Day 9 : Living on the Edge
Day 9 : Living On the Edge
Entered the studio at 5am. Cold, layers on. Shoes too in fact.
I sat down the Casio in the dark & plug in my headphones. Touch plastic, feel the stand wobble against my knee as I try to straighten my spine. I decide its worth the effort to reset over to the Vose though not taking off my headphone - preferring for now the isolating effect of wearing them.
Sitting down at the Vose i immediately thank myself. This is truly one of the greatest luxuries I’ve ever experienced, & something I would not trade for much of what other people often call luxury. & look how little i take advantage of it.
I find myself thinking about a man named Larry. Larry was my friend & neighbor two doors down these past two years. He died the day after Valentines Day, which is now just about a week ago. We didn’t hang out that often. But I believe I did get to know him pretty well. Larry didn’t rent the whole house down the block, he was friends with the owner & just rented the garage, in which he lived, worked, & painted.
Larry, when I knew him was I believe in his 70’s & had grown up in this very same neighborhood where he died, but he lived a truly radical life during the interim. In his younger days, Larry became a merchant marine & sailed all over the world. He seemed to really like rock & roll, especially the band Jane’s Addiction - who were heroes of mine all through high school. At some point he graduated from Johnson & Whales school of culinary arts. Ellen, the neighbor who lives in the house between us, attests to his ability to cook at a professionally high level, as he often did for her super bowl parties. Ellen also employed Larry to help her with gardening & handyman work. Even though Larry was addled by his advanced age & openly struggled with mental illness he could still seem to do pretty much anything.
He didn’t drive or have a car, but Larry rode his bike to the local shopping centers & would often stop by & talk to me while I was out front throwing the ball for our dog, Ophelia. Larry asked if he could have a couple throws & I could see by how much he enjoyed it that he really appreciated dogs. Especially Ophelia, who was born an abnormally diligent retriever. Larry heard I was a musician & mentioned that he was a painter. He offered to show me some of his paintings, I said sure I’d take a look sometime.
The next morning I found that Larry had left about half a dozen canvases, some framed, on my front porch. I carried them inside & put them on the bed in the guest room. I got busy & forgot about them for a couple of days. I remembered them a few days later, went to have a look & was absolutely astounded. Floored by the work. The level of craft, abstract composition, with patterns ranging from obvious ones to highly complex layered patterns. The media was everything from pen, marker, paint, spray-paint, tapes, stickers, high-lighter, to photo collage. The more you looked at it, the more patterns & symbols seemed to emerge within one canvass, & across separate canvasses. Musical, rhythmic patterns of line & dots. All done by hand, late at night, in someone else’s garage.
I showed my partner, who has a fine-arts degree, & she confirmed what anyone who doesn’t can obviously see that Larry was a truly brilliant artist. Later that evening I went to return the paintings & found Larry in his garage. I told him how much I liked his work. He invited me in & I kind of got to see the way he lived. He had a TV that was playing a live Jane’s Addition concert DVD just like in the background. He seemed to have a bunch of projects going at once. He showed me a hallway inside the house of Dr. Bob. Dr Bob is a retired dentist who has lived & worked in Miami longer than I have been alive. Dr. Bob is also Larry’s lifelong friend, mentor, & at the time landlord. In this hallway off the garage, Dr. Bob had displayed some of Larry’s chosen work. I could see that Larry was excited to point out some of the details of his work. He seemed to view his creativity with a slightly competitive edge. He said, “If i’m gonna draw something, I’ve gotta do something to make it better than the other guy.” Which made me laugh only because his word did in fact sort of scream to be looked at.
Larry then led me to the side of the house where he kept several dozen more paintings in a plastic shed. Each one as brilliant as anything I’ve ever seen, & much more brilliant than much of whatever I’ve seen. I also detected an interesting pattern that Larry seemed to like best his works which I appreciated least.
I told Larry I definitely wanted to buy some of his paintings. I thought it might make a good valentine’s day present for my partner. The whole week before valentine’s I kept $100 in my pocket specifically to give to Larry, & a rough mental outline of how to say something like, Hey I know your work is worth way more, but I what can get my partner for this? I walked past his garage with Ophelia each day. A couple times I heard rock music playing, but the door was down.
I find I am running my hands quite fast over the surface of the keys. It’s 5am.
Practice Begins
I close my eyes.
