That Which Goes Around, Comes Around

 Inexplicably on Sunday evening I was pulled into an undefinable funk.  After spending several weeks preparing for a cocktail piano gig, I was able to muscle my way through.  Nothing had changed, and all of the pitfalls I knew were coming were there.  My forethought minimized these hazards, but the long term implications of work sustained.  I conquered, and the gig was successful, but this event was a catalyst for repressed energy.  This is the plight of family.  You come from this familial heritage, so part of it is your own blood.  Often they say children come "through" their parents.  I have lived in my father's shadow my entire life.  As he aged this influence waned, but as a part of my own blood necessarily it always will be there.  When I first began playing piano I modeled after my father.  It was a good start.  When I went to college, especially graduate programs in other states, you grow in other directions.  The more you learn the more your playing changes.  You can't go home.  This is a deep statement, and what does it really mean?  I understand, but the chips fall where they fall.  To go to a gig and expect to be heard like my father is challenging.  His model is quality, and never could I replicate his playing style.  There was a reason for that, and I didn't discover it until recently.  His method of playing cocktail or jazz piano was based on a specific music theory called "Locked Hands."  Milt Bruckner was the originator of this style.  It widely was used by many keyboard purveyors including Hammond organists.  The technique was playing the melody in octaves with your right hand and filling in the harmony with your other inner fingers.  George Shearing played this way as did many jazz pianists who were known for a more sophisticated style.  Barry Harris was the most influential teacher of this method, and it began with using only one scale.  He would have you play up a major scale and harmonize I-V the whole way up.  What resulted in actuality was using a seven diminished seventh as a V for each I.  I think it is melodic minor.  Over the years as I looked at my father's miniaturized hand-written fake books, his chord "changes" or chord symbols were different than those used in the Berkley "Real Book."  They resembled the original chord notations from printed sheet music of the published songs.  As I perused these piano renditions of American popular songs, I began to understand that jazz notation or harmony was different than the harmony used by America's greatest popular song composers.  It was from a classical source, four part writing originating with J.S. Bach.  If you took Music Theory 101 in college, you will know what I am talking about.  Four part writing is a complicated thing.  You must begin from the beginning and learn it from the ground up.  "No parallel fifths."  Over the course of music history, Bach's strict four part writing evolved and changed, and these differing harmonic approaches defined the stylistic periods that came later.  The Baroque is an odd horse as is Renaissance music.  We like to believe what came later was more advanced, when in fact the roots of 20th century Expressionism can be found earlier.  The modulations I heard in Renaissance music are similar to what I hear in my own head.  I have devised my own harmonic system called "Multitonalism."  Pieces have no key signature and freely fluctuate between tonal centers or use modes as points of reference.  There are a lot of accidentals, because they are not found in a specific key signature.  The way my father played was sophisticated and required a deep understanding of the chord changes, the melody, and voice-leading between chord tones.  I could be called "learned."  George Shearing sounded the way he sounded, because he used this style.  So did my father, but I never knew it.  He wasn't "faking" a tune.  He was playing it the way he had learned with the specific chords he knew.  I choose to play more freely, and I change my approach often.  Always I have had the urge to explore this technique further.  Being expected to sound like someone else is difficult.  It is flattering in ways, but also it is a damp cloth over your flame.  Knowing when to be a whore is key.  It would seem in America we spend most of our time being whores for others, rather than seeking our own spark.