How Do You Learn to Play the Piano?
AUTHOR: By: Ray Skjelbred
Originally published Oct 2013
I am pleased that Judy has asked me to do some writing for the Puget Sound Jazz Newsletter, and since I have just finished writing liner notes for a new piano CD where I consider jazz as a “tribal” experience, I thought I might use that idea as a starting point for this writing. So, I include here the opening paragraph from my liner notes: “How does a person end up playing jazz piano?
How do you learn? It’s not just keys and sheet music. How do you learn good taste or how to express passion, or a good instinct for what to do or not do at a given moment, especially in relation to other people who are playing with you? I really believe for me that it has been a kind of tribal experience. I mean it. The elders of the tribe pass on their wisdom. They tell stories. They sit a certain way. They see things and they give out “tribal magic.”
The pianists who as “elders” most affected me were Johnny Wittwer (my teacher from Seattle), Art Hodes, Burt Bales, Joe Sullivan, Jess Stacy and EarlvHines. One of the first things Wittwer wrote in my notebook was “Make ‘em dance,” which referred to wrists. He got me to move my hands loosely and to create a jangly feeling that would allow a natural and warm sound to come from either hand. You don’t play with your arms.
Your wrists move loosely up and down and from side to side. He also said “Think Swinging” before you play. Silently imagine the sound and let yourself slide into it. He also believed that piano duets were important as learning experiences. We had to share a piano. We had to see and hear where someone else was going. It trained me in seeing, listening and editing, especially in finding the important open spaces between notes. And playing duets with him prepared me for playing in a band. Through many years I also learned from the other piano players I listed above.
This opportunity to learn musical wisdom from elders has always been there in jazz history and that doesn’t mean just how to play an instrument that someone else plays, but learning how to blend with others or how to be surprising or how to be subtle or understate an idea or even how to live in a world where the life of the artist is often questioned or misunderstood. If you find the right human connecting links the life of jazz history is amazingly short. For example, I learned a lot about lyrical, beautiful playing by playing music with Darnell Howard, one of the great clarinet players of early jazz. He, in turn, had learned from his experiences and recordings with people like Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, his elders, and they can take you back to the earliest days. I think I can safely say that swinging with a sense of abandon mixed with subtle beauty has always been part of jazz; that is what I see as passed on by the elders.
Of course as time passes, the original elders disappear and others who seem more contemporary are the survivors, but they have held the wisdom. The great Chicago drummer Wayne Jones just died and Hal Smith wrote an appreciation about him in the Michael Steinman blog Jazz Lives. Hal noted Wayne’s intelligence, kindness, sensitivity and his playing as always appropriate to a musical situation. Other drummers wanted to hear Wayne and know him. He was an elder. Hal learned from him.
An elder often slithers through the world like smoke. He rarely has an ambitious sense and usually avoids being a star or an “all-star.” He stays true to himself but takes the art of jazz seriously and he learns how to survive with talent and wit. So I have one last good story for an example. I used to play trombone in a kind of pep band for the San Francisco 49’ ers. We wore white pants and shirts but still had a disheveled quality that should have been apparent to anyone who saw us. Some of the best San Francisco traditional jazz musicians played in this band that was the size of about three regular bands. One day I happened to be playing alongside Bob Helm, an artist, a swing era veteran and the clarinet mainstay of the Lu Watters and Turk Murphy bands. Bob had high principles and was also a survivor, a man who could figure out a way of making it through anything. An elder. At halftime I remember we sort of blended in with some other entertainment going on but it was pretty bizarre. Gina Lollobrigida was there in some kind of acrobatic costume and was spinning around. There were lions on the field and mostly I remember tigers jumping through flaming hoops. It was all loud, bright, fast and spectacular and at the height of it Helm turned to me and very quietly said, “Do you like this kind of life?” I was stunned. His timing and wit were perfect. And of course he was suddenly dealing with – everything! Did I like this kind of life? I don’t know. But I enjoyed watching him observe it. I had things to learn.
