Playing the Wrong Notes with a Purpose: A Short, Short Story
By: Rick Gibbins
Tags: Memoir, Life Lessons, Creative Process, Performance, Music

“Sometimes you hear kids in a garage somewhere who can just barely play their instruments and are hitting it with a kind of ferocious, undeniable spirit that has a power and energy that no one else other than those kids playing on that day in that place will ever achieve in that particular way.” — Pat Metheny

“You might not feel like playing pretty all the time. Instead, you might want to play something nasty… you might want to play something out-of-context with the tune. It might be a note that creates so much tension it becomes unpleasant, but you want it to sound that way.” — George Benson

Out of the box my mother wanted an accordion player, or that was my impression as her only child. Hence, as the only child, I was the only potential first chair accordion for the Lawrence Welk Orchestra that she would ever know. I started taking lessons and practicing on my neighbor’s accordion by the age of eight, but it didn’t last long. The Beatles hadn’t happened yet, but in my working-class KC neighborhood, Elvis definitely reigned as king. He clearly had no truck with accordion players in his band. I know I could find little to redeem the accordion regardless of how smoothly I could render a version of “Little Brown Jug” or “Aura Lee”. I don’t remember how I manipulated the circumstance, but by October of ’64 my mother had relented and I began to take lessons on electric guitar; my own electric guitar.

Initially, she made me practice an hour every day, and we had many knock-down, drag-out family dramas about how I was sure-as-hell gonna practice that thang whether I wanted to or not. By the time the Beatles, puberty, social-cache-as-the-only-guitar-player-who-could-play-and-read-music-in-my eighth-grade-class, and…girls had had their way with me, practicing too much had become the source of family stress.

I ended up doing well enough in school to snag a free ride to Columbia University and off to NYC I went once I graduated.

I wish I could tell you how I juggled academics and musical aspirations on my own in New York and flourished upon my graduation, but I pretty much spent my time at Columbia frequenting bars and clubs on the Upper West Side and in the Village. School was a pretense to be in NYC. I got to see Paul Quinichette and Joe Jones at the West End Café before they passed, probably sat in a booth where Kerouac and Ginsberg sat and drank, bathed in profundity, and I actually developed a relationship with Lance Hayward, a pianist who had a sit-down residency at a club on Bleeker Street. I can’t remember the name of the place. Those are not names for most of us today, but in their day had their place on a New York stage.

Cutting to the chase, I ended up quitting school to marry my high-school sweetheart and began to pursue the life of a working musician. In those days, the mid-70s, you could go several directions to find work. Obviously, road gigs could be found, but more often than not, you’d find the road also had you traveling with guys you wouldn’t hang with under other circumstances. Making it big…yeah, I guess. But what a hassle, you know, with selling out your integrity and all😉. And there was the six-night-a-week world in town. I went for that one. Six nights a week also had the added spice of looking like that smoky jazz club in the movies that beckoned me as the abode of the “cool”.

Reality being such as it is, the truth of living the life of a working musician had its trials. If the gig paid well, I normally couldn’t stand the music I was playing. If I dug the music, I was in a dive and barely making enough to eat. In the end, I put the cherry of a child on top of my marriage sundae and it became clear that music couldn’t deliver a future for me and my family. After a couple of years of trying to break out of the music business I found a fulfilling career and put my music days behind me…almost.

No longer needing to feed myself and family with the money I could make playing music, I’ve spent the last 20 years letting music feed ME.

I continued to play guitar. I continued taking lessons with a genius keyboard player for the next 17 years. I played in a church band for a couple of years even though church is not a place I try to find myself on a regular basis. But finally, I just put it down for three or four years. In 1999, I picked it back up, began the practice routine spaced around a 60-hour-per-week work schedule, and ended up pushing it hard enough to venture back into public performance; mainly solo guitar, playing music-to-chew-by in restaurants and wine bars. No longer needing to feed myself and family with the money I could make playing music, I’ve spent the last 20 years letting music feed ME.

With many ins and outs that are grist for another story, my wife and I ended up moving to the Denver, Colorado area. Four or five years ago, I started running the circuit of local jam sessions, looking for any setting where I could commit jazz in public. I found a very straight-ahead session at a bar downtown near Coors Field, and, at that session, I met Vlad. Vlad held the B3 chair and even though his organ playing was top-notch, his piano playing really got my attention. Vlad had emigrated from Russia, but had been trained as a classical pianist from the age of four through college in the Russian educational system. He had the chops to play Liszt and the feel to give McCoy Tyner a run for his pentatonics.

Like many Russians I’ve known, Vlad could be very direct — maybe some would say rude — with his feedback. Over the two-and-a-half years we performed together every week, he never hesitated to let me know what he thought of my playing. If he didn’t like what I was doing he often just turned to me and said: “Stop playing for a while.” The honesty and abruptness could be …ah…breathtaking. Other times he would compliment my playing. Since he could be so brutal at times, I really trusted him when he’d turn and give me a smile and a wink after a good solo.

This particular weekly session could be very challenging. Most times I found myself sight-reading some hard bop tune with any number of players and different instruments. Some national names, if you’re into jazz, would drop in from time to time. Pat Bianchi packed the place on a trip back to Denver from NYC. My oldest son plays trombone and the night he came down, his trombone idol, Steve Turre, serendipitously sat in for a couple of sets. I played a set with John Scofield’s drummer. I guess the best night for me happened when a Lebanese djembe player, Rony Barak, played with us. In the hour he played, we only got through three tunes. Social media tweets filled the place with patrons of other bars on the block within fifteen minutes. The highlight was “Body and Soul” in seven with a Latin feel. I hope you can see that this session could quickly turn into a deep-end-of-the-pool-thang, what with the caliber of players and Vlad’s very particular demands on my playing.