As I think about how Larry lived on the edge, all 10 fingers on both hands sail fast over the surface of the keys. White, Black, it doesn’t matter. Pushing off the core with fully active shoulders raking my fingers go limp. Fast. Because time is limited. The faster you go, the more you get to experience. I switch back & fourth from quarter to eighth not swings. I roll my wrists over each other to produce 16th note jabs like i’m playing a conga drum. These rakes & jabs are silent thought. Like trying to skim along the water with as little disturbance of the surface as possible.
Fingers on the hand deform its shape in reaction to the key surface. Pad side, nail side. Sending one finger other the edge, then two, then three, then back. Playing the gaps between the keys like a guerro. Raking up experiences like leaves. The key surface blurs. Only one edge remains. The edge between high & low state remains. Both hands together sail from pole to pole & back in time with gulps of breath. Like a swimmer in an olympic sized pool. This why they call it a Grand Piano. & You get to experience it now. Not later.
Not after you fix the tuning problems.
Not after you decode the sequence behind each & every key.
Not after someone else pays for your time to pay sufficient homage to the greats
This is payment from the Universe you get to collect up-front.
Swinging my arms faster, learning to glide my fingers smoother with each swing, like Tolstoy’s Levin in the fields, I realize how much a Steinway right now would be a rather expensive cage. I have had the luxury of taking this Vose apart, tuning (mostly) & reassembling it screw by screw. I’ve sanded its felt hammers, & held the organs of its action in my own hands. I realize that having years ago removed the fall board, my hands now reach around the backs of keys.
I slow down the arms & the breathing. I feel a thin layer of dust over everything. Tracing the actual wood of each key, which goes so much further back. The keys of the Casio truly only represent the tip of the iceberg. The wooden tops of the keys behind the fallboard is unpainted, un finished, not even sanded really. Exploring the shape of the cave I find the fulcrum where the key is actually leveraged. Each key is held in place on an upturned metal post through the key center, & the wood of the key there is raised up. The wood stepping down after the fulcrum makes this makes a ridge just tall enough to grip a finger against. Pulling back on one of these ridges moves key over the fulcrum in the same direction as depressing a key, i find that from here I can pluck instrument like a harp. I also find thaat this spot all 88 keys form a perfectly straight row of half steps that runs the length of the instrument. This is a hidden, playable, axis of 7+ octaves of chromatic tones. I demonstrate this by pulling little 4tone rows & clusters with IMRP of each hand. I try making whole step as well. It’s a different technique, different dynamic, but fully musical access point.
I then ask myself, so which notes are these. There are only 2 discriminating features among the 88 keys in this space. The wooden keys break off into 3 roughly equal sized continents. There’s like a 2” gap between each chunk of key surface. I decide to focus on the continent in front of me. It’s centered & about the with of my shoulders. Perfect. So what’s it NY? What’s its La? Can I find them with my eyes closed? Can I find them still without making a sound? I send my hands south from the Canadian bat cave behind the fallboard along these coastlines.
Surprise. Both black keys. Some finger recon just to confirm but the Left Captain Reports a Western Peninsula (Db), while Right reports a center Mainland (Ab); the note of High Symmetry.
I acknowledge immediately that these two keys produce a Perfect 5th with some octaves between, & that this may have something to do with the way the harp is folded over on itself in a baby grand. Anyway, I decide to sound them in confirmation.
I start playing perfect fifths. I remove my headphones so that I can make sure I’m not playing loud enough to wake anyone. I play softly mixing & matching Db’s & Ab’s all over the key surface. I notice a few of these are out of tune. I notice this because the others sound so spectacular. I notice this because even though they may be out of tune, they still sound interesting. Maybe more so. I settle with my L(PT) & R(PT) resting on two adjacent fifths, of the Alto & Soprano octaves. I interweave the four tones, notice the two voices, one imitating the other’s patterns. The Also fifth in is reference perfect. The Soprano is off. But only very slightly. The root is level with the Alto, but one of its three Ab strings is a little flat. It sounds like the right is learning, trying to become, as the left repeats the example sound.
I lean forward,
sending up 5ths,
drop my shoulders,
sending up 5ths,
bow my head down (like Bill Evans),
sending up 5th,
I soak up every the sound from the cave of the opened fallboard
This is my great luxury.
I realize its not a search for more or better or more interesting tones.
It really is about the sounds, the capabilities of the notes right in front of you.
The sun rises.
Practice ends.
