I’ve been aware of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard for a long time, but only in the past few days have I decided to try the layout for myself. Like any cognitive realignment pushing against the momentum of a lifelong habit, the initial adjustment process has been slow and occasionally punishing. When you are acccustomed to the fluidity of the keyboard as an invisible extension of the mind, it’s terrifying to find it amputated and clumsily reattached. I expect this overwhelming self-consciousness to be the norm someday when future generations willingly trade in their limbs for more dynamic cyborg substitutes.

Up to now, the closest I’ve come to this awkward stumbling was when I attempted to train my left-hand dexterity on Charlie Parker melodies I would normally play with my right. A kind of impotence, really: I was willing myself to do things that I was used to executing at dizzying velocities with ease, but my body just wouldn’t respond. The trick, I discovered, is to force yourself to slow down, clean up the suddenly naked particulars, and not rely so much on your established ‘chunks’ of muscle memory. My left hand is still a shambles, mind you, but as the lesser automaton it invents the more colourful passages.

That’s why I’m still plugging away in Dvorak. It may be slow-going at first—this post you are reading now is taking an eternity to punch in—but within minutes of playing with it, you begin to perceive all sorts of qualitative pleasures that simply don’t exist in QWERTY-land. It’s like switching to an Apple Macintosh, complete with the moment of epiphany where the cultishness of the already indoctrinated looks reasonable all of a sudden. (Or so I’ve heard. Having been a Mac user on and off since the age of five, I can’t really say.)

Patented in 1936, the Dvorak keyboard was designed around a handful of basic principles. High-frequency characters reside on the home row (middle row) to minimize squashing and stretching. Vowels and common punctuation marks sit together on the left, encouraging the alternation of hands from one character to the next; one hand presses keys while the other hand repositions. Finally, synergistic pairs like the digraphs ch and th are packed in close proximity. (In the original design, the arrangement of the number row fell on the axis of an outward spiral, reading 7531902468 from left to right. Even Dvorak’s adherents conceded that was silly, and it has largely been dropped.)

Dvorak users will often tell you two things. The first is that the layout’s ergonomics are a vast improvement on QWERTY, allowing you to push your typing to record speeds without incurring nearly the same risk of repetitive strain injuries. I can’t verify this myself; as someone who pulls a respectable 120 wpm in QWERTY, it’s unlikely that I’ll see efficiency gains in my typing habits anytime soon, and RSI has never been a problem for me thanks to my exclusive preference for lightweight, shallow keyboards.

Intuitively, the claims about Dvorak’s top-speed advantage sound plausible. Although the credibility of the original pro-Dvorak study has been questioned, notably in the 1990 paper “The Fable of the Keys” by SJ Liebowitz and Stephen E Margolis, the fact remains that the QWERTY layout was specifically “anti-engineered” by its inventor, Christopher Sholes, to split digraphs and spread common letters apart and thus avert key-jamming. In other words, it was designed to slow you down.

The second thing you’ll hear is that the Dvorak keyboard has nothing to do with the most notable figure to bear that name, the great romantic composer Antonín Dvořák. The keyboard’s designer, the Seattle-based educational psychologist August Dvorak, was a distant cousin at most—and that, we’re told, is all there is to the story.

This is where I disagree.

Key Largo

Most of the conversation you will find about the Dvorak layout portrays it as a case study in economics. If mass commercial standardization precludes the adoption of a considerable improvement in design, the argument goes, do free markets really foster innovation? Jared Diamond’s 1997 essay in Discover, “The Curse of QWERTY”, is a classic of the genre. Liebowitz and Margolis, in contrast, stay on the tack that QWERTY has remained triumphant simply because the alternatives aren’t discernibly better.

In either case, the way people tend to talk about Dvorak is invariably utilitarian, balancing the costs and benefits of adoption in the quantifiable parlance of character frequencies, finger mileages, relative activity by row, and above all, words per minute. Rarely will you hear specifics about the intangibles of the overall Dvorak experience, even among the few who swear by it. My impression is that many who praise Dvorak on principle don’t actively use it themselves—”I wish I knew how to qwert you!” rings the cri de cœur on Backspace Mountain—and testimonials among those who do typically say a few words about speed and comfort and leave it at that.

