The fourth dimension of retirement

I wrote a blog a while ago now about the key, or one key at least, to success in retirement. This was / is to design a new identity for yourself to replace the one you gave up when you retired. In my case I decided I would start describing myself as a writer and a vineyard owning and guitar playing one at that. I’ve blogged about the vineyard on a regular basis and written other blogs so the writer bit has been taken care of. And of course we have the pups which I’ve also written about. But I have not written much about the musician side of my identity – the fourth dimension of the title. I will try and rectify that now. It’s a good time to do so because the jazz workshops I wrote about are beginning again. It would be easy, although cowardly, not to go back. It’s all very well to talk blithely about new identities but assuming a new identity involves a degree of discomfort. This blog is about discomfort and having a plan to deal with it. Learning new skills, and keeping mentally active by doing so is, again, all very well, but it does, as the more compos mentis (alert), among you will realise, require some effort – and a plan.

As a guitar player in my youth I realised you only needed 3 chords for the quicker stuff and 4 chords, of which 3 are the same, for the slow stuff. As a lover of Country and Western music – it’s the poetry you know – you can play everything in one key–G. Now, as you may have read, I’m trying to master the dark arts of jazz guitar. It’s quite a step up from the kind of music I’ve been fiddling around with for the last 50 years. No longer do I need only to know 3 or 4 simple chords, there’s hundreds of them out there all fitted into apparently simple songs. And not just any old chords either. We’ve got flattened fifths, augmented sevenths, diminished major with added ninths. And apparently you’re supposed to play all the way up to the top end bit. Akin to a trip up the Orinoco for some of us. Comfort zone? That’s over there, way over there.

Let me get my excuses in first. Buying good guitars (see photos below -I’ve been looking for an excuse to include photos of some of my collection) cannot compensate for one’s own physical shortcomings.

I know Django Reinhart played with only two fingers but he was certainly exceptional. And he plays quick. My own poor fingers, damaged by years of wicket-keeping – badly – anybody who has kept wicket in club cricket knows that often it is not a thing of beauty and that a combination of poor pitches, crap bowling and indifferent technique means broken, dislocated and otherwise damaged, fingers. My left hand has particularly suffered, and, despite what my tutor says, I regard this as the important one. In New Zealand I had a cortisone injection, extremely bloody painful, by a guy who came from Nottingham but didn’t support Notts Forest (yes I know) so I should have known there were going to be problems. This for something called, in New Zealand at least, trigger finger. Now I’ve got the same problem in my first finger. I don’t want to make excuses but I do want you to understand just what a challenge this jazz guitar business is for me.

This level of challenge and my failure to rise to it, is why, after a few weeks of my jazz improvisation workshops and feeling a little bit of a prat, despite kind words from some of my fellow band members, if I may be so bold as to call them that, I decided I needed a little extra tuition. Our main workshop leader is a chap who talks an awful lot of sense and he’s a guitarist (unlike the other workshop leader who is a saxophonist – nothing wrong with that except I suspect he has little sympathy for struggling guitarists) so I decided to track him down and persuade him to take me on as a pupil. Eventually I did just that. This was my plan.

By the time this is finished I will have had three lessons (although the third one has been postponed) and, at £35 a pop, and being an OAP living on a pension, this was about all that I could afford. But that, in itself, is no bad thing because lessons can be addictive, an emotional crutch you’re frightened to throw away. So the third one will be the last and, at the end of September, two new workshops begin and it’s back to the bright lights and that feeling of being exposed technique-wise. Not a comfortable feeling but one that goes hand in hand with new learning experiences. Stepping outside your comfort zone – at times – is one my goals for retirement. And while we are on the subject of spending money, something I do do well, my tutor recommended a brilliant little gizmo called Ditto, (see right) you just lay down your rhythm track and play over  / along to it. I also spent money on two tutorial books recommended to me by my tutor. Not sure the plan involved spending lots of money but that’s the way it is sometimes when you have a plan. It costs.

And I am learning a lot of new stuff for my money – scales, chords (some I didn’t know existed), arpeggios, relationships like thirds and fourths and fifths, learning the notes all the way up the neck and ‘making a note your friend,’ in the words of my tutor.

I have new heroes now, I’ve moved on from Eric, Mark, BB and Albert, my new hero is Wes Montgomery. Hence the photo at the top of this blog. It was an easy choice because there aren’t that many iconic jazz guitar players (Django apart of course), at least that I know of. So Wes (don’t you just love how I use their first names as if we were brothers in arms?) is my new hero and he plays with his thumb rather than a pick which is something I find easier to do. Wes and I, we are as one, even though technically speaking he is dead, and talented and black and I am white, un-talented and, at time of writing, alive. Nevertheless, we are together on this. So I’m writing this blog now before my last lesson and also before I start my new workshops. I will keep you informed as to how it all goes, unless it goes badly of course, then you will hear nothing. Retirement is a time of newness and challenge and plans and some degree of embarrassment.