Hey! How’s your musicianship these days? We are trying to get ours back. Frustrating at times, miraculous at others, at least it beats doomscrolling and rage-posting etc.
So much time spent on the streaming outlets, whether on the big screen on the bedroom wall or the miniature screen on the trembling palm. Rather than give the odd discretionary dollar to the attention-merchants, we have lately been spending some money on sheet music. Cazart!
The piano is the instrument we’re trying to improve at. We had had piano instruction way-back-when, but it always took a backseat to the lessons we took on the clarinet. So we became reasonably competent on that instrument, which is a one-note-at-a-time tone-maker, so the treble-clef notations were no problem at all, even when we went to the secondary training on the piano.
It was always the left hand, the troublesome bass-clef, that proved too much. The necessary two-staff sight-reading and manual coordination of both hands playing different rhythms were exceedingly tricky on the transition from the clarinet.
The lungs are a little lacking for the clarinet nowadays, but the piano is always there, no need to assemble or disassemble, no need to attach the reed to the mouthpiece and warm-up and then swab-out when the playing’s done. No, sir. Any session on the piano is easy to start & end.
So we are giving the piano its due, and we are getting better, glacially. We still stutter and have apprehensions of going fast, and the concentration is not always where it must be. Still, we’re letting the brain get some new routines, and we always enjoy the incremental improvement whenever we can hear it. We run the range from classical (Bach) to jazz (Allen Toussaint!) to 1980s alternative (New Order, The Bunnymen, Simple Minds etc.) It’s all good beneath the keyboard hood!
Another early-week weekday, so another chance at these three from the Valley of The Sun, Maricopa Co.’s very own Turf Paradise off Bell Rd., in the city of Phoenix in the Grand Canyon State of Arizona. There’s a litany for yourself!
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