The Heart of the Instrument

What Music Is Made of

When I was a kid, just starting out on my lifelong journey of music and piano, my first instrument was a fold-out cardboard keyboard.  I spent hours playing my little three-note songs from the John W. Thompson children’s primer hearing the notes in my head while tapping my fingers on this two-dimensional surface.  I could hear it even if you couldn’t.  Well maybe you could hear the tap-tap-tapping which must’ve been a form of torture for my poor mother who’d tell me I was playing too loud.  Sorry, mom.

Eventually, this led to a mock keyboard with three dimensional keys so that my fingers could at least feel the raised black keys from the white keys of the otherwise silent instrument.  And still, I practiced.

And eventually still, my parents realized that I was not to be dissuaded.  “I guess the kid is serious,” one of them must’ve said to the other, “maybe we should try to find him a piano.”  And so when my dad learned of someone getting rid of an old clunker, a huge mother of an upright that weighed as much as a black hole, he jumped on it.  This monster had to be hauled out of a basement somewhere so my dad enlisted 2,600 of his closest friends, one of which had an open pick-up truck, and they somehow raised the Titanic from its resting place in a cellar.

I waited on the porch watching for it to come home to me.  When it turned the corner making its slow stately way to our house, third from the end, I was sure I’d wet myself with excitement.  So what if half the keys stuck and the other half didn’t work?  It was a piano!  A real one with strings and harp and wood and fancy carved wood ornaments.  It made sound, which in and of itself was music to my ears, (and horrors to anyone else within earshot.  Funky as it was, I had an instrument to call my own.

I played that baby for years, often leading my parents to beg me to stop and go outside and play.  From the start, I was making up ditties, great arpeggiated walls of white-key sound aided and abetted by copious use of the sustain pedal, which for better and worse, did work.  A star was born!

Jump ahead, decades to the Steinway showroom on W. 57th St., in New York City, where sympathetic salesmen welcomed me to play anytime I wanted to, knowing full well I might never be able to afford one.  I was good for business.  Prospective customers would walk in the door, hear me, and convince themselves that if they had the instrument they would sound like me after two or three weeks of lessons.  One time, a twitchy greasy-haired fellow with a slinky strung-out babe came in, accompanied by a kid, a wrecking crew of a five-year old boy.  After the demon child pounded and kicked every piano in the showroom, the father asked one of the discreet salesmen standing by, what’s the best piano in the store.  The salesman was happy to point him to a nine-foot Steinway D for a mere $250,000.  The man bought it on the spot, explaining with a shrug, “the kid wants to start piano lessons.” He gave his address and made arrangements to have it delivered.  After they were gone, the salesman told me he was a rock star with some mega-band; he didn’t know, or care, which one.  A sale was a sale was a sale.  He also told me that most Steinways were bought cash and went to homes where no one played.  Glorified picture holders, he called them, supporting framed photos of the kids and grandkids.  I guess that was supposed to make me feel better.  It didn’t.

I once heard/read of a fellow somewhere in a rural African Bronze-Age village who’d never heard classical piano music.  Not a recording, not live, not nada.  For him, classical piano music was only a concept of something he somehow intuited to be his destiny.  This fellow, following in the footsteps of Mozart, (who you might remember was composing symphonies and playing concerts for kings while still counting his years in single digits,) had learned to read music somehow, and acquired some piano scores. Hearing it all in his head, he moved his fingers over any available flat surface, until, equally miraculously, he willed himself to America, to New York City, where he auditioned for Juilliard.  And, was accepted.  His skills were haphazard at best.  But when the judges learned that he had come this far with no formal instruction and no piano ever to play, admitted him, realizing correctly that anyone who could do what he had taught himself to do, would catch up in weeks or months what usually took years to achieve.  I wish I could remember his name to tell you.  I’d love to know what became of this wunderkind.  

I did a remarkable gig in Africa once; long time readers might recall me writing of it before.  A project called FRIENDS ACROSS BORDERS, a collaboration between African musicians from various tribes and countries augmented by myself and two European musicians; all uniformly excellent.  I often wondered why the brilliant instrumentalist from Mozambique, a fellow named Ze Maria, was always out of tune with the other woodwind player, a fantastic German musician named Hugo Read who was a permanent member of the avant-garde composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s, touring orchestra.  I came to learn that Ze’s instrument was woefully battered; a soprano saxophone held together with spit and mud and chewing gum and rubber bands.  The fact that it could be played at all was a small miracle.  The fact that it soared as powerfully and spirited as it did was mind-blowingly impossible.  But it, and he, did, hanging in with Hugo’s world-class playing on a perfect, valuable instrument.

You may be seeing where this is leading.  The fact is, the instrument accounts for A LOT in music making.  A good instrument meets a musician half-way in making good music.  But not as much as the player, and the spirit he or she brings to it.  I was always really good at playing any beer-soaked bar piano I was invited to play for a few bucks and a tip jar.  Coming up playing a cardboard piano followed by a broken-down faded lady of an instrument prepared me to make the best of any instrument under my hands.  These keys are broke?  Fine, now they’re percussion instruments.  Out of tune?  Heck, I once played a night on an instrument where one side of the keyboard split was a half-step off from the other.  Musicians will know what it means to play such an instrument.  Trust me.  It came as close as I ever hope to come to having my head explode.

Which all leads to this.

Convicted Luthiers (makers of string instruments) in Italian prisons made instruments from wood scavenged from boats that broke up at sea while carrying refugees across the Mediterranean. The instruments debuted at La Scala, the most famous opera house in the world.

And finally there is this.  If this doesn’t make you cry snot-buckets of joy and amazement, nothing will.  You are dead.

The greatest instrument in the world cannot play itself.  A Stradivarius in the hands of a bad violinist (I shudder!) will still sound like a cat in heat.  But an okay, (or worse,) violin will be made to sing in the hands of a master.  Still, given the choice, wouldn’t we all prefer to have the best tool available?  I know I would.

And so, here’s a track from my record, AS. IS., a live concert recording on one of my favorite pianos in the world.  I lovingly refer to her as my “B.B.B.”  I won’t tell you what that stands for because the PC jackboots would kick my door down and skewer me!  A priceless, (for me anyway) 9-ft Steinway D residing in the Stone Church in Bellows Falls, (or Fellows Balls, as local wags call it), Vermont.

Play on, hearts!  till next week, Mimi ni Alki (Swahili, of course.  But you knew that.)