One night on break Vlad looked at me with a big grin. “I just figured out how to tell when you don’t really know the tune!”

I gave him a sideways glance and responded. “That’s not too hard to figure out, at least not tonight. Seems like I don’t ‘know’ any of ‘em.”

He laughed. “I am not talking about that. The way I know you don’t know the tune is you don’t make any mistakes on the changes when you’re soloing or comping.”

I’m sure my head tilted like the RCA dog. “I thought copping the correct changes was the first evidence I kinda know the tune. Even more so if I can solo over them.”

“Yeah, and some people think that if they know how to read a cookbook they know how to cook. A chef can just do it.” He pointed his finger for emphasis. “If you can really blow a tune, the music on the page is a…ah…a really loose guide. We’re not playing classical here. We’re just blowing our asses off if we’re lucky. We’re just blowing ’cause we want to. Stop thinking about it and just do it.”

“What? Blow without a clue of what I should blow.” I raised my hands in humorous exasperation.

Vlad paused and looked down in thought. When he looked up, he had a peevish grin. “I know what you’re gonna do. When you’re comping use the chart, but keep the comps spare. But when you solo, you’re only going to play WRONG NOTES!”

I’m sure that I looked like I was soaking my Depends. “You can’t be serious?”

“I am very serious. Next set, until I tell you otherwise, only play wrong notes. If you don’t look at any of the charts… I’ll pick some good ones. It’ll be easy to be wrong. If you want to look at the chart when you solo, then you need to play really wrong notes?” He was already giggling with the prospect of throwing me in the deep, deep, deep end of this night’s pool. I talked and pleaded with Vlad for the remainder of the break about letting me off the hook. How this was a bad idea, but he only became more determined.

I finally laid it out: “But I’m gonna sound like shit!”

“No, you won’t.” He looked right at me. “Not if you believe in what you’re playing. I mean… Really Believe.”

“If you tell people where to go but not how to get there you’ll be amazed at the results.” — George Patton

Totally frustrated and befuddled, I just shook my head, laughed, and followed him into the club to face the music. First tune was a softball, a blues of some sort, but it was a struggle to play anything wrong enough. It was just flat with no energy. But inside I kinda got pissed and on the next tune I jacked the volume and hit every note like I was saying, “Get out of my way.” Everybody on stage gave me funny looks, but Vlad just quickly grinned over his shoulder before calling the third tune.

I don’t remember what the third tune was but the math of the chart and the math of playing it wrong came together along with the last twist up on my volume knob. For my solo, I transposed the first note of the measure up or down a tritone and then trilled a minor third above it for the rest of the measure. (Sorry for the music jargon.) Second chorus I did some equally outlandish mathematical variation with dissonant intention. I blew three or four choruses that had me sounding like a rabid pit-bull on crack following Alice down the rabbit hole. People in the audience looked up with concern in their eyes and the players on stage with me started checking to see if I’d sprouted goat hooves for feet. But inside, it felt like a breath of the fresh air Ornette Coleman must have just exhaled. My dissonant ornaments hung from a tree of structured musical phenomenology. I suppose I could feel the tether of my mathematical musings hanging on the harmonious intentions of the composer.

When the tune finished, Vlad turned to me laughing and said, “Okay, now do you believe?” I nodded… I was wide-eyed and a little breathless. “Good. You can start playing ‘right’ notes again.” And with the next tune, I found my way back to the reservation of civilized improvisation a little adrenalized and disheveled from the journey outside the bounds of musical correctness.

“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.” –Mary Renault

Those three tunes, and being forced to throw my preconceived, traditional harmonic conventions to the wind, changed my musical life. I’m one of those players that often solos feeling like it’s a matter of life and death. That night I learned that dying with a fist in the air because I soloed too far south of the border in Cecil-Taylor-Land was a better choice than meandering inside the lines paying homage to a chart with a recipe on it. What’s the biblical reference? “You were neither hot or cold…you were lukewarm, so I spat you out!” something like that. She/He probably felt that way about Lawrence Welk.

For a period of time I had to interact pretty regularly with Bobby Watson, an alto player who spent many years on the road as the musical director for Art Blakey. He had a number of aphoristic gems of wisdom gleaned from a life of playing with some formidable cats. The jewel was: “When you solo with a group, soloing is you talking. You just better be talking about what the bass player is saying.” No one needs to tell me how to talk, but someone else needs to be there for there to be a conversation; whether it’s another player or a pair of somebody else’s ears. I can converse with that part. I can evoke an internal response from the listener through the particular virtues of music. I can touch that part of another that feels so much like me that sits inside all of us. I can take Bobby’s sentence play with the words and find myself on resourceful ground wherever I stand.

“When you solo on a tune by yourself, you’re just talking. You just need to talk about the song.”

“When you paint a picture, you’re just seeing. It just needs to look like what you see in your mind’s eye.”

“When you write a love poem, you’re speaking a truth. Just make it as honestly beautiful as the queen/king of your heart deserves.”

Most universally, when the path of expression you’re on leads to and into the life of the others around you, tread as gracefully and beautifully as you can and hope that when the tune is over, nobody got permanently hurt. As artists, writers, dancers, painters, musicians, cooks — anything human that expresses itself — we all carry tools of community building that want to burst into a conflagration of collaboration that leaves us covered in the debris of human beauty. Or such is the way it looks 50 some years after I got off the boat from accordion land.

“Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.” — Kakuzo Okakura

My appreciation for the support and inspiration of Sam McKenzie, Fanny Elisabeth Garvey, Marcela Cruz-Gibbons and, as always, I can’t say thank you enough to Linda Caroll.

Copyright Richard Gibbins, 2019. All Rights Reserved.