My MusicLifeandTimes podcast partner Kevin Bales, who has taught jazz to students young and not-so-young for more than three decades, advises those who want to learn music to first seek out a teacher they can relate to, who will help them not only learn the rudiments but the pure joy of playing music.
I tried to address the student-teacher relationship several times in my novel, The Musician, how a good teacher might go about helping a student better understand not just how to play better but what their ultimate goal in learning to play better might be.
My protagonist’s first encounter with a teacher occurs in Chapter 5 of The Musician after he has met a pianist in a Miami Beach nightclub, a fictional Artie Reardon, and learned that Artie also gave lessons:
One evening, talking between sets, I learned that Artie spent his days giving lessons “to recalcitrant children who despise practicing and weekly lessons, and who will abandon the instrument as soon as they wear down their mothers.”
“You think you could help me?”
His eyes went wide. “You mean give lessons to someone who wants them?”
It proved a new beginning, a godsend. Artie showed me how to position my hands to allow them to move freely across the keyboard. He taught me chords of six and seven notes and how to form them, some with notes as close as half steps. I learned more scales than I’d dreamed existed, that would provide notes and ideas for soloing.
But I still didn’t sound like Artie. It would take years of practice, hours a day, to know well enough, to hear well enough to weave them fluidly, naturally into playing.
“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’s sage advice continues later in the same chapter:
Artie stopped me early in a lesson one afternoon as I began reciting an exercise in chord inversions.
“Let’s just listen today.”
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.
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.”