The closest thing I’ve seen to a lucid experiential observation is this article by Nicholas Thompson, in which he says:

Using a Dvorak after a lifetime of banging on a Qwerty is like removing a tiny pebble from your shoe. Writing a word such as “the” gives me a buzz as I roll my fingers to the left in a fluid, natural motion. The the the the.

The the the the. Thompson couldn’t have picked a better example; ‘the’ is the word that sold me on Dvorak. It rolls off your fingers like the spoken word rolls off your tongue as you flick it against the back of your teeth. Teeth teeth teeth teeth. But then he blunders:

For musicians, think about trying to play “Blowing in the Wind” starting with a B-flat ninth. That’s a Qwerty board. Now think about starting on a G chord. That’s a Dvorak board.

This makes no sense to me whatsoever. Were you to play “Blowing in the Wind” with a ninth on the initial tonic, the chord would reduce to a F6 or Dm7 over a B-flat root. Easy, comfortable, and far better than G on many instruments. I suspect Mr Thompson was a guitarist.

However poorly he may have worded it, Thompson had the right idea. Dvorak’s layout is more than a mere ergonomic reconfiguration. It proposes an entirely different way of thinking about typing. It makes the activity of typing musical. Dvorak, in a word, is like Dvořák.

Major Major Major Major

Experienced pianists have a way of detecting whether a composer is catering to their needs. In this respect, Frédéric Chopin comes up most often as the model composer for the instrument. Playing Chopin is like revenge: it isn’t easy by any means, but everybody covets the satisfaction of pulling it off. It’s easy to see why once you practice his works—his chords and patterns have an uncanny knack for fitting in the curve of your hand like a volley of fastballs perfectly aimed at the palm of a catcher’s mitt. The fingerings by and large suggest themselves. In the jazz world, Duke Ellington is the same way: construct the chords under a tune like “Mood Indigo” or “Prelude to a Kiss” and you find yourself pulled towards brilliant, open structures with voice-leading that magically clicks.

One neat little morsel of trivia about Chopin is that he liked to start new piano students on B major, which has the most idiosyncratic fingerings of any major scale if you learn the instrument according to the common pattern of starting with C major (no sharps or flats, and therefore no black keys) and adding accidentals as you get better, spreading out along the circle of fifths. In the usual progression, B major with its five sharps is introduced relatively late, and thus it has developed a reputation for being difficult.

Chopin, who frankly knew better than everyone, taught C major last. It’s the easiest key to read, he reasoned, but the hardest key to play. C-oriented thinking creates obstacles in the long run in real-world performance scenarios; better instead to begin with B, which develops the proper contour of the hand. This won’t seem like a big deal if you are anything like Eva van Crommelynck from David Mitchell’s novels and “couldn’t tell C major from a sergeant major,” but believe me, it is.

For Chopin, training for the eventual practicalities of expressing real ideas took priority over taking advantage of conventions that happened to be convenient now. You can probably see where I’m going with this. The Dvorak keyboard, you may notice, was conceived along similar pedagogic lines. It is a system where to work on fundamentals is to prepare yourself to tackle practical scenarios efficiently. Learn a few neighbouring characters at a time, starting with your hands in the rest position, and within minutes you already have the building blocks of words and phrases.

But it’s the clever arrangement of digraphs where Dvorak truly shines. This is something you pick up right away: drum the right hand on its natural resting place and you instantly glimpse the potential of legato typing. The t in nth is a passing tone; the s in sh, a colourful appoggiatura.

Even as a Dvorak novice, you don’t hunt and peck a character at a time. Instead, as you practice the layout you rapidly come to visualize phonemes and syllables, hammering them out in clumps. Strings like ‘Schubert’ feel like five keystrokes, not eight, but acronyms like QWERTY remain a nasty pickle. Pronounceables skip like stones on a pond; abbreviations are minefields daring you to tiptoe across. In essence, the rhythm of Dvorak imitates the rhythm of speech. Rhythm rhythm rhythm rhythm.

