Brilliant Piano Lesson

I just got back from a jazz piano class at the Jazzschool in Berkeley taught by a woman named Debbie Poryes. It rocked! I think she may be the teacher I've been looking for!

She was organized, inspiring and funny. Most importantly, she said some things that I've never heard a piano teacher say before, such as:

1. Jazz is an oral tradition. Books are usually confusing. It's very hard to teach yourself. Further, some authors (and she named one who taught a searingly intellectual piano harmony class I attended at Stanford Jazz Camp years ago) pack so much information into their books that only a select few could ever use it--the rest of us are just daunted and depressed. Amen!

2. Throughout the class, she preached a "natural hands technique": no arched or flattened hands, no stretching to reach notes, no turning the thumb under (wow!), no octaves with less than thumb and little finger, no legato (holding one note and stretching to hit the next). Apparently, she works with www.golandskyinstitute.org in New York on this theory. "If you can't play it fast, something's wrong. You need to change the fingering. There are no weak hands, unless you have a medical problem." This was revolutionary to me!

3. Learn scales using the one-finger technique: Play them with one finger all the way through! You don't need the complex fingering (where to put the third and fourth fingers, as we all learned) for the most part, because you're never going to play a scale like that as a solo. Not only that, she said, you then learn the scale through your muscles but not your brain--the one-finger approach makes sure your mind gets it. "A scale is just a pitch collection," she said.

4. Learn scales using the "shmush" technique: Play all 7 notes at once. Learn to hear that "pitch collection."

5. Relative major and minor scales are useless: "That's just pedagogy. All you need to care about is parallel minor and major. The rest is just meaningless drivel to quickly teach students." Further, "There is only one minor scale. The pedagogy has this confusing concept of three minor scales."

6. Don't play 4-note chords in root position in one hand; you're never going to play them that way anyway. Rather, do either 4/2/2/4 (left hand fourth and second fingers, right hand second and fourth fingers) or 3/1 (left hand triad, right hand one note).

7. Talk to yourself as you practice chords and scales so you learn the information fully.

8. For ear training, she pulled out a sheet of manuscript paper with root, third, fifth and seventh written out in every possibly permutation. This is an exercise she got from Elvo D'Amante, retired from Laney College--with whom I studied years ago (what a great teacher he was!). "You've got to be able to sing everything and hear everything."

9. "I hate the circle of fifths!" she said. Wow, can I finally take it off my wall? "It confuses everyone. My answer to it is the line of fifths." You start with C at the top of the keyboard, go down 7 half steps to the next note, and so on. It's linear and visual, and you don't have to conceptualize a circle. "The piano is the most visually clear instrument we have. It's all there, not like fret boards or slides. No more circles!"

10. She gave us recordings to listen/practice to of all great jazz cats (Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, etc.). She had a methodical approach to learning our first tune, Parker's Now's the Time. Soloing starts with the blues scale, but there's also the chord tone technique. "Remember, the blues scale is just a pedagogy. Alan Lomax did those field recordings of the Delta Blues [for the Library of Congress in the 1940s] and they figured out, 'oh, this is what they're playing!' All theory comes after the great composers. Bach--who knows what he was thinking?"

Toward the end of class, she pointed at my stomach and said, "After the baby comes, you won't have time for any of this." I said, "This is number two." "Oh, so you know that then," she laughed. "Actually, I can breastfeed and practice piano with one hand," I boasted. "That's what I did last time." You've got to do something to pass the hours in the first few months of baby-watching, or you'll go nuts! She claimed to have mastered the art of practicing in two-minute increments so that she can spend time with her child and family. A musician after my own heart!