A Fictional Jazz Lesson (from Mike Shaw’s The Musician)
Mike Shaw’s novel, The Musician, captures life as a musician in the 1960s and ‘70s through his protagonist Tom Cliffe as he struggles to overcome the obstacles to becoming an accomplished musician and winning recognition for it. Beginning as a self-taught coffeehouse folksinger, Tom dedicates his life to learning and playing better music. He knows he needs help to get there, which begins with a fortuitous meeting with a Miami Beach pianist and teacher, a fictional Artie Reardon, who takes him on as a student. For the first time, Tom is exposed to jazz.
From pages 46 and 47 of The Musician:
He walked to the back of his teaching studio, a converted dining room in his small, spare Coconut Grove apartment, and opened a door to the room’s sole closet to reveal no shelves or hanging clothes or can goods or dinner plates, just a ceiling-high stack of LPs. He fingered a few, retrieved one, extracted the disc, walked it to a turntable near the piano, then handed me the album cover. “‘Waltz for Debby, Bill Evans Trio,’” I read.
“Your quest for skill and knowledge will always be at a beginning,” Artie evangelized. “You’re on a long and arduous journey that will not end. No matter how far you travel, something new and necessary lies ahead. You will never run out of things to learn and you can never allow yourself to stop learning.”
Artie stopped me early in a lesson one afternoon as I began reciting an exercise in chord inversions.
“Let’s just listen today.”
Artie’s chords and scales came to life in the most musical hands I’d ever heard. Rich, lyrical, and so different than any pianist I’d ever listened to. What Bill Evans was doing was beyond my comprehension—and I knew immediately, exactly what I wanted to learn. Those sounds, that technique, and to be that good, to play every note with that agility and sensitivity and understanding.
I clutched the album to my chest, then a little embarrassed, tried to hand it back to Artie. But he just smiled, left me holding it, and let the cuts play. “My Foolish Heart,” “My Romance,” “Some Other Time,” all songs I’d heard before but never really heard.
“You can’t practice to be famous,” Artie said as he lifted the LP off the turntable. “But if you work hard enough for long enough, you could become good, very good.”
He stood over me and looked straight into my eyes.
“To get good, very good,” he repeated. “That’s all you can control, and in the end all that counts.”