QWERTY has a rhythm of its own once you’re fluent, but as you accelerate you converge on the uniform staccato of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. There isn’t a way around this, either, as your pace is bounded by your fingers’ travel time. Typing in QWERTY is atomic at heart, decomposing into a succession of meaningless independent characters—quite unlike Dvorak, where vowels and consonants are demarcated by their very placement, and the phoneme reigns supreme.

We could almost think of the QWERTY map’s decentredness as twelve-tone serialism over a wider alphabet of possible notes, none of them privileged, no combination outwardly consonant or dissonant. By this analogy, switching to Dvorak is akin to witnessing music history play out in reverse, returning to a classical pianistic scheme of vowels in the left hand harmonizing a punctuated melody of consonants in the right.

And in tactile terms, that’s really how typing in Dvorak feels, only all the letter-chords are broken down sequentially. There are many obscure alternatives to QWERTY in the keyboard ecosystem, but perhaps why Dvorak has endured as the representative champion is its essential musicality. It’s the romantic keyboard, reminding us that beneath every typewritten palimpsest sleeps a sound.

It reveals an odd kind of poetry, too, when you first practice it in fridge-magnetic increments. “The idea that nineteen studious Dadaists assisted Einstein is asinine,” reads the cryptic aphorism of a home-row exercise. “This session is tedious on the tendons,” reads another.

Somewhere along the way, I penned a dissertation of sorts, but let’s not talk about that. Here is the crust of readings that has built up in the meantime. There are more, but the list below was becoming rather overgrown and at some point I had to stop.

• Two of the great figures in things I care about passed away in May, both of them at ripe old ages after leading fulfilling lives: jazz pianist Hank Jones at 91; mathematical popularizer and Lewis Carroll expert Martin Gardner at 95. I came to both Jones’ and Gardner’s works late in life but quickly—very quickly—came to understand their immeasurable impacts on music and mathematics, respectively, which I had previously felt secondhand without being aware of it. More on Jones here and here; more on Gardner here and here.

• It speaks volumes for how long I’ve been away from saturating this page with hyperlinks that sitting atop the pile in my draft box is an ominous article by Dominic Lawson on David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s public-school upbringings at Eton and Westminster, written the week of the first televised debate.

• IBM has developed a Jeopardy!-playing computer. Observe the promotional video. From an AI perspective, this is orders of magnitude more exciting than Deep Blue, and takes us deep into Turing Test territory. I hope to say more about this should I find the time.

• One of the disadvantages of being in the United Kingdom—indeed, the most serious one I have yet encountered apart from the absence of fine, extravagant steaks—is that for the first time since 1998, I was unable to see a new Pixar film on or before the date of its release. Two Pixar films of note, in fact: Toy Story 3 and the accompanying Teddy Newton short Day and Night. That hasn’t stopped me from following the resurgence of coverage of Pixar’s process of perfection in this Wired piece and this interview with Lee Unkrich.

• Typesetting matters, folks. Just ask the consummate professionals behind these two book-size online resources: Typography for Lawyers, and LaTeX for Logicians.

• Everyone with an interest in the romance of modern international affairs has read it already, but Raffi Khatchadourian’s profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an outstanding piece of storytelling, if also one that tends towards the making of myth.

• And while on the subject of journalism and international intrigue, here is the Rolling Stone feature on Stanley McChrystal that led him to be sacked from command in Afghanistan.

• Civilization V is on its way, but there’s still plenty to say about Civilization IV. Troy Goodfellow shares a letter from Christopher Tin about composing music for the game. Kotaku asks lead designer Soren Johnson about the mathematization of religion.

• Jeremy Parish reflects on this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and calls out much of the game industry for the creative bankruptcy of video game violence.

• Neil Swidey of The Boston Globe courageously explores the mind of the anonymous comment-box troll.

• As this year’s graduate session at Singularity University gets underway, The New York Times talks to Ray Kurzweil and gang about the posthuman lifestyle.

