red

 

After 55 + years, I'm still a largely incompetent musician on SEVERAL instruments - NO lessons! I saved money! Enough to buy eight guitars and a couple of Swiss watches, so far. There will be more Swiss watches... and a couple of fine Japanese ones, too. They're excellent.

 

Sometimes members of a community are interested in conversation for conversation's sake. This usually occurs when the original topic has run its course. It's why I don't complain about it. Some really interesting things can arise.

 

I admire you Johann that you can teach yourself to play. I spent a year with a good structured classical piano course before I signed up with my teacher. I learned to play some simple things but I ran into a wall because I didn't have the real basics. With a teacher I moved much faster and improved my technique. I also learned things that aren't easily acquired except from someone who got it from her teacher and on back through centuries. How to play baroque quarter notes "correctly" is a simple example.

 

That's great! Why? Because we threw the last complainer into the East River in NYC on a cold night. He was never found.

 

Same dynamics are true in golf. Most players don't learn the game beyond what they can teach themselves (and a lot of that is wrong anyway). Then they plateau, never getting better--and often not really enjoying the game as they could. It's why the average men's handicap hasn't improved in 50 years despite huge advances in technology. Handing a better rifle to a lousy shot doesn't make him better.

Elton John could bang out a pretty good song on Schroeder's toy piano.

 

Nice discussion thread youse got dere. Be a shame if sumtin' happened to it....

 

That doesn't apply nearly universally in music. If nosborne says it DOES apply in classical music - I'd agree with him, but there are many individuals in some fields - e.g. blues, who never had any formal training. They might have picked thing up from others - but not formal lessons. e.g. John Lee Hooker. Country music - you have people who learned their music from their uncles and aunts, playing in a cabin or at a hoedown in the hills of Tennessee. More people who couldn't have afforded regular lessons if they'd wanted them.

Jazz? That's theory-heavy and yeah, most of those cats know a lot of stuff - a lot of them took lessons. Some of them teach, as well.

And lessons don't always have to be the "once a week and pay" variety. Take Ray Charles:
"His musical curiosity was sparked at Wylie Pitman's Red Wing Cafe, at the age of three, when Pitman played boogie woogie on an old upright piano; Pitman subsequently taught Charles how to play the piano." (Google)

There was a wonderful scene of his "first lesson" with Mr. Pitman in the biographical movie, "Ray."

I like Charlie Parker's take: "If you don't live it - it won't come out your horn." Louis Armstrong said something similar. I had the privilege of meeting him once - back in the 60s when he was playing in Toronto. Just as wonderful a man as people still say he was.

I was listening to jazz a couple of weeks ago and I didn't recognize the piece or the saxophone player - but it was beautiful - and fresh as tomorrow. It turned out to be Charlie Parker, playing "Autumn in New York." Recorded over 70 years ago!

Yeah, if you learn from other musicians or woodshedding by yourself, you run the risk of bad habits. You have a choice - get rid of them, or make them work for you. Fine musicians use unorthodox techniques. T-Bone Walker used to tilt the body and neck of his guitar 90 degrees, to a horizontal position. If he'd done that in a formal lesson, he'd have been told "You're holding it wrong." But he made it work for him and did it, in both jazz and blues venues, over a long, long career.

There are plenty of rock stars who learned without formal instruction - and others who learned with it. Takes all kinds. Most music is pretty democratic. Funny thing - democracy sometimes works better in music than in government. I'm all for it - in either.

All kinds of music - all kinds of musicians. All kinds of lessons - and no lessons at all.

No, Rich. Music is not anything like golf. Golf is a complete and utter waste of life. Music is life.

 

Well...not arguing with you, Johann, but you might be surprised. Benny Goodman made his reputation and career in swing which has a good bit of jazz in it...I have a recording (vinyl of course) of Goodman playing a rather difficult Mozart clarinet concerto like the disciplined classical performer he was and had taken lessons to be.

I sometimes doubt the "Never had a lesson in my life" line. Classically trained musicians can "cross over" and you don't always get the full origin story.

As for golf, I absolutely would not know!

 

Oh, another observation...you can sometimes get an idea of whether a popular pianist has had formal training by watching how graceful his hands are. I am NOT particularly graceful but I catch myself occasionally making movements that might look effortless and natural but are really the result of many of hours of hard practice with a patient teacher. This isn't just affectation though. Repetitive stress injury is quite real and more than one career was cut short by it.

 

Not really surprised, at all. I've heard lots of his music - and liked it. Taste, swing and musicianship. As a kid in the 50s, I saw Steve Allen play Benny Goodman, in a movie -"the Benny Goodman Story." Very well done. A formative musical experience for me when I was about 12-13. Never forgot it. As I said before:

 

Yes, so you did! Oh, and Elton John studied classical piano at a very high level in Conservatory.

 

I was lucky, in that I DID get lessons in theory, at school, once I came to Canada, It was very well taught - to everyone -in those days, in elementary school. My sons never got that. One of my grandsons did. He blows tenor sax in the School Band now - he's 15. He is a very cool and cerebral dude. I hope that he'll get to like jazz. A jazz musician in the family would please me WAY more than a Prime Minister!

From Grade 5 to 8, I learned to "read the dots" - note values, time signatures, key signatures, scales and some sight-reading. That was all invaluable later when I started (around 19) to learn to play. I knew how it was supposed to go together. I had basics that worked on any instrument. I didn't know anything about chords, other than major or minor - but the others were easy to learn from a book or my friends, when I took up guitar.

In folk days, you learned about modes, too. And that was a help with Blues harmonica. If you knew how Mixolydian and Dorian modes worked, you knew how "cross-harp" and "third position" worked. And with blues, you also learned pentatonic scales. You could find out harmonica "positions" without knowing modes, (as all the great harp players in Blues did) but it would probably take longer. Theory goes a long way.

 

Elton John --- high, in the 60's? Now who could ever have imagined THAT!

And - from Google "He discovered his passion for music at an early age and taught himself how to play the piano when he was only four years old"

So it's NOT all about being high in the Conservatory. He and I are fairly close in age. He was born in 1947, I was born in 1943. I'm sure we were BOTH high in the 60s. Everybody was! Never met him, though. I'd like to.

 

Yes, I would really like to meet him. And David - and their two young sons. A good part of what I like about Elton John is his being a good family man. Other things - besides his musical accomplishments, he supports several important health-related charities, including one that means a lot to me. Stellar musician, family man and generously supportive of others. Hey, it doesn't get any better than that.

 

This is argumentative. I'm not kidding. Pass.

 

Okay. I wasn't kidding, either.

 

Taught himself to play what on the piano? Classical performance in the last hundred years is more closely akin to a Japanese Tea Ceremony than a rent party. The goal is to perform as perfectly as possible and to interpret within the strictures of the written music.

I don't actually agree that this rigidity needs to be the sole standard but it is the sole standard now. Not always! Indeed, Renaissance and at least early Baroque often cannot be played as written. Musicians were expected to improvise. That was part of the job.