Playing in a Cover Band

 ...is not anything ever to which I have aspired.  While I heard a few bar bands while I was in college, including "Hootie and the Blowfish" in Columbia, and a few good bands in the Research Triangle Park, or Triad, or Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, never was I motivated to want to play in such a group.  The music was interesting to me, but I grew up listening to jazz.  My father was a jazz pianist, and some would call him a stylist.  His approach to the piano was Milt Bruckner's "Locked Hands," of which George Shearing adopted and brought to a wider public.  It is a particular harmonic approach to realizing tunes from "lead sheets" or "chord charts" that states the melody in an octave spacing, usually between the little finger in the right hand and the thumb of either the right or left hand.  Barry Harris is the more modern purveyor of this style based on the ascending melodic minor scale.  It uses a diminished chord as a V, so as you harmonize a diatonic scale ascending I,V, I, V, I with diminished chords substituting for the V7.  It sounds very lush and sophisticated.  These little diminished chords were notated in my father's hand-written fake book, and never did I understand what they were.  If you play a tune with this stylistic approach, you must really know the melody of the tune, meaning you have harmonically analyzed the intervals of the melody and are capable of inserting passing chords in between the notes in the melody.  It is the common practice of most jazz pianists.  In essence when "faking" a tune, the pianist realizes a more complicated and sophisticated sounding accompaniment becoming an impromptu arranger on the spot.  You are doing something different than playing "licks" or fills behind the melody, which becomes distracting quickly if you are not tasteful.  I will admit that although I am a solid jazz pianist, I never spent the time on each and every jazz tune I play.  I always have played the melody mostly by ear, hunting and pecking away in a rather ignorant approach.  My pianistic touch is subtle and dynamically expressive, and my ear is keen, so never has it been a problem.  But (and I don't usually begin a sentence with a contraction) I can't tell you the notes of particular melodies.  When I compose music, and with two composition degrees, I do use harmonic analysis along with my heart and ear.  I write this analysis on top of the staff like a lead sheet.  When you play, you do not think this way.  You sing the song, and that singing is in your head.  I have only recently realized that this singing makes the realizing of a tune much much easier.  Your ear remembers or knows the tune, so aural tradition plays a large role in your performance of the song.  So was the case for much American popular music.  It was not written down in musical notation.  The melodies were passed down through the generations from person to person.  There were a handful of "Tune Catchers" who traveled to Appalachia to find and transcribe this mountain music, as did Alan Lomax traveling to the American South to record blues, work songs, Negro spirituals, and other indigenous music.  In the last five years I made it a goal to study the lineage of American Popular Music, and I never realized what a huge undertaking this was.  It is a massive undertaking, and still yet has it not has been done.  Ken Burns as made a sizeable dent in this archiving with his series on Jazz and Country music.  I have accomplished some of my goals as a musician, composer, and performer, but it was not until I became a caregiver for my mother that my life's musical perspective changed.  Never did I realize how much I don't know about American music, and that is because I never studied it.  Classes about American Popular Music were scant during my college years.  It is important, critically really to understanding who America is a nation.  More importantly this musical heritage is diverse and includes both Native and African American roots.  This is not a rich political era for recognizing these roots.  In fact it may be the worst in our lifetimes.  Only this week news commentators  were vocal in saying, "Dixie has returned to Washington, DC."  What does this mean?  In a slight pause I will mention that life has not been easy recently for anyone, and the entire nation is hesitant to push back on the policies of our President.  My vote for Fayetteville mayor was changed in one split second, when the candidate for which I had chosen to vote decreed his agenda for mayor would mimic Trump.  A Nobel Peace Prize?  Let's reflect shall we at the absurdity of that notion?  A Nobel Peace Prize for a sitting President who sanctions a violent extremist entity indoctrinated with his cult-like desires?  They attack the United States Capital and try to stop validation of Joe Biden's win for President.  He fails to respond to this violent incursion deploying no one, and several people lose their lives.  