38

Going for the Sounds

I did things for two or three hours a day that seemed more or
less reasonable. I practiced certain well-known technical exercises
that I heard many musicians had used, spent lots of time investigating the keyboard to discover new sorts of melodic configurations, found ever-new intervallic relationships, evolved more
pathways constructed on principles similar to those Id been told
about, with their characteristic jazz sounds, listened to a growing
collection of records, seldom trying and always quickly abandoning the horrendous task of solo copying, and aimed for what I felt
to be the most sophisticated and intricate examples of contemporary jazz piano. For the most part, my playing sessions were
devoted to a handful of songs, doing improvisations, the particular handfuls contents changing entirely every several months, as
some tunes became more enticing and others a bit less so.
Fluent manipulation on these paths produced a semblance of
competence, and I was able to sustain long playing sessions,
going for this rapidly articulated music, sensing I was on target.
I knew my play left qualities to be desired. When I recorded
myself it sounded disjointed, frantic, and wanting in other
respects. I knew I wasnt making music like what I heard. But
by virtue of the sheer extent of what I could do at the piano, the
large collection of songs at my command, and what I felt to be
increasingly an insiders perspective on the music I listened to,
after a couple of years I thought of myself as one with nearly
competent basic jazz skills.
In some respects that was warranted, in others pretentiously
premature. I was in some ways as far from the mark as could
be. Of course this was only clear in retrospect, as deficiencies in
earlier efforts were made transparent by acquisitions gained
later. But this delayed appraisal allowed me to sustain motivation to play a good deal without feeling too far off base.
I was learning to play in what can be loosely termed a backward direction. In first language acquisition, one initially gains