keith jarrett leaving again transcription

Keith jarrett leaving again transcription free#

We would always invoke, after a week of both teaching and learning in equal measure, that old jazz mantra: “We must do it again!” This has been going on for years. Sometimes I would watch so intently that I forgot to play. And every year I would watch Geoff Simkins create impossibly twisting sculptures of line out of these same old tunes. I felt that music belonged, in some way, to them.ĭave Wickins used to run a Summer School in Wales that myself and Bobby taught at every year. Those associations were long in the making. I haven’t played that kind of music since. I still played standards a bit with Dave and Dave but then, in 2019, Dave Wickins died. In 2016 Bobby passed away, and the gigs at the 606 stopped. I felt the same way: I needed to do other things in order that I had something to bring back with me. Musicans like John Scofield, Keith Jarrett, Geri Allen and Paul Motian had always come back to standards after playing their own music and that of other contemporary composers. Sometimes we would play as a trio without Bobby, but even that group was slightly edging away from the mainstream repertoire. There’s a lot of fun in that (and no violence, by the way).Īnyway, that band, took care of my “standards fix”. They became more alive with every punch, with every attempt to unseat the foundations the thing stayed more in the ground.

It seemed no arbitrary coincidence that these songs had been played for decades: these songs could take a beating, and still they got up and asked for more.

Every musical decision felt like it had infinite other alternatives, each of which would have led to a new fork in the road with infinite others, all somehow held by the gravitational pull of the tune itself. I think it worked like this: Bobby called a tune, or sometimes just started it in the middle of another one, and, depending on the circumstances, we crashed, sloped or edged in around and behind him.

Keith jarrett leaving again transcription free#

You might think that was a pretty locked in format, but it was as free as I ever felt playing music: clear boundaries that were, as you approached them, soft and fluffy as clouds. We played standards, often the same ones month after month. The band was (mostly) myself, Dave Whitford and Dave Wickins on bass and drums respectively. We played at a club called the 606 in London, I reckon we did a gig a month for around fifteen years. I used to play in a band with a tenor saxophonist called Bobby Wellins. But there has to be something linking it all together, and I think I’ve at least found out what that is. It’s a kind of direction in itself I suppose, a clearly defined path taken by a three-wheeled shopping trolley. But how? How do we recognise it? I’ve tended to shy away from sticking to any kind of guns musically, and perhaps this means I’ve been unable to find my true calling, unless you count absent-minded listlessness. So are we all following the distant bark of a trapped dog? All musicians aspire to a condition of authenticity when playing. We are supposed to aspire to that, to find this thing that is yours, as if music were a forest, the voice a lost animal somewhere. The disconnect between what I heard and what I could play was too wide to bear and the piano became a leaden piece of furniture in our living room.The older I get, the harder it becomes to locate a voice in my music. But early bad habits and a mental block around diminished fifths, flat ninths and other inverted harmonies kept me in a narrow register. I practiced for hours, keeping the mute pedal locked as a courtesy to my family and neighbors. When she ultimately handed me a Xerox printout of “Autumn Leaves,” I felt I’d earned a seat at the jazz den in my head. I found a wonderful teacher at Manhattan School of Music, who took me through classical paces, starting with Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos” to Bach two-part inventions, while exposing me to jazz fundamentals like the circle of fifths and two-five-one chord progressions in all 12 keys. Her Chopin études inspired me to finally seek proper instruction. Mostly we traded keyboard runs and he’d break into “Here’s That Rainy Day.” I got no further in my education.Įventually my playing faded altogether until my daughter took up piano decades later. I bought a used upright on moving to New York in my 20s and took informal sessions from a friend who’d gone to music school, but he grew frustrated when I tried to turn the chestnut “I’m Old Fashioned” into a McCoy Tyner stomp.