My husband and I have been going to jazz concerts recently, and I decided I’d like to learn to play jazz piano. My journey with playing piano has been a metaphor for how I’ve lived my life. I started off very much “in the box”, doing everything by the book. As I grew older, I felt the urge for more freedom to create and to express myself both with music and in other ways.
I learned to play piano the traditional route: Play exactly what’s written on the page.
I started taking piano lessons when I was 5, learning the classics. I took lessons until I broke my arm in a car wreck at 17. I greatly appreciate a teacher who taught me how to sight read and play written music. Those fundamentals have been priceless. However, limiting myself to them alone has crippled a lot of my creativity with music over the years.
For example, my piano teacher spent very little time teaching chords. I know we went over chord theory in workbooks, but there was always a disconnect for me in how they were applied in the real world of music. My piano teacher focused on making sure I played every note correctly and got the timing right. If I got something wrong or left out a note, I had to go back and replay that section.
At about 18 I started playing music for church and swiftly realized you can’t go back and fix mistakes. You have to keep going. And if you need to play fewer notes to keep up the pace, so be it. No one really notices as long as you don’t hit a sour note.
It wasn’t until I was about 47 and started learning chords that I began integrating them into hymns. At about 48 (after my first divorce) I started playing extemporaneously – just whatever came. But it wasn’t until my mother passed (and my second divorce) that the music really started flowing.
It’s probably no coincidence that my freedom to express myself musically coincided with my divorces. Letting go of other people’s expectations of how I lived my life, letting go of caring how or if other people judged my efforts, expanded after my divorces. Somehow that liberation filtered into the way I play music.
After my mother died, I spent several months living at my dad’s house and hanging out with my cousin, Jody Norris, a former Elvis Tribute Artist and songwriter. Jody taught me how to find the guitar chords for songs. Then, as I sang along as Jody played, something clicked! I finally started to understand chords.
My extemporaneous music took on a new sense of freedom, and I ended up creating an extemporaneous piano album to go along with my Confidence Rising book. The album is on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, GooglePlay, etc.
As I said, I have wanted to branch out more into jazz, so Friday afternoon I googled “how to play jazz piano” on Youtube and found an excellent free 15-part lesson series on the basics of Jazz by Mark at www.PianoBreaks.com .
His tutorial is excellent. I was able to whiz through his 15 lessons in one day. By the time I played for my husband Friday evening, he wondered if I was some kind of piano prodigy for having picked it up so fast. I assured him: I am not! I don’t think I even really have an ear for music, and I never have. But this man’s lessons are fantastic. Combined with what I already knew about music, it was easy for me to pick up and implement the techniques. I’ve never had anyone explain chords on the piano to me like this. I’m finally starting to get chord theory. I also greatly appreciate his philosophy about playing piano — that it’s all about freedom of expression.
I went through a couple other videos on the PianoBreaks.com site and spent most of Saturday practicing. I’ve had a cold and didn’t feel like doing much of anything else.
The video below is something I recorded this (Sunday) afternoon using the techniques and chords I learned from the PianoBreaks video series. I set it to some photos I took on the Mt. Nebo Loop in central Utah earlier this summer. I hope you enjoy it. I had fun creating it. I call it “Sunday Afternoon.”
What are your creative talents that you feel confined or constrained in expressing? Whether you express your creativity through art, music, decorating, photography, sewing, crafts, writing, or creating your life… I believe there’s value not only in knowing both the “rules” and the “structure,” but also in knowing how not to let the rules cramp your creativity or crush your freedom of expression. There’s a way to do both — to find that delicate balance of structure with a full range of expression.
