Lenten Notes: Music Lessons

[I’m writing each day in Lent, except for the days I’m not, about music. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but yikes! I’ve still got two more weeks to go.]

Pictured here is my one musical instrument, posing next to Joan’s. Mine is the harmonica. She can play her piano, plus the pipe organ. She’s dabbled with guitar and recorder at some point during our marriage, and she was a voice major. You get it, right? She’s the musician in the family.

As for the harmonica: it’s a joke. Almost anyone can play the thing. Kids. Those old-timey cowboys I used to watch on “The TV Ranch Club” when I was seven. Billy Joel. Even the show-off flashy conceited pianist on the cruise ship who played ten times as many notes as were required for “Moon River.” He too jammed a harmonica into his mouth and overplayed that. The joke here? I’ve had that nice Hohner for over 50 years, and I still can’t play it.

I can make sounds, and I can play something approximating “Silent Night” (or a couple of lines of it), but any song straight through? Even the one about Mary’s stupid lamb? Nope. I may as well just hum loudly. Or, softly.

I’m just not a self-disciplined person. I procrastinate, or to put it more kindly, I “wait for the Spirit to move.” (And the Spirit, who has more patience than I, is probably waiting for me to move.) When I finally got around to reading a book about procrastination, I think it said one reason we put things off is that we are afraid of failure. Yep.

What motivated me throughout my ministry was deadlines. Hard deadlines. For the radio stuff: airtime. For the church stuff: 10:30 a.m. Sundays. I almost always showed up, but it was only by the grace of God that I was prepared. (I hope that knowing this, you can appreciate the discipline I have to summon up to write these Lenten things day after day.)

I’ve written of my musical journey elsewhere on this “Peace, Grace, and Jazz” site, but let me repeat myself. I started with drums in second grade. Dad had been a drummer in high school, even playing in a widely respected fife and drum corps. (Mom played sax in the high school band, and her mother had played piano. You’d think there’d be some gene thing going on for me, but no.) So, I banged the snare drum the school let me cart home, and then used Dad’s drum pad when the snare would be too loud for the house. But after what must have been some exasperating lessons, the school music teacher called Mom and told her I had no sense of rhythm, though I might develop one eventually.

In junior high, I took trombone lessons, and those from one of the most respected instrumental music teachers in the area. He had been a  standout at Eastman, but he could only do so much for a kid who had arms long enough for the instrument, but no self-discipline to actually practice. I may have played two or three years, even adding my trombone’s notes to a school band, but when my progress wasn’t progressing, Dad said he wasn’t willing to rent an instrument for another year. My brother, it must be said, did take up the instrument, marched in the high school band, and made some pleasant sounds. I think he still has the horn.

When I was about to get married, I was in a Woolco department store (Woolworth’s ill-fated take on big box discount stores) and saw this harmonica. I figured it might be my last toy purchase before marriage, so I got it. My experience with it has been no more successful than Woolco’s entry into discount merchandising. Mostly I’ve used the harmonica to stay awake while driving. I can’t do that anymore, though, fearing that it’s a handheld device that might get me pulled over.

All this is to say that I have regretted for decades my inability to play an instrument. I so wish I could walk over to a piano and sit down and play something nice. I wish I could take my harmonica to jazz jams and pretend I were Toots Thielmans and wow the crowd. I imagine carrying my guitar to a party and playing some James Taylor, or one of my own very impressive tunes.

Or, prayers. I have two old LPs of Father Malcolm Boyd reading his prayers from his book Are You Running with Me, Jesus? Jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd accompanies the readings, and I swear Byrd is praying too, through his solo guitar. I wish I could do that. But, if wishes were horses…

There are those who say that it’s never too late to learn, and that learning an instrument is good for the aging brain. Here’s the problem. I have honed the art of procrastination for so long, and I have not overcome that lack of self-discipline thing, so let’s get real. I’ll just continue to whistle and hum and dream.

And I will become an evangelist for music education, urging every kid I come in contact with to at least try an instrument for awhile. “You won’t regret it!” I’ll preach. From experience.

 

Forty Images Along the Way: Jazz

Many of the pictures I’ve chosen for this Lenten practice of mine, choosing photos from my collection and writing a few paragraphs inspired by the images, are comparatively recent. But this one goes back to my college days. Thus it is a print from fifty years ago.

Just before I took this photo of jazz pianist George Shearing, I had done my very first radio interview with him. Imagine that. My first ever interview was with Shearing. I carried a small cassette tape recorder into an intimate practice room in the school’s Conservatory of Music, and bungled my way through a conversation with the man who wrote “The Lullaby of Birdland.” No prep on my part. No idea how to proceed. So, the photo I took from backstage during the George Shearing Quartet concert turned out far better than the interview.

That said, Mr. Shearing was more than tolerant of my inept questioning during our time together. He projected grace, a generous spirit, and good humor, and I can still hear it in his voice over the hiss of the fragile tape these five decades later.

Obviously, this image sings jazz to me. Piano, bass, drums, and vibes. When I started this blog many years ago, the title “Peace, Grace, and Jazz” came to me, almost something I could use as benedictory words. Peace…of course, as in “peace be with you.” Grace…as in that gift freely received and generously offered to others. And jazz? Just to be clever? No. Because I do wish you jazz.

Here’s what appeals to me about that genre of American music, now so internationally appreciated. Jazz is creative, rhythmic, and improvisational. I think a form of it was the first music I heard. At least, the first records played on the Kellam phonograph were 78 rpm big band era tunes from my parents’ WW2 days. That era was a couple of generations removed from the birth of the “jazz age,” and the musicians bowed to the public’s desire for danceable tunes and more tame lyrics, but some trumpets still wailed, basses got slammed, and drums kept syncopation alive, even if the “Blues in the Night” lyrics were not exactly  as achingly painful when sung by Dinah Shore.

