Being a teenage musician in a place like Los Angeles has got its perks. I’ve got access to the Hollywood Bowl, the Baked Potato, the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the California Institute of the Arts — not to mention access to thousands of musicians associated with LA-based music organizations. Nevertheless, it’s still exciting to meet those people that you only see in websites and magazines; the faces behind the names that show up on the songs that you play every day.
It was on the last Sunday of January that I met Antoinette Perry, the Senior Lecturer of Keyboard Studies at the University of Southern California, for a master class in a home of a quiet suburbian neighborhood. If you know anything about master classes, you’ll know that they can be absolutely frightening — in front of a large, judging audience the student has to perform a piece, knowing that in the next few minutes an intimidating master class instructor will be hovering over her shoulder, exposing tiny mistakes, insisting on minuscule nuances. It’s not one of the most pleasantly exciting things to do.
But my experience with Antoinette Perry was quite the opposite. To tell you the truth, the first thing I noticed about Perry — before her tall, lanky stature and her youthful smile — were her hands. I was nearly infatuated with them. Her fingers were bony, slender, delicate; they stroked the keys of the piano with the grace of a prima ballerina. I’ve constantly tried to justify playing piano with my short, stubby fingers by pulling up names like Thelonius Monk, insisting to myself that he probably didn’t have Rachmaninoff fingers either and could still play a killer B-flat blues — but Perry flat out dissolved those comforting thoughts. Even she noticed that my elbows aren’t even close to being perpendicular with my hands when I play, leaving me in an awkward angle above the piano keys — a realization that she quickly dismissed by hastily moving on to a different topic. It’s a pretty sensitive subject for a compulsively-obsessive pianist like me.
Still, she had fantastic critiques about my performance of Schubert’s Impromptu No. 2 in E-flat Major — everything from inner melodies that needed more emphasis to small fluctuations in pedaling to help me out with my E-flat major scale runs. And Perry was an exciting instructor — as she had me try out her tips with the Schubert, she’d flail her arms wildly in imaginary conducting, passionately singing along. She was definitely a great window into the music program at USC.
(P.S. I later won a $300 scholarship from the local Music Teacher’s Association of California playing the same piece!)
Just as exciting was a clinic with Don Menza, the composer of one of our currently most challenging pieces: Time Check. (Menza’s also the composer of the popular piece Groovin’ Hard.) “You can only play as good as you can play,” he told us in regards to being nervous before a performance, adding, “I talk about this with Sonny [Rollins] all the time.” He only ever took off his shades when he wanted to emphasize a crucial point — putting air through the horn; playing lines together; hitting the drumset with confidence. While Perry was a window into a prospective college, Menza was a window into the past — a place where jazz was a taboo gateway into violence and drugs and alcohol. It seemed like jazz had this fountain-of-youth effect on Menza — as he spoke, he moved his body energetically, visually showing us what he wanted us to do, throwing around in his speech the colloquialisms of a jazz kid from the sixties.
And then there was his saxophone. Before he arrived, we already knew that he’d written and played with Maynard Ferguson’s orchestra and Buddy Rich’s big band; we knew that he was an amazing tenor sax player. But the word amazing is used everywhere in nearly every circumstance imaginable — it can’t even come close to describe what came out of Menza’s horn.
On a concluding note, here’s what I’m failing in an attempt to describe in words:
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Roustabout/Simple Citizens/Me and Miss Lemona K
