The Universal Mind of Bill Evans.

Every musician should learn jazz.

As most musicians today understand it, jazz is a musical style. That is not wrong, but it's not really the most important thing because jazz is also a process. It's the process of making music in the moment, an essential skill that was mostly lost in classical music towards the end of the nineteenth century.

A long time ago, musical notation was developed out of the necessity to make a piece of music permanent. Without recording technology, it was necessary to write the music down if it was to be played more than once. Music, up to the end of the eighteenth century, was improvisatory in a very high degree. Even in the romantic period, there was still a great deal of improvisation serving as the basis for concert music.

Musical notation allowed composers to write works of increasing complexity, to the degree where a composer could take months to write a single minute of music. It also marked a new division between composer and interpreter. Today we have composers that can't play a single note of music on any instrument; some of the really bad ones are also practically tone-deaf. There are also interpreters out there that can't pick out a melody on their instrument, let alone deviate from their precious score-- even when the musical style demands it!

The necessity for the ability to improvise goes beyond being able to pluck out a cadenza in a classical work or playing a jazz standard by ear, it affects everything we do as musicians.

It affects our interpretation. When we hear or play a piece, being able to follow along with the "jazz process" of the composer is something that gives us depth and insight. It gives an interpreter the ability to see what a composer didn't write and what he could have written instead of what is on the page. This ability also allows to understand the "why" and the "how" better. I've been to too many classes where the lesson the teacher is able to give with his limited insight does not go beyond correcting the note values and marking the tempo by clapping along. There is no talk about the musical process the composer followed and there is no deeper meaning to what is being done. Too many musicians go through their whole careers thinking that an interpreters job is just counting , measuring and following along with what is written like a good little bureaucrat.

Being able to improvise also affects the way we teach and learn. I believe that the best way to learn is by playing around. In many languages, the word for playing an instrument and the word for playing with a toy is the same. I have found that the best way to teach a child is through improvisation. By letting them write their own songs and trying out alternatives to what is written down. In the same way, good practice is really the process of teaching ourselves. In that sense, one of the best ways of learning is by making variations on the music and playing the things that are not there.

Most important of all, the jazz process allows us to be real with what we play. Particularly with the piano, it is easy to play a note without feeling it, without thinking it. You drop the finger, and the instrument makes noise. You could just as well have hit the piano with a pencil, or thrown something at the keys. It is absolutely essential to listen in your mind to every thing you play or it isn't real. This is more apparent when making jazz. It is easy to play scales up and down, or have a few formulas that sound good almost anywhere, without really feeling the different harmonies or thinking out the melody that you are improvising. The sense of actually doing what you are singing in your mind is quite hard to do, but being honest and real with your playing really makes a difference in the end result and in what you, as an interpreter, get out of your music.

In The Universal Mind of Bill Evans, Bill Evans sits down and has a talk with his brother. I consider this video essential viewing for any pianist, specially those of us who play mostly classical music. Bill Evans was not only a great pianist, he was also a philosopher of music and, in my opinion, one of the greatest musical minds that the world has known. I don't compare Bill Evans to other jazz pianists, I think of him as a modern day Chopin or Schubert. Here is part one of the video, the whole thing is up on YouTube:

You need to say "Yes."

Last year I was invited to play Shostakovitch's second piano concerto. The orchestra was doing a programme of classical music used in the movies, with half of it dedicated to Disney's original Fantasia and the 2000 version. About a month before the concert, the conductor called me up.

Due to that concert being done by a guest conductor, there were going to be some changes to the programme. "Can you play Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue?" he said. I had never played the Rhapsody before, but back in high school I'd played around with the score a few times. I was pretty sure that I could learn it in five weeks, before the rehearsals with the orchestra started, but I decided it was better to make sure and play through the score once. "I'm not sure," I said, "let me look at the score and I'll get back to you in about an hour."

I sat down and played through it, didn't find anything that was really hard to play and saw it was pretty straightforward to memorize. Most of it is also played solo and very improvisatory, so there was a lot of freedom to move around. Just as I suspected, I could easily play it by then. I called the conductor back in 40 minutes to tell him that, only to have him say: "Oh, I'm sorry, we already got another pianist to play it. We'll do Shostakovitch with you next season."

