Curt Siffert

I've always hated scales and arpeggios. Just hated them. I was always a classical music kid - scales were like taking music, and aggressively distilling it down, boiling away everything that was good and true and emotional and affecting about music, and stripping it down to something incredibly annoying. I hated looking at music as something that had annoying elements to it, and scales/arpeggios just shone a big spotlight on them.

I also saw no point. What is the point of being able to play both-handed four-octave Ab-minor arpeggios if none of the pieces in my repertoire have them in their passages? Plus, I had been able to learn particular scale runs when necessary - the G minor scales in Chopin's 1st Ballade. The F# runs in Brahms B-minor rhapsody. I suppose they weren't perfect every time I did them, but they were a heck of a lot better than when I would do them as part of mindless scale exercises. It was the music that motivated me, not some aim of mindless technical proficiency.

And now... it's different. Jazz makes it all different. Now there's a point to practicing these scales. If I reach a confidence point with some altered pentatonic exercise, I can use it. And there are times in my improvising when I know I have a sound in my head - a flourish that I intellectually know how to play, one that depends on some pentatonic or symmetric diminished pattern... and my fingers get tangled.

Damn it.

I've always had good fingers. I've been able to coast on them. But I guess I'm getting to the point where my lack of scale/arpeggio practice is finally starting to limit me.

So, today was the first day I really started pounding scales again, first day in a long time. All the modes in several keys, both hands.

And this time... thinking about the jazz playing I might be able to use them in, it was actually kind of fun.

Well, about a week ago my hard drive died and that was a lot of fun. I didn't lose anything in the way of music - just two revisions of one of my piano musings, when the one I wanted to keep is still around. And some recordings from my jazz trio rehearsals, but I've already uploaded them on a website so I still have them. Still, annoying. I think I've just about decided to invest more in to an actual desktop computer system so I have some redundancy.

The other advantage of that is that I will be able to start getting back into multitracking. Right now the only multitracked song I have is Together, and I'd like to do more of it.

Saturday night, I recorded some more versions of All Aboard and Balancing Above The Air, with the intention of finally getting demo-quality songs that I could put up on garageband.com. I didn't quite get there, but it was still nice to come up with a couple more versions I can listen to and examine. These recordings have piano and drums. I might upload them here in the future - still letting them sink in.

I just tried playing through I Have A Cold, Balancing Above The Air, and My Favorite Clown, one right after the other. Oy. It's been too long since I've played them through. And I don't think I've ever played them through back to back before. I've got to practice those more regularly. I just put myself on a schedule to do it every three days.

First rehearsal of the trio went well. The bassist hosts and has everything set up in his basement, so it's really cushy that way - even the drummer didn't have to haul anything. We worked on Where Or When, Ain't Misbehavin', But Beautiful, Comes Love, Desafinado, I Could Write A Book, and Under My Skin. There's so much I don't know! A few impressions, both from last night, and from listening to the recordings today:

Desafinado sounds really good with just drums, bass, and voice. I brought in the piano after the A section was done and it sounded really good that way.

I feel weirdly more creative in my solos on the latin tunes. (We're doing But Beautiful as a bossa.)

Comes Love has been really hard for me to do solo - just voice and piano - but it's really fun as a trio.

It's tough to find a good tempo for Under My Skin. I wanted it to be more peppy, but it just really wants to lay back the way we're doing it.

I gotta breathe more. When I don't know a tune, I don't breathe as deeply, and then my singing tone is thin and I go sharp.

Overall, really fun - I'm looking forward to the next rehearsal. I think this will inspire me to work on jazz a lot more than my last band did - the smaller combo is better for me, partly because the three of us felt comfortable talking a lot about what it meant to play jazz. Lots of learning opportunity here.

Looks like the year is starting out right. One of my goals has been to have an outlet for practicing jazz singing and jazz piano in a trio format, and I appear to have that now. I'll be starting regular rehearsals with some good players here in town. The players will be rotating a bit, but I've got the core members in place. First rehearsal is tonight!

I'll probably be regularly creating rehearsal recordings and will be uploading the better ones over in standards. If you want to hear, drop me an email and I can shoot you the password.

All of my Piano Musings are podsafe, which means that podcasters can grab them and use them as background music for their podcasts, as long as I'm credited, etc.

There is a site called Podsafe Audio that specializes in categorizing this kind of music. I just created a page specifically for the piano musings, and you can find it here.

iLike is spreading, and has now launched on Bebo. This means that I also now have a Bebo artist page, for those of you on Bebo. I also have a member page there now but don't appear to have any friends, so if any of you are on there, you could be the first person to add me.

I have a new facebook page up that is a little more professional. You can hear music, tell the recommendation system that you like my music ("click to iLike this artist"), etc. I'll mainly be using that site to reach out to fans that aren't already hooked up here, but every "iLike" signup helps because it gets my music out there more.

This facebook stuff really does get addictive. I've managed to set up a few things. If you have a facebook page, I now have a better artist page that you can view, become a fan of, etc.

You can also click the "iLike" button to say you like the music - this has all sorts of benefits - you get informed when I upload a new song, you can post on the "Fan Wall", and it means I get more airplay in iTunes. I also think (if you have a facebook account) that you can just click on this image:

On that page, there's also the capability to listen to my songs, add them to your own profile, dedicate them to one (or all) of your friends... and each time you do, I get more fans and there's more likelihood that even more people will stumble across the music I'm uploading. Have fun!

One of the things I have been focusing on lately is my jazz piano skills, particularly in regard to the old songs and standards. I am trying to do more singing too - and so all in all, I'm basically trying to become a cocktail pianist. It feels kind of odd to be aspiring to be a cocktail pianist. I remember before I started getting more into jazz piano, I saw cocktail piano as being a little bit lame. Really! Old people drinking their sorrows away, singing songs no one sings anymore. Now I think it's a really romantic atmosphere, and I kind of like drinking more than I did, too.

I mean, I know how it (theoretically) hooks into my future goals. I learn more jazz piano and I get a richer harmonic palette. I learn more songs and I have more ideas for my own songs. There's a risk, though, to focusing a lot on jazz. A lot of musicians never find their way out.

Nevertheless, I've been happy to have some breakthroughs lately. I was able to sing/play I've Got You Under My Skin at mid-tempo all the way through by myself. What that means is, expanding out all the chords to comping, soloing, turnarounds, bassline, singing... all at once. I'm doing it badly, but I got through it.

And just now, I decided to give myself a recital, which is a step forward. I picked the twelve standards I'm most confident on, and performed them back to back, recording each one. I find it's about an hour of material overall. I'm about to listen to them. Kinda nervous.

By the way, remember that if you're a friend of mine, you can email me to request the username/password to my "Jazz Standards" page. That's where you can hear my jazz recordings, which I post fairly often. I can't make them publicly available because of copyright reasons.