Besides my own history, that is, growing up in the fading echoes of those jazz bands, I personally love the inventiveness of the music, especially when musicians leave the printed notes behind and let the spirit of jazz inform their improvisation, freely springing (or swinging) into wherever their souls want to fly.

I’m with those who remember that the roots of jazz are in the fields, where call and response and spirituals were the musical seeds of the blues. In thinking about the connection of jazz and church, I came across this un-attributed quotation from Stephen Longstreet’s The Real Jazz Old and New:

When the slave came to talk to God with a banjo he played what he heard by ear, or liked by ear. And when he got a piano he played it sinful or godlike. He played his music in clapboard churches, or for the purpose of the open-air evangelist, or he became the professor in a Storyville whorehouse, with ragtime or barrelhouse, in saloons or wherever music was wanted for a burial or a parade or a fish-fry.

Lament, Longstreet wrote, reached a high level of folk art. But I suppose, so did praise! I have written of “jazz vespers” in previous posts in this Peace, Grace, and Jazz journal, so I need not plagiarize myself here. And my friend Bill Carter and I produced a DVD called “Jazz Belongs in Church,” where our shared credo is expressed musically and theoretically. (www.presbybop.com is where you can find that resource.) It’s enough to add here that even Lent lends itself to jazz expression (or does jazz lend itself to Lent?).

Lent is blues, minor key or not. The tenor sax sings the psalm, the piano plays repentance and forgiveness, the drums and sticks and brushes and cymbals join the bass in the pulse beat of wandering in wilderness and lingering in garden and hanging on crosses.

The vibes of Lent? Like bells calling us to church.

 

Generational Rhythm

There was an odd piece of furniture in my childhood home. Well, it wasn’t really furniture, but it was a substantial slab of wood (to a 6 year-old) and hammered onto that wood was a hard rubber pad, about 1/4 of an inch thick. The wood measured maybe 6″ square, and a couple of inches high. It made its way through various rooms of the house where I grew up: on the kitchen table, the living room floor, or a dining room chair — wherever Dad left it after practicing. Here’s a hint: drumsticks were never far from the object. Dad called it a drum pad.

And he could drum! Mom and Dad both played in their high school marching band, Mom with her saxophone, Dad with snare drums. I never saw or heard Mom play, and never heard what might have become of her sax. But I remember Dad’s drum exercises! He didn’t have an actual drum, but that pad was a fixture in the house for many years. Besides the high school band, Dad had also played in “The Union-Endicott Colonial Fife and Drum Corps,” a group that became almost legendary in our hometown. [It continues to this day, some 70 years later, now using the name “The Continental Ancient Fife and Drum Corps.”] As a young father now, Dad drummed the corps’ rhythms, sticks on rubber, at lightning speed, holding on to his youth even as his own kids grew toward the age for music lessons.

It was inevitable that I would adopt the drum as my first attempt at “playing an instrument,” in second grade. After all these years, the memories of those days are few, but imaginary snapshots remain. I recall my lessons taught on the stage of the school auditorium. I stood at the drum and practiced the most elementary of rhythms: the drum roll. I can hear the teacher’s hint at how the roll was to work: “Mama/Daddy, Mama/Daddy, Mama/Daddy…” And I translated that into a very slow tap-tap with the right hand, tap-tap with the left. It didn’t sound at all to me like Dad’s pad.

Another snapshot: carrying a full-sized snare drum home, strapped to a second-grader’s body, drum bouncing against me with every step, and words of warning to any classmate who had the idea that it would be fun to slam a hand or stone on the drum head as I walked the four blocks home. No mere pad for me! I got to borrow a real drum for my practice sessions, a few minutes each day (supposedly), relegated to the cellar of the house where the noise of Mama/Daddy, Mama/Daddy wouldn’t drive the rest of the family crazy.

Last snapshot from the album: I was in the basement with the drum when the music teacher called my Mom. He was surrendering. I remember her telling me after their brief conversation (was she standing at the top of the cellar stairs?) that my teacher had said, rather bluntly, that I had no sense of rhythm, and that perhaps in a few years, I might develop one. In the meantime, I should take the drum back to school, and think about another instrument.

This probably came as no shock to Dad. He had tried to mentor me through flams and para-diddles and flam-para-diddles. But it was hopeless. (I learned later that perhaps the drum roll might have moved beyond Mama/Daddy if I had let the stick hit on Ma and bounce on -ma, hit on Dad and bounce on -dy, and stopped trying to play like a mechanical monkey. Too late.]

Dad’s sense of rhythm skipped one generation (me), and my own kids never considered taking up the sticks/pad thing. Later in life, my wife Joan and I saw a drum for sale at Colonial Williamsburg, and we thought it would be a great present for my Dad; probably the first “real” drum in his possession since high school. I suspect it turned out to be not quite as real as we thought. He never owned up to this, not wanting to hurt our feelings, but I’ll bet he tried playing it, and punctured the drum head (since the thing was more decorative than “real,”). When we last saw the drum many years back, it was upside down, decorating the front hallway of their home.

All this comes back to me now that my 12 year-old grandson is taking drum lessons, and has played in his middle school band. Apparently he does have a sense of rhythm, does practice, and has some of my Dad’s musical genes. I told Ryan that I wish my Dad were around to see this happen. He’d beam at the thought of a great-grandson doing the flam-para-diddle thing. A new generation.

This essay has taken so long to write that while I typed, it occurred to me that my grandson’s drumming comes from another source, much closer gene-wise. My son-in-law was a drummer! That explains a lot. Genes from both sides of the family.

All that’s left now is practice, practice, practice. Mama/Daddy, Mama/Daddy. Etc. Etc. Etc.