A New Beginning
Today really showed my lack of discipline/consistency. I actually woke up at a good time, did some yoga poses to warm my body up before meditation, and got a halfway decent meditation session in – even though I never really hit that deep meditative state. The meditation wasn’t as centering today since I didn’t have that extra dopamine burst of starting something for the first time. Once the novelty runs off is when the real work begins. The same could be said of my practice session today. I got more time in which was a step in the right direction, but I took more breaks too and found myself distracted more easily. I started with 10 minutes shy of 2 hours today on piano instead of violin, to experiment with the rotation, and I found it to be better (at least for today). I like to switch things up every now then to keep my mind fresh and to remember that schedules aren’t supposed to be prisons. This same notion carried into my piano practice. I did a few times around the block playing to Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode but found myself quickly losing focus. That’s when I decided to switch to a YouTube video of Jacob Collier and Chris Martin playing Sparks. Jacob Collier has quickly become one of, if not, my favorite artists of all time. His imagination and color are so spectacular that each song he plays draws you in to this beautiful universe he creates, usually spontaneously which just adds to the magic of it all. I’m trying to learn as many lessons as I can from him on color and chords, so I often find myself playing along – or at least trying to – to his work. Truthfully, I enjoy bouncing between two songs to work out, particularly one up tempo and one a bit slower tempo. They’re complementary palate cleansers, if you will, for each other. I find anymore than two songs are too close to juggling, something I’ve never even come close to mastering. Sparks is this great three chord emotional song with lots of room for extensions, particularly the 9th, which on the piano is fun and easy to understand when you break things down into triads. For example, if you take Db (the I chord of the song) and play some shell structure like a 1-5, 1-7, 1-3-7, 1-5-7 or 1-5-8 (you get the picture) in the left hand and play triads in the right hand, you can see these basic building block triads and extensions as the same. My favorite voicing in the right hand was playing a C-Eb-Ab, which would be the M7th, the 9th, and the 5th (technically 12th) extensions of the Db chord, but it’s also an Ab chord in first inversion. So, instead of having to think in these isolated ideas around the chord I can start connecting these simple building blocks I already know, and it allows me to see how these chords all start to connect in more interesting ways. Not to mention, Jacob plays some amazing licks and passing chords that I’m hoping to imitate, assimilate, and innovate on. Chris Martin even asks Jacob at the end of the song if he had seen the movie Amadeus (which if you haven’t seen, love music, and have three hours to kill is a great movie), to which Jacob replies he had not. So, Chris begins to describe a scene where Mozart meets Salieri for the first time. Salieri is playing an original composition, Mozart hears it once, and sits down at the piano and begins to play it. He doesn’t play it straight like the original, however, he adds some flourishes and improves the theme in some parts much to Salieri’s dismay. Chris likens this scene to what Jacob just did with his song without all of the jealousy. It’s a touching moment between two fantastic and humble legends.