There’s a pub in Soho where they still have a piano player. This guy is not there to colour the silence and chit chat in the way a pianist does in a restaurant. He plays Beatles songs, and show tunes, and things even people under thirty might recognise. And people listen and sing along. When his list runs out, there’s no music, but it never runs out. And most of it is stored in his head. He has fingers that play a real instrument, and every song he plays has to work on a piano or it doesn’t work at all. And he has a head for a hard drive.
There was a time when all music in the home was like this. If you were lucky enough to be in the rising middle class of Victorian England, you might have had a piano in the house. And that was the source of all music. A Victorian Jukebox. All music was live. And if no one played the piano, there was no music.
Just silence and conversation.
And we all know how awkward that can be.
Having no pianist would be like having no wifi, or 3G, or 4G, E4 or Dave. People inevitably understood something of how music was made, because everyone who had a piano knew a pianist, and saw at close hand what was involved.
I remember a few years ago, I went into my son’s pre-school to play for their Christmas sing song. They had no piano, so I brought a keyboard. Children gathered around as I hauled the case down flat on the floor, flipping the catches as an assassin might before removing and demonically cleaning his weaponry du jour. As I prized open the lid the kids, far from experiencing some kind of recognition, “oh he’s a musician, cool, music, wow it must be great to just sit down and play an instrument” kind of reaction, they were perplexed. And it was tinged with that slight anger of not understanding, of feeling stupid, left out. They had no idea what this object was. As I set it up, plugged in and sat behind the keys, they looked on in wonder. It wasn’t the kind of wonder that Spielberg might have filmed, that kind of bathed angelic luminosity kind of light with its warmth and its fuzziness. It was more like, I wonder why the hell we are here light. It was more like Dogme-style, natural light, cold stares. “Festen” for juniors. Icy silence and tumbleweed in one uncomfortable mixed metaphor. I was not at that point believing, contrary to the opinion of George Benson, that the children were our future.
So I played my first chord. Resisting the jazz urge to hit them with all my musical neurosis of chromaticism and darkness, I went for C major. A safe option, I thought, the universal language of music I thought, a vibration that reaches out to all without discrimination. Almost instantaneously the entire group burst into uncontrollable laughter. That weird, nervous laughter like when you and your mates got caught stealing useless crap from a supermarket. An entire social history of music making, from the royal courts to the Victorian sitting room and the East End pub, friends who could sing and play, daughters who were encouraged to play the piano because their legs were tucked safely away from prying eyes, it all ended here. It all ended on a cheap carpet with the worst audience I have ever had.
Well they were only four years old but, you know, once they’re over five there’s no changing them.
I’m quite fond of the piano as a music making machine, as an instrument of reproduction, reduction, representation. Music used to work on the piano, most things were reducible to two hands, ten fingers and some sleight of hand stuff…aided, of course, by the imagination of the audience. Pianos were often required to conjure the sound of an orchestra at full tilt, much as Turner’s paintings of water might almost make you feel the shock of the spray against your face.
So how would a piano cope with the incredible breadth of musical styles, genres as sounds today? There is nothing to be gained by an accurate reproduction, but the sound of the attempt is what interests me. Jazz for me sometimes involves hearing something you like, whether it’s more jazz or a Ugandan singer with a balaphon, and trying to use it for the purposes of improvisation. Using a piano to do this is like playing playstation with a real tennis racket. In other words, it’s perversely enjoyable. It’s the best kind of enjoyable there is. When I hear Bud Powell, or Duke Ellington, or Monk, or John Taylor, it’s partly a fight to prize something out of that instrument that was once a symbol of polite, middle class society. It’s such a forgiving instrument, sometimes you have to really give it something to get upset about. It’s that or it’s back to the kindergarten.
Brother Face 