I come from a family of musicians, of various shapes and sizes. My brother, you may recall, has a doctorate in modern classical composition, and is a marvelously talented jazz player in Washington, DC – he plays bass, guitar, and now, apparently, piano. My mom was a singer and pianist, mostly frustrated, but in the later part of her life, quite serious about her voice. Me, you know, presumably.
And then there’s my dad. He was a boogie-woogie pianist in his youth, but didn’t play for years; after he retired, however, he started taking jazz piano lessons quite seriously. And he reads my newsletters religiously, and it would not insult him for me to say that music, and especially jazz, is not a natural activity for him.
My dad was an engineer by profession, and he’d probably be the first to tell you that he’s an engineer by temperament, as well – tab A goes in slot B, the impedance of this whatsis matches the voltage of that thigamajig – there’s a formula for everything, a rule for each situation. It’s a perfectly sensible way to be, but that’s not really how jazz works – when you’re improvising, you’re composing, right there, a one-off creation which exists in that moment, driven, perhaps, by one’s knowledge of harmony and rhythm, but not the most rule-like behavior in the world, if you know what I mean.
And on top of that, my father has the same deficit that I do, in that he doesn’t have what my people call sitzfleisch, the ability to sit down and get it done, when it comes to the music thing. My brother, he of the doctorate in modern classical composition, practiced in conservatory-size heaps for many, many years; I, on the other hand, can probably count the days in my life that I’ve practiced from more than an hour – and I mean practiced, as in scales, technique, all the boring crap that makes up basic competence and skill – on the fingers of one hand. Unpracticed, lazy fingers, at that.
I used to beat myself up about this, but I’ve made my peace with it. My teachers and I have had this discussion, why I only take lessons every other week or every month, how I make progress at the eon scale. My singing teacher has told me that as long as I’m making progress – and I’m definitely making progress – she won’t kick me out; but it’s not week to week, it’s month to month or year to year. My father, on the other hand, has definitely not made his peace with this; he doesn’t have a lot of time left, dammit, and all this lack of sitzfleisch is harshing his master plan.
But he called me up, a while back, to tell me that he’d had a moment. He was working on this solo, and the doorbell rang, and his friend had arrived to go to lunch with him, and he was honestly, completely startled – he’d been working so intensely on his music that he had no idea what time it was. And this, he said, was the very first time in his entire life that he’d experienced this sort of submersion.
“I lack passion”, he says. “I’ve lacked it all my life. That’s my problem. But this – I’ve never felt this before.”
Now, we’ve all talked the talk about the ability of music to transform. Some of my friends are music therapists, and they can see it every day when they work with their clients. Some of us (some of the same us, actually) look forward to that moment on stage where the room is entirely captivated, when time stops except for the fingers on the strings. But then, there are those, like my dad, who have only their own selves to amaze – and apparently, it’s never too late.
I’m glad my dad finally experienced that moment – I’m sorry it took so long, but better late than never, as they say. We all, apparently, contain multitudes – even a retired electronics engineer.