Over the years, I’ve read many times that Miles Davis, when asked by young trumpeters how they might improve their own playing, would invariably respond: buy a piano. And certainly, Miles wasn’t the only trumpeter thinking along those lines; two of my other favorite jazz players, Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie, doubled on piano well enough to release recordings featuring them at the keys. Even a world apart, in the arena of classical playing, William Vacchiano, a long-time fixture of the New York Philharmonic’s extraodinary trumpet section, once famously remarked that, had he spent half his trumpet practice time at the piano, he would have been not only a better piano player, but a better trumpet player as well. When it comes to understanding functional harmony, there’s nothing quite like the piano, with no other instrument so linearly and visually laying out melodies, harmonies, and the relationships between them.

So, it is with serious embarassment that I must admit I am an exceedingly remedial pianist. I have a mean ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, and that’s about it. Yesterday, however, as I passed by Sam Ash, I noticed a handful of electric keyboards on clearance sale in the window. Years of accumulated non-piano-playing guilt sent me through the doors, and I came home last afternoon with a full-size Yamaha PSR-273 electric keyboard. Sadly, despite it possessing literally hundreds of other features I will never conceivably use, this model appears to lack the occasionally found karaoke add-on, dashing my hopes of making money on the side by inviting Asian tourists from nearby Time Square into my apartment for rousing rounds of song and drink. Still, karaoke or no, armed with a textbook (John Valerio’s Jazz Piano Concepts), I yesterday butchered my way through a first short practice stint. While it will be a long, long time before I’m ready to play in public, with the music theory I already possess, after several years of hard work I honestly believe I could even push my playing skills all the way up to somewhere just below mediocre.

This is slightly discouraging, considering how blazingly quickly I picked up my other back-up instrument, the upright bass, though it’s also a good reminder that I picked up the bass quickly not because I’m some sort of musical genius, but rather because the bass is really, really, really easy. Consider this classic jazz joke:

A young boy comes home one day and tells his father he’d like to learn to play the bass. Glad that his son is taking an interest in music, the father heads to the local music store, picks out a bass, and signs his son up for a week of lessons to get him off on the right foot.

The next evening, the father asks his son what he learned in his first lesson.

“Well,” his son replies, “I learned the first four notes on the fourth string.”

The following evening, after the same question, the son answers “I learned the first four notes on the third string.”

On night three, it’s “I learned the first four notes on the second string.”

The fourth night, the father again asks his son how his lesson went.

“Actually,” says the kid, “I couldn’t make the lesson today. I had a gig.”

In my estimation, this joke is only slightly hyperbolic, as after about two years of playing the bass I’m now occassionally called in to sub gigs, whereas after two years of trumpet playing I still basically sounded like a slowly and painfully dying cow.

By now, even after nearly seventeen years of trumpet playing, I still occassionally feel like I’m in dying cow territory, and I’m especially concerned about a relapse in that direction tomorrow. I’ve been hired in as trumpet soloist for St. Luke’s Easter service, where I’ll be playing a Baroque suite, and descant lines on most hymns. The pieces, requiring delicate, highly exposed and spritely playing throughought, would be a stretch even when at my best, and may prove altogether impossible when performed at a morning hour early enough that my eyes are still to bleary to read the music. Wish me luck.