This is a very competitive field. I was lucky to get a shot at playing it and forgot that there were a dozen other pianists ready to play it in case I wasn't; and that's just locally. Two weeks later I got another invitation to play Rhapsody in Blue with even less time to learn it. I said "Yes. No problem." on the spot. I did what I had to do to get the piece ready and a couple of suitable encores (I prepared Gershwin's Lullaby in Blue and a short piece by Kapustin) and the concert and rehearsals went very well.

If you are one of those pianists that always says "I'm not sure," "Maybe," "Who knows" in answer to the question: "Can you play this?" you need to learn to say: "Yes" or "No" because it is nobody's problem but your own whether you can learn a piece on time or not. I've written about this before on this page: one of the most important things a musician must have is a realistic view of what he can and can't do.

As a student, a lot of the repertoire we play is designed to overcome hurdles, to learn to do things we hadn't done before. Our attitude when faced with a new piece is usually one of "I'm not sure if I'll be able to play this."  Because of this, it's easy to fall into the habit of prefacing everything we do with an excuse. Excuses are just a projection of our own insecurity. They can ruin your performance because you end up sounding as if you are apologizing for playing. The "student" attitude also can be terrible for your own self-worth. As we gain maturity and technical mastery, that attitude has to change. When learning a new piece it's not about whether you can or can't play it, it's about when. You have to do what you can to make it good, and that is nobody's problem but your own.

The manager, the concert promoter, the conductor, the old lady from the music society that hired you to play the recital, the people in the audience; they don't care how much you had to practice-- or how little-- or whether its the first time you play it, or if you get nervous in public, or if you don't play the really hard passage in measure 243 perfectly clean. All they want is to hear a piece of music. To be, for a moment, lifted from every day's routine by art, beauty and emotion.

Don't give excuses.

Just say "Yes, absolutely," or don't do it at all.

#70 Winning.

Music should not be a competition; the music you play, should not be some kind of monster you are trying to slay.

The piano is not meant to be won. It's meant to be played.

Fearless

There is a quality in each person's playing that is completely unique. An approach to music that is completely our own, that comes from within and which is part of a personal quality that has been there from the very beginning. It can't be taught and it can't be learned; I think it is something that has to be remembered.

When I work with children approaching the piano for the very first time, I get a glimpse of it. In the very enjoyment and curiosity that a child displays when doing everything for the first time-- his first song, his first time playing with both hands together, the first time he actually sits down and presses a key-- there is an unimpeded deliberation. A sense of  doing and being that gets lost over time with all the "what ifs" and the "should haves" and the "would haves" the fill up our mind almost immediately after we start.

This quality is stifled by fear and soon forgotten. Over our lives as we learn to make music, our own mind works against us in subtle ways. Before a musician makes that big step from being a student to being a professional, it is important that he deals with his own demons and emotional baggage.  I experienced a kind of release-- of shedding away some unwanted load-- before I started feeling a bit more comfortable with my own playing. While building up all the necessary skills and knowledge we need to be musicians, we also must experience an intense personal search of ourselves. Our goal: to play-- in the broader definition of the word.

Some people physically exhaust themselves trying to reach that goal, playing everything in a million different ways, practicing hours and hours; through constant repetition and hard physical labor, they bang their head over and over again on a brick wall hoping to make a dent. Other people analyse every single aspect and possibility that the task at hand offers, they read every single book there is about technique and spend hours just thinking; by arming themselves with knowledge, they try to outsmart the wall. Both of these ways eventually reach a point of saturation either by complete physical exhaustion-- repetition until the task loses all meaning-- or information overload in which our knowledge reaches a point of impracticability.

At that moment,  a release comes and when it does, the wall is gone.  It's fear; fear of what we are. Once the fear is gone, we are free to play as we played that very first time we sat at the piano; but knowing what we're doing this time.

That is what I admire most in the small children I teach for the first time. Their complete fearlessness. It is a fragile thing, but as a teacher, I try to help them hold on to it as long as they can. Hopefully, it'll be that much easier to remember once the time comes.

12 rules of being a first year piano student at the conservatory.

1. Don't have fun at concerts, stand around looking snooty and slightly bored.


2. Have contempt for any kind of mainstream music, including popular classic pieces. If people like it, then it is not good.


3. Spend five hours each day criticizing other musicians at your school or on the Internet.


4. Spend five minutes every other day actually practicing your instrument.


5. If you're going to start playing the piano, make sure you start with the most technically difficult music you know. The Rachmaninoff second concerto, Liszt's second Hungarian rhapsody and Flight of the Bumblebee are all popular choices. Make sure to mention that you are "playing" those pieces to everyone you know.


