It’s Thursday morning and I was playing a few jazz scales on my guitar and at the same time idly wondering what I might write a short retirement blog about for tomorrow. I was a little stuck but then the answer was right here in front of me.
I would write a blog about my retirement and my musical activities. That would be likely to be pretty short on account of how there really haven’t been many of late. I think I’ve mentioned before that I was both surprised and disappointed that during the period of lockdown, which might have been predicted to be an excellent opportunity to practise old skills and develop new ones, I seem to have almost stopped playing any instrument in any genre.
It seemed like I needed the potential embarrassment of performing badly in public to motivate me to practise or at least just play at home. But this last week, with huge potential shame looming in the form of this year’s summer school (live for the first time in two years), which is coming up on August 16th, just over a week away, I needed very much to get practising. With little action, my fingers and my brain have atrophied at a frightening rate. Only pain hangs on the horizon.
So I picked up my guitar which is in the living room, plugged in my phone to my speakers and started to play along to a guy called Tony Winston on Youtube (as above). There were a number of pleasant surprises in watching him. First he plays the piano and sings a bit. That’s not perfect in that I’m as I said playing the guitar and I’ll probably be playing the piano at the summer school. Not sure yet because there has been no discussion of this kind, but it’s likely.
This wasn’t a surprise just not smart as a practice method. But then to be fair to myself I did have a piano (or keys as we cool cats call it) practice yesterday but because this has to be up in the attic this is a bit harder to arrange. So I can have unlikely but relevant or, more likely to happen, but less appropriate. You tell me what’s best.
What was slightly surprising about Tony was that he was American (not a surprise in itself) but that he swore and made mistakes but didn’t bother to remove them. I speak for myself here but I like a tutor who swears and also one that makes mistakes because the first makes me smile and I think it’s possible to learn more from the second. Just my opinion. What surprised me is that the combination of bad language / cussing and being American have not always gone hand in glove in my fairly extensive experience. Still the guy has 35K (I think) subscribers so he must be doing something right.
Anyway we both made our way through Stella by Starlight, Autumn Leaves, Blue Bossa and a few more. Him playing mostly very nicely on keys and me bumbling along on guitar. Still at least I’m doing it, badly but it’s happening, and that hasn’t been the case for quite a few months.
So with summer school coming up soon and hopefully the usual jazz Monday night workshops starting again in September, I might get back to my average best in the jazz piano world. As for the guitar and the folk fiddle group on a Thursday night, well I’m not so sure about that. It’s not that I’m any worse on guitar than piano, I’m equally as bad at both, it’s just I can’t see me going out twice a week if life ever gets back to ‘normal’. That, for some reason I don’t really understand, feels a bit scary. No I don’t understand either.
I’ll just see how the summer school goes especially the dreaded Thursday night jazz gig of summer school (moved I’m told to Wednesday for some reason). If my confidence remains somewhere around the 7 out of 10 mark after that, I might pick up with Transatlantic Sessions and Celtic music. If that goes well, then who knows?
As usual I’ve left it very late to start preparing for my reintroduction into the musical world. As long as I can keep my head nicely buried in the sand for as long as possible, refusing to see difficult challenges on the horizon (I’ve known about summer school for quite a while), then that is what I will do. Wish me well with my challenges and good luck to you and yours.