False starts are my bread and butter, but the waiter’s eyes tell me breakfast is over.
I’m sliding down the Ellefson Scale Pyramid, a scale routine dug out from my tuba days in college. (Quite frankly I’m amazed my tuba documents remain. Papers under my dominion tend to flee the kingdom the moment the throne turns its eye.)
At the top of the pyramid is the key of B, and for a week you go through every B scale, getting it under your fingers. The next level down is B (again) next to E. You learn all of E’s scales and – surprise – you keep B sharp. Uh, no, not sharp, you keep it…you keep practicing it.
So it goes for twelve weeks, until the great circle of fifths is complete and you know all your scales…most, anyway. (There are many.) My jazz teacher told me not to stress too much over all of them right away. Learn the majors, learn the natural minors, learn the blues. (The other minors are really just a matter of taking this note and that one and flattening them a bit.)
Yes, you heard me. Jazz. The one where they make it up. For two months now I’ve been enrolled in jazz piano lessons at a local piano shop. Prior to this I’d been hacking my way through the Alfred Solo Piano book, and while I’m more than capable of continuing such studies alone, they’re not giving me what I want: the freedom to converse in music.
For over fifteen years I have been a horn player, a tuba player of formidable (if sloppy) skill. Classically trained, if I feel like bragging. Thanks to this I can read the language, and with the iron bass I can still speak with some fluency, but only according to the text I’ve studied in advance. Even in sightreading clinics I’ve had at least eight minutes to look it over.
That will no longer do. I want to swim in the stream of musical consciousness, where I speak the phrases just as they come to mind. I want the vocabulary at arm’s reach: spells ready to cast at a moment’s notice.
All Alfred can teach me is how to learn a sheet of music: start with the first phrase, start it slow, deliberate, careful, clean. Then (slowly) ramp it up to tempo. A phrase may take a moment or an hour to untangle, but once untangled, in need only of diligent refinement.
That’s not going to help me when I visit a musician friend and they ask me to jam. You can tell me what key you’re starting in, but I still don’t know what to say. Or how to say it. Or how to even try saying it. I didn’t learn that way. But music is a language I mean to speak forever, and it’s high time I become truly fluent.