6. Carry the score to those pieces everywhere you go, preferably with the title page clearly visible to everyone.


7. Once you are able to play the first couple of bars of the above piece at half speed with lots of mistakes, proudly tell everyone you know how you "nailed it" the last time you played it.


8. When you are unable to "nail it" in front of someone else, make sure to blame: 1) nerves, 2) cold hands, 3) lack of sleep, 4) the piano. When you are alone, you always play it perfectly and your word should be enough for other people and for your teachers.


9. Talent is the same as technical skill. The faster the fingers, the more talented the musician.


10. Show off your piano, show off your sheet music, show off your artist clothes, show off your bohemian lifestyle, show off everything... show off your dog (get a dog). How others see you is the most important thing.


11. Whenever you listen to another person play, make sure you mimic them. Play an "air piano" at recitals so that people know that you can do whatever the person playing is doing even better (this is not in the least bit annoying).


12. Fast is good. There is no good slow music, except when it's Liszt.

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Some additional rules for the jazz students:

1. A single note sounds bad. Play in chords, play it in octaves, play it with chords in one hand and octaves in the other (and an arpeggio somewhere in the middle).


2. There are countless possibilities to the chords you can use to supply texture and color to your playing. With so many options out there, pick the two chords you like best and use them in everything you play.


3. Length is the single most important factor in a solo, it doesn't matter if you keep doing the same things. If you can't go for length, then go for playing as many solos as possible.


4. If it is impossible to be a good jazz pianist, at the very least pretend you are Chick Corea. It's all in wishing hard enough, no practice or talent required.


5. Dissonant chords are the only chords.


6. Sixteenth notes are the only notes. (This does not apply to trumpets or saxophones playing very very high, in that case they are not permitted to hold a note for less than four seconds).


7. If it's not a piano or a trumpet, it's not a real instrument and should not be playing solos. That goes double for bass. In any case, if there's a piano on the stage, there's really no point in having anyone else there.


8. If you can't pretend to be Chick Corea, you can at least pretend you know how to play Latin jazz piano.


9. On second thought, don't do that. It's really annoying.

#69 Rhythm and gesture.

We naturally express rhythm and expression by a gesture, a movement with our bodies. That's what happens when a small child spontaneously dances to music. Rhythm as a function of movement and the relation of muscular tension and relaxation is hard-wired into our system; in our breathing, in our walking, in our vital functions.

Physicalising rhythm is a vital first step into developing a good sense of time. Expressive gestures, dancing, and something as simple as clapping or tapping our feet are things that we should not stifle in young students. Ideally, by constantly reinforcing the recognition of rhythm in the timing of our movements, we help the student to reach a point where the very movements he makes when playing are inseparably linked with the rhythm and expression of what he plays.

Walking around, dancing, jumping, clapping, stomping our feet... these are all good things which we should encourage. I like to encourage parents to let their children play a simple percussion instrument, or at least to let him bang on the pots and pans in the kitchen once in a while (which my grandmother let me do to my heart's content when I was very young).

A metronome is essential to learning precise time, but the very first step is translating rhythm into a physical gesture, not spending hours trying to follow along with the clicking, beeping or blinking light.

#68 Listen to non-piano music.

Puccini, Vivaldi, Renaissance and Middle Ages music, ethnic music, Rossini, Verdi, Massenet, Berlioz, Bellini, Gregorian Chant, Paganini.

There are countless composers out there who wrote practically nothing for the piano. I get irritated with any pianist that doesn't know music beyond Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff. A lot of the best piano music out there is inspired on these composers that many pianists are not familiar with--- Bach transcribed dozens of Vivaldi concertos and continuously imitated the Italian baroque forms in his music; Chopin idolized Bellini and his groundbreaking way of writing for the piano was an attempt to imitate the singing melodies of Italian opera; Liszt was mesmerized by Paganini's diabolical virtuosity and set out to create that same kind of sound for the piano; practically every composer tried to imitate some kind of folk music elements from his region, and that kind of music in its raw form is easily obtainable today.

The hardest thing for pianists to do is playing a good melody, what better way to learn that than by listening to music for the voice? Even so, I'm surprised that so many "pianists" can't name more than a couple of operas and some have never sat and listened to a single one.

Stop being a pianist, be a musician. There is a lot of music out there, don't limit yourself to the clanking of our 88 keys all the time; don't box yourself in. By listening to all kinds of music, your piano playing can only improve.