It gets even weirder for me. The affinity to this song is simple: I’ve been playing that riff since I took up piano. You know, ‘lord save me, my drug is my baby,’ etc. Here’s the story. A piano was in our living room. My parents arranged lessons. I hated them. I truly absolutely bleeping hated them. It was a hour of smiling, boring nonsense that made no sense because it was just learning how to connect dots on a page with where your fingers go and when, and nothing about the sound. I complained. I hated practice because it was just me trying to fit my fingers to dots on a page. No one would talk to me about music, about why you hit these notes and not those, about why this sounds good and this sound sad and this sounds jazzy and this like some stupid song in a bleeping book of stupid songs. I couldn’t convince them to let me stop. So I resorted to a demonstration: I put straw between the keys. Not destructive but obvious. Lessons ended. Piano went away. I didn’t want the piano to go away: I wanted someone to help me learn how to play the keys so they sounded good, to talk to me about intervals and keys and chords and how they go together.
I started playing in college when I was really, really stoned and on a whim sat down in one of the practice rooms and banged away in the dark. I found I could start to learn. I think one of my first ‘learnings’ was working on separation of the hands so they could independently create. I played intermittently. In law school, I started going to the class building around the corner from where I lived where they had pianos on each lecture stage. I’d bring the newspaper and I’d open it up and play whatever was in my head while reading the box scores. I found that reading completely uninteresting material let the musical part of my brain shape the sound without me worrying about it. I started to play a bit in public then, mostly riffing on whatever the person before me played, taking it apart and extending the harmonies. I started to think that might not be cool, so I stopped. (That’s something people never got about me: I explore but I am very careful about others and try very hard not to cross lines that make people uncomfortable.)
When we moved to this house, we got a Yamaha Clavinova. I wanted a digital piano because I knew we wouldn’t tune a regular one and the high end Clavinova sounds really good, though the action kind of sucks heavy so the touch response isn’t what I really want. I play in spurts but the very first thing I generally play when I sit down has typically been a blues. That particular blues. That exact one. I’ve been playing through versions of that since 1985.
So you can imagine what I felt when that song came on. It absolutely reeks of all the undertones I’ve heard and explored over the years, except of course rendered so perfectly it’s uncanny.
I had a goal when I started playing in college, which was to play what was in my head without anything getting in the way. That meant layers of self-trust. That’s why I played while reading the paper: it was a conscious exercise to break down the walls that say your fingers go here because music is this way. I found stages in the experience that ranged from something I had on the tip of my mind, which often didn’t come out at all like I thought it would, down into complete identification of my thoughts with the notes I was hearing. That’s hard to sustain because the flow shifts and it’s hard not to be jarred out of rhythm without going into cliché. Sometimes I find I’ve gone too far down one road and can’t hear next. But that’s fine because I’m tapping into the flow of music and enabling it to flow through me. That’s why this riff matters to me: it’s primal. It comes from the deepest soul, as it processes through and embodies cultural iterations. I can’t put into words all the layers but she brings them out and adds the voice – really she is The Voice – in which she combines a depth in the music with a depth in the vocal so she brings out those cultural iterations across the generations. I’ll tell you: it was like being hit by a hammer to hear what I think of as ‘my stupid riff’ coming at me. And she – of course – combines the sound of her voice with absolutely perfect words for the riff and for her singing, words that reach through the cultural iterations to the primal truth that my drug is my baby I’ll be using for the rest of my life. I’m not going to explain what I mean here.
As a note, the reason I started playing in college was a friend, Randy Katz, loved to listen to Keith Jarret’s The Köln Concert album. I respected the work but it didn’t reach all the way in me so I decided to reach into me on my own. It was coming back from Randy’s room junior year that I ducked into a piano practice room. So I owe Randy thanks. (Thanks!)
It’s important for me to note that ‘flow of music’ means ‘flow of music’. There is a flow of music. You tap into it. It flows through you. You can reach the level at which it flows but it flows anyway and all you’re doing is touching bits of that.
jomi: playing with perception 