Poseur to Composer

I'm progressing along with the intro of So What. The Piano From Above animation has given me a huge push, but it feels like cheating. Now I'm referencing the sheet music instead. I want to sight-read at least as much as I want to master this song.

I should mention that the second chord Cb/F/C# really tweaks the tendinitis in my right elbow. Like, I'm feeling the music right down to my medial epicondyle! That and some of the music reading games I'm playing are leaving me a bit sore. Wearing the arm braces help, but I don't always put them on before practice.

Time to sleep and consolidate today's new information.

I have a friend at church who plays piano and sight-reads. He was the one who recommended I learn sight-reading first and above all else.

Yesterday he played a musical piece for some youth singers in Sacrament meeting. Mid-way through the song, he stopped. One of the music sheets he was sight-reading from was missing! Since he didn't know the song well and relied heavily on the notation, the singers and congregation waited in frozen silence while the accompanist fumbled through sheets of paper to find it.

She did find it, two or three inexorably long minutes later, and the song was finished without further incident.

After Sacrament meeting I commended him on his performance and graceful recovery from near disaster. He chuckled and shrugged it off. Then from my pocket I pulled out the crumpled sheet music for So What. I pointed at the first chord and asked him what the root note was, and if he could give me "the formula" for determining that myself.

His reply? He didn't know because he never learned chords! Here's a man who can play a complicated musical composition by sight-reading alone, and yet he doesn't know chords!

I guess it's not that unusual. Legendary Blues guitarist BB King couldn't play a chord to save his life. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.

I wake up to John Coltrane every morning. He's my alarm clock. I choose Coltrane because he attacks with his saxophone. In many songs he roars in the first few seconds. My favorite release from Coltrane by far is the four part A Love Supreme because he's a little more restrained. It's an album that sounds and feels like a monumental achievement in music history, even to these untrained ears of mine.

Today, in a passage from The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz, I found out why Coltrane jumped into songs like he did. It reads:

Throughout the year and a half that he stayed with Miles, he worked on his style, trying, as he later told Wayne Shorter, to start in the middle of a sentence and move in both directions at once. In effect, the result was an outrush of arpeggios and semi-quavers spiralling up from the line.

That explains so much about how Coltrane played the saxophone. His time with the Miles Davis Quintet informed and honed his approach to music. It makes me reflect on my own scattershot approach to learning music. Instead of starting in the middle of sentences, I'm reciting the ABCs. It's been a humbling process.

I look forward to being able to communicate intelligently with music. To finding my own voice.