This mob violently breaches the Capital Building as working lawmakers scurry to safety hiding in various places.  This action in the pinnacle of the opposite of a peaceful transfer of power in Washington.  There is no more absurd suggestion that Donald Trump could or would earn this prize, because his policies and the ramifications of his ideologies have caused much more violence, separation, and unrest in America since his election as President.  It has been a rally of the Ku Klux Klan.  Life in America since 2016 markedly has been worse than before, and violence has escalated.  It has been the worst decade of my life, and this is one week out of having had Covid for at least the 8th time.  The corruption of America has become so deep, we are beginning to lose the border of reality.  The news media, not unlike the rest of Corporate America, has fallen prey to the intimidation and legal coercion of the Trump Organization through mob-like action.  Trying to keep the torch of America's true history alive has become daunting, because Cancel Culture has infiltrated the mainstream.  Education has become so compromised and Americans so put upon and sheltered, as a populace we are not capable of seeing or understanding the truth.  Everyday is just another reinforcement of Donald Trumps autocratic tendencies, and many local leaders have joined his party.  As a musician and now self-proclaimed music historian, finally I have realized why this journey is difficult.  As I have been looking backward to the roots of American popular music, the Trump Organization (now the Trump Administration) is looking to sanitize, homogenize, and marginalize American achievement.  It has been American democracy, that out-of-bounds, dirty, disruptive, and aggressive force which has made leaps and bounds in civil rights.  It means that in freedom, not everything is going to be in your liking.  Most things may stray from your own personal perception of American live.  That is the definition of diversity, and the question looms as to whether America is and has been diverse since its inception.  The unequivocal answer is, "Yes," and there is n denying it.  To put the pedal to the metal, early Americans bought slaves, African-American slaves.  These slaves were captured, shackled, and shipped to southern American ports, where they were sold to affluent white people.  If you mean to say America is not diverse, than you would not have brought indigenous Africans to America in bondage.  One only has to look at the history of the Minstrel practice of Blackface to understand.  The images derived from slavery and used as entertainment often were accurate.  The basis of the images, while sometimes exaggerated, were true.  There were Aunt Jemimas and Uncle Toms.  The basic hierarchy of a plantation was the "Mammy" ran it.  A large, powerful, masculine, and often rude woman was the authority figure of the inner workings of a plantation.  One could suggest she was a lesbian, because she was not to be the object of the affection of the master.  That would infringe upon the romantic sovereignty of the wife, thus her responsibility was to be feminine.  The images used as entertainment during the period of Blackface, while seemingly startling and possibly unsettling were accurate.  African culture at the onset of slavery, because of its pure roots, markedly was different than European,  now new American sensibility.  This disparity in culture truly is the soul of America, and over several hundred years evolved into the true roots of American culture.  To deny African or Native American influence is erroneous and in insult to Jazz, Pentecostal, R&B, Blues, and Soul music.  Without the Black Church, upon which freed slaves came to rely, American Popular Music would be a shell of itself.  Try to tell our modern generation of Americans this tale.  Black music?  Blues artists?  Gospel Music?  Soul?  Jazz?  Jazz is the least popular music in America.  To understand the soul of America is to understand the oppression and despair of freed slaves being lynched in the American South.  What was it about African-Americans that merited such murderous behavior, being whipped and hung from trees to die?  What was so antagonistic about Joe Biden's win of the Presidency, that merited a violent mob attacking our elected leaders while they tried to confirm the vote?  Simply it is racial discrimination or White Supremacy, or "Dixie comes to D.C."  I have been writing about Jim Crow Jr. throughout the Trump Presidency, and I never knew I was living in a chosen red state.  Red states lack soul, understanding, empathy, and compassion.  Their social and political sentiments could be attributed to the same Red Skins erroneously earmarked as as savage and self-serving.  By what is the Republican Party under siege?  Much of their fodder is being created for the purposes of their own rebellion, otherwise America may have continued as a peaceful and prosperous entity with democratic rule.