Quaint ramblings and occasional reflections of a journeying Aussie musician...

13 February 2006

I Love A Piano...

Played Gatsby again last Saturday night...there seemed to be twice as many gorgeous waitresses as last week! Either manager Nick's got the eye or it's just another world out there past the M25....was kinda talking to one young girl pulling beers, but it's a tough one with waitresses as they're working, and I had two trains to catch...oh well, I'm sure I'll be back out at Berko sometime down the track!...

Inhaling an early morning cawfee and two bits of half-cooked toast, this morning I bounded out the door, up the street and round the corner to catch the 6 into Edgware Road for a mid morning practice session. In amongst the chain cafes and kebab shops of central London's Lebanese district is a handsome-looking piano store with a whole bunch of practice rooms that G-Man referred me to (more about him later)....

This morning is my first of the mid-term week away from the teaching - any chance I can get away from nailing seven year olds to a chair for more than three minutes at a time is always welcome! Couldn't help but feel some sort of sense of occasion, if only privately, like the morning was yet another small step in a slow but steady process of getting my music back on track, after what has seemed like an interminable period of wandering....

As I got off the bus and looked back up the long, wide, straight road (always a rarity in central London), with it's broad walkways and tall apartment buildings, the long-distance focus thing with one's eyes happens again, and I felt reminiscent of a place I've never been, where the streets have no name, a place I'd very much like to get to someday...also reminiscent of the history of this town two millenia in the making, as this used to be Tyburn Lane, the ancient Roman road leading north-west out of the village...did they know what this place would become?....

I plunge headlong into the showroom, it's gleaming lines of cedar and mahogany always a welcoming sight...led down into the basement, I pass a couple of concert grands, nine-footers you could almost take sailing they were so big! and then into the room.

My mistress this morning was a Kawai (Don't they also build bridges ;-D), and she was not disappointing in any way at all...no rickety honky-tonk upright, no Oxo baby grand where I need a fork on standby to jimmy stuck keys out of the keybed mid-tune! This was the real thing, in every way imaginable...

I placed my hands on the keys, noodling out a few impressionistic chords like I always do, to test the richness of the instrument's tone, and all at once I knew that this one was going to do exactly what I wanted it to, but in that gentle way that only a superior piano can....in fact, it was one of those instruments whose capabilities bring to attention the player's own deficiencies, which of course was part of the reason I was there...

And then, in the excitement of discovery, I hit only the sustain pedal, and there's that electric zing of all the dampeners raising at exactly the same time, the zing you're sometimes lucky enough to hear on the best pianos on the best recordings played by all the best players on all your favourite albums...a gateway to a sea of possibilities, the promise of the musical infinite....

Right away I tucked into the rough practice program I'd laid out for myself the night before, and it was a glorious, soul-enriching two hours, as I knew it would be...I'm back there every morning this week...and then, stepping out onto the street, with the light cloud cover and the light all around, this place, this 'alien glob dropped on an ancient settlement', once again didn't seem so bad after all....

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