blue trane's Journal: Piano Dream

Piano dream

2011-04-07

In the opulent home of a high-school friend. There is a white piano, exquisite, elegant. I'm talking to one old acquaintance; there are others there too, in another room. Their parents are having a dinner-party in the dining-room. The friend I'm talking to and I are in the living room, with its centerpiece grand piano.

I'm talking to the old friend about my life, trying to defend it, the position I'm in currently. My friend seems sceptical, judgmental; he's gone on to become a professor or some other professional success, while I seem to be floundering around in obscurity.

A record player starts playing a jazz tune I know, Jelly Roll Morton's "Buddy Bolden's Blues" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgmZyImasvA, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5k9E717QVM). I want to demonstrate to my friend that I know how to play this tune! I walk to the piano, and attempt to pick out the melody as it plays.

I can't get it quite right! I'm off by a half-step, or something. I can hear that I'm off, and tell my friend - "well I haven't played this for a while, it's something close to this, can you hear that I've almost got it" - something to that effect.

One of the parents from the dinner party comes into the room as I'm trying to pick out the melody. Is it Syd Abrams? I look up to see him. I'm a little embarrassed at not being able to play the melody completely accurately but in m mind I have excused myself for the mistakes. The parent, grey-haired, relaxed and confident at his own life's success, talks to me gently with a smile on his face. He asks what I'm doing. I tell him I'm working on my AI project. I say I have social problems that prevent me from working for pay, but I'm doing the best I can on my own. He nods understandingly. My friend, still in the room and silent, seems less forgiving.

Then I tell them I have to go. I pick up a backpack with my stuff and walk out a door. I cross a street and head up a sidewalk. I'm conscious of being alone while I can still hear the sounds of the party in the rich house behind me...

---

After I wake up, I realize the mistake I was making when trying to play the tune: I think I was actually trying to play a different tune or conflating another tune with "I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say" (another name for the song). I was starting on the right note, but going down a whole step instead of a half-step, and that initial mistake was throwing me off so that I couldn't get the rest of the melody quite right either. Trying to play live along with the record, the initial mistake on the second note had thrown off my frame of reference for the whole piece. I realized this immediately on waking up.

Earlier that night I had been reading about Darwin and Huxley and Petr Kropotkin and their scientific activities, and how they had a lot of social success, but despite being scientists didn't really do experiments. Also I had read a wikipedia article on Warder Clyde Allee, which highlighted my very different experience from his at the University of Chicago.

My mistake in trying to play along with the melody is understandable, I think, from a musician's point of view; it is something that occurs often when practicing, at least for me. But an audience of non-musicians or even (non-jazz) musicians is likely to see my mistake as unforgivable; to conclude that I am a bad musician and they could do as well or better so I should shut up.

This kind of disconnect between the way I view a performance and the way most people view a performance is one of the main sources of my failure to be a conventional success (like my brother, say) in this world.

Statistically, I should be making much more money, etc.