On Your On

As I listen to Mr. Joel, Billy the Joel, aka Billy Joel, the Piano Man, only can I think "genius."  I never absorbed the Beatles, until I was in my mid 30's, because I never listened to American popular music.  I was a classically trained pianist, although my reading skills were underdeveloped.  A classical pianist is forged with the eyes.  There is no other way.  How much complex classical music can you absorb by ear?  Tangible melodies can be copped by ear, but Chopin's notes, as are other Romantic composers, are dense and complicated.  So many notes!  Clumps of grapes they are called fondly by the commercial music community.  It takes a special musician to read this material, and it is dependent upon visual acuity.  You must be able to read dense music well, grand staff, concentrated content.  It is possible to be an excellent musician without this talent as proven by American popular music.  Although Early Jazz surprisingly to me was reading music (who knew?), Louis Armstrong would prove that aural skill equally was as important.  Listeners can't discern how accurately you are realizing these clumps of grapes.  What they do know is if your musical product, your rendering of sound and feeling, is original, expressive, and communicative.  I would say without feeling and a keen ear, your music will fall on deaf ears.  Let's say the classical idiom is reserved for those blessed with exceptional eyesight, and American popular music forged a new path.  Louis Armstrong could not read music.  Erroll Garner could not read music, and yet they were ground-breaking prodigious musicians.  The visual notation of music is secondary to the music itself, and with its need comes a vast expanse of musical politics.  The interpretation or rendering of written music may be one of the grayest and most contentious areas in humanity.  Most often it is realized poorly and with pretension by those with little musical talent.  Billy Joel's German-born father was a classical pianist, and Billy was born in the Bronx.  They moved to Long Island where he grew up.  My only question is whence did his vocabulary come?  His whole style of music, the rhythmic groove, the melodies, the piano riffs, and the lyrics.  Holy cow!  It is no wonder he is one of the best selling artists of all time.  160 million albums sold.  I did listen to Billy Joel in high school, one particular album on a cassette tape.  That was enough.  It had Rosalinda's Eyes on it.  That marimba!  I have tried to  tighten up, and from Youtube I have been expanding my historical knowledge of American popular music.  There is a plentitude of music, and it is rife for appreciation and learning.  I guess you are born with such a musical perspective.  Lucky you!  Pops, or Satchmo, or Louis didn't read music.  Instead he absorbed what was around him and interpreted it musically.  Louis Armstrong was sent to a "Waif's Home" in NOLA after firing his father's .38 revolver into the air in celebration of New Year's Eve.  He was determined to get out of there and quickly learned how to play the trumpet.  Some people are blessed.  I had to work diligently to become a competent trumpeter.  It took six weeks at Governor's School East at St. Andrew's College in Laurinburg for it to happen.  Playing the trumpet five hours a day will make you a better player quickly.  It was not fun a first, but as we learned the more sophisticated wind ensemble literature, trumpet took on a new meaning.  We had six in our section, because there weren't enough strings to fill two orchestras.  They made us a Wind Ensemble lucky for me.  I didn't make it the first cut.  Only after they expanded the trumpet section was I offered this opportunity of a lifetime.   Over the course of six weeks finally I was able to play lead on the Charles Ives Symphony.  It is my greatest triumph as a trumpeter, and I listen to this recording often of my ability to lead the ensemble.  My tonguing became my best skill, and with it I defined the rhythmic time feel of the group.  It was years later I discovered I was tonguing between my teeth, a no no.  I had a tangible musical interpretation which came from twelve years of piano lessons, and consequently the ensemble developed an emotionally mature interpretation of our performances.  You must be able to play time to be a musician, and modern day American pop music ignores this.  The "feel" that has been championed in American popular music does not require real time and the ability to internalize quarter notes at different tempos.  This ability is what creates the possibility of feeling in music.  The continuity and steadfastness of these quarter notes without straying allow the creation of a mood.  Upon listening to one of my first Billy Joel CD's, a live in the studio recording, all I could think is that the technology has speed up the performances like a turntable turning at the wrong speed.  "Live at Sigma Sound Studios" was a complete surprise, because Mr. Joel, Mr. Wonderful, sounded so young (and so full of coke).  Oops!  Did I say that?  We are listening to music from a different era, and there is no more appropriate time.  I have forgotten all my preconceptions about American music and am trying to absorb it for the first time.  It is unsettling, because America always has been rife with controversy and oppression.  There were drugs in the 1980's, and cocaine was one of them.  Cocaine also was readily available to Louis Armstrong, although history says he was chose marijuana.  Supposedly he smoked three blunts a day.  That is telling to realize this was common activity in the 1920's, the "Roaring Twenties."  You could get cocaine at the local drug store.  Today it is illicit fentanyl imported from other countries via the "Dark Web."  It is a shame what America has become, and most of it is at the behest of communist infiltrators.  They would like nothing more than the fall of the free world.  Communist practices sneaked into America unnoticed and set up shop in the middle of our lives.  I am ashamed to call myself American at the moment.  (so Republicans would say, "Leave.")  I say Mr. Trump should move to Russia to be with his lover.  We have not survived two years of Covid, and these two years have turned us into complicit, docile, complacent servants of "The Man."  This attack has been as egregious as the Holocaust.  Manufacturing an often deadly pathogen which robs you of your sense of taste and smell?  I have not been able to cook, because I have not been able to smell for two years.  I have had Covid thrice!  Damn this enemy, and damn those who created it!  It was manufactured and released upon us, and the "vaccine" isn't a vaccine at all.  It is an antidote.  When your country forsakes you or drops the ball center field, you know you are on your on.  Probably American through the centuries have been on their own as well, so it is best we figured it out.