I'LL BE SEEING YOU

 

I'll be seeing you....until we meet again, somehow........somewhere.......
I only wish I could have told you everything.
But everything is too overwhelming, too dangerous. Everything is all that we never wanted to know.

Am I drunk?
Am I psychotically irrational?

I'm in deep personal contemplation.

I recently found this ancient piano tape in my music files. So old that I'd nearly forgotten I recorded it. It's my own arrangement - - which is damn good.
One of the (many) musical warhorses that I used to play in smokey midnight piano bars, where brutal reality was mercifully submerged in booze, cigarettes, and delicious sexual anonymity. I was alive then.

Alive.
These past few years I am merely a ghost, contemplating my own grave.....

So I took this old piano tape, made a quick, sloppy, haphazard video out of it. Posted it on YouTube.
Nobody will listen, nobody gives a shit.

But I listen. I hear the inner sanctity, the clockwork of musical depth that only musicians hear.

The audio quality isn't perfect. Isn't even reasonable.
But it's an old tape.

That's life. And life, my friends, is a brutally unforgiving bitch.

I'll be seeing you. Sometime. Sometime soon.
With more words, more music. More disturbing displays of personal contemplation gone awry.

Without me, where else would you find such an appallingly addictive enigma?

                               

RONDO CAPRICCIOSO

One of the problems I've always had as a pianist was an intense fear of performing. I had no doubts about my talent or capability - but I had an intense terror of making a mistake or having memory failure. 

Whenever I gave a public performance, my main goal was to get through it alive and with as few mistakes as possible.

My performance fears were compounded whenever I was being recorded or videotaped. Press a Record button anywhere near me and I instantly freeze.

With an over-sensitive musical ear and a strong penchant for being self-critical, I can always hear flaws when I listen to my recordings. My recorded performances are never (or seldom) relaxed. I always seem to be pressing forward merely to get to the end.

In all honesty, however, I usually manage to do a reasonably good job in dangerous (pianistically speaking) situations. I have never edited or dubbed my recordings, like some musicians do. What you hear is exactly how it was performed. Flaws and all.

What's my point?
No point, really. Perhaps - in some strange, neurotic, roundabout way - I'm praising my recordings and realizing that I wasn't half as bad as I imagined.

I recently found this recording that I made in California when I was twenty. The audio quality isn't the greatest, but I managed to transfer the old tape to an mp3 file.

Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso op. 14 by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847).
Mendelssohn wrote this piece when he was about 18 years old. 

Fair warning: it's over 7 minutes long.
Have a shot of whiskey before listening.

I posted this on Soundcloud because I wasn't in the mood to make a video for YouTube.

DISCONNECTED

I'm thinking of how disconnected I am from my musical past. Sometimes it seems so far away that I can hardly believe it was real. Time has a wicked way of diminishing the potency of things that were and eventually eclipses our shining absolutes with shadows of doubt.

I look at my two abandoned pianos gathering dust and  am disheartened at the fact that I've only played them once or twice since I moved here. I'm in a dreary mood lately, battling private ghosts of melancholia.

I think of those golden California years when music and the piano were a major part of my life. I was a soloist, accompanist, ballet rehearsal pianist. I performed with orchestras, chamber groups, choirs. It was a wonderfully full life, overflowing with creativity.


For the past decade or more I've had far too many other pressing concerns to think about music. Lately, the only music that fills my life are the soothing songs of Mother Nature: chattering birds in forest trees......the great breath of the wind singing through towering branches......the lean, hungry midnight howls of coyotes.

It was your choice to abandon music, wasn't it, Jon?

We don't choose the cards that life deals us. Life is a vicious bitch that kicks us in the ass and knocks our dreams into the endless void beyond raw reality.

Bitter, Jon, really bitter....

But I'm not here to lament or philosophize. As usual, I've taken a very long road to get to the point.

I'm thinking of my past music work and the annoyingly infrequent documentation of it. Some of my public performances were filmed but heaven only knows what happened to them (or who is in possession them). Those were the days before the rampant popularity of videos and cell phones. Documentation wasn't as easy or frequent as it is now.

When I moved to Texas I had a small music studio in San Angelo. I also got my first camcorder (better late than never...). I'd prop it up on a bookshelf and film myself rehearsing or practicing the piano. These are some of the piano videos that I have on my YouTube channel. Jayveesonata

Unfortunately my virtuoso days were long gone. I was in my 40's and out of practice. The quality of my playing on these videos is mediocre (according to my critical standards).


There is a bright side to this murky mess of self-degradation. When I lived in California and was an active musician I recorded an enormous amount of my music on audio cassettes. I tossed the tapes into boxes and nearly forgot about them.

While recently going through the chaotic mess of things piled in the garage, I came across a box of my old audio cassette tapes (one of the few things the movers didn't "lose"). 

There are over fifty audio cassettes in the box and they contain many of my serious piano recordings: loads of classical music, a great deal of ragtime and blues, even some of my own compositions (which I thought were lost forever). I even found a unique recording made when I was twenty -  my performance of Gershwin's original rare solo piano version of Rhapsody in Blue.

I plan to transfer these old cassettes to CD and MP3. There are numerous cassette converters available, such as the USB Cassette Capture (but I've heard some negative things about the sound quality). 

I should probably just use the free Audacity software, although - after having looked through the tutorial - it seems rather daunting. Anyway, I want to begin this project ASAP. It will be fun.