• John Naughton writes in The Guardian about what the Internet has really changed.

• England has been swept up in the pathos and misery of football fever, as usual, and one may as well get some World Cup readings out of the way before the Three Lions have truly met with yet another ignominious doom. (Or, preferably, they could win.) Tim de Lisle enquires into the origins of spectator sport’s global draw. And then there’s this article on the North Korean national team, published in timely fashion just before Portugal blanked them 7-0.

• Finally, the only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree.

• Turn up your speakers and read Jan Swafford’s article in Slate about performing classical piano repertoire on classical pianos, which is full of audio comparisons that will make you wonder if the homogenized ideal of the modern Steinway grand is really a good thing.

• The Guardian asks a wide selection of novelists for their writing tips, which have a way of telling us more about the authors than about writing. Some of my favourites: Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“The first 12 years are the worst”), Philip Pullman (“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”).

• Ben Goldacre shows us how regulating alternative folk medicine through requiring certification is no use at all when we don’t know what’s being certified.

• From The New York Times: Canadians shoot left, Americans shoot right. The article is about hockey players but I think there’s something bigger in this.

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden remarks on the imaginative poverty of failed authors who think suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism is a good idea.

• Jonah Lehrer wonders if the direction of funding towards older scientists hinders us from tapping into the creativity of youth. Also read the followup on his Frontal Cortex blog.

• Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson talks about designing strategy games around our intuitions about probability (or lack thereof).

• Mark Chu-Carroll explains why computer simulations of biological phenomena will never replace animal testing.

• Joel Stickley’s explorations of bad writing by example finally catch on to my fatal flaw.

Let me put it this way. After Werner whistled along to his own piano outro at the tail end of his lovely, lovely composition, “Uncovered Heart”—which he introduced as the song he wrote on the day his daughter was born—my classical composer companion leaned over to me and whispered, “So I’ve decided on his behalf that he is going to have more children.”

In retrospect, were we unable to plead ignorance it would have been a callous remark. What Mr Werner did not tell us was that his beloved daughter had perished in a car accident two years earlier. I suppose he trusted the music to speak for itself—and it did.

The band played a set consisting mostly of originals from his 2007 album Lawn Chair Society (“New Amsterdam”, “Uncovered Heart”, “The 13th Day”), but in a wholly acoustic setting, plus an unrecorded tune (“Balloons”, a lilting piece that bobbed up and down in thirds) and John Williams’ signature melody for the Harry Potter films (“Hedwig’s Theme”).

One can go on forever about how jazz is the quintessentially American music, and nowhere is it more American than in its ideal of individual liberty as the wellspring of greater collective achievement. This was one of those bands where every musician was consistently interesting to listen to, yet never selfish. Brecker’s dizzying bebop lines were an ample foil for David Sanchez’s wide expressive sweeps, and Antonio Sanchez was a real listener who clearly thought in ideas much bigger than patterns and strokes. Colley was a discovery for me, particularly the way he used pizzicato bass to trace smooth legato shapes and do far more than walk. And of Werner’s facility for drawing singsong melodies out of the piano, the more said the better. Elsewhere he cites Joni Mitchell as his primary musical influence, and I believe him.

Werner’s quintet was current, situated in the here and now and doing something fresh, while staying within an accessible jazz aesthetic with traditional instrumentation. The funk-and-swing pastiche of “New Amsterdam” highlighted the continued richness of acoustic instruments in predominantly electric forms, and the screaming intensity of “Hedwig’s Theme” harked back, however distantly, to what John Coltrane did to “My Favorite Things” decades ago. (I don’t hear nearly enough John Williams in jazz: up to the 1960s the adaptation of iconic themes from contemporary cinema and Broadway productions was a matter of course, and one would think that Williams, the definitive composer of film music from 1970 to present, would elicit more widespread treatment.)

There’s plenty of good jazz in the world. But great jazz? You’ll know it when you hear it—and I heard it.

That was the ever-theatrical Hiromi Uehara playing the prototypical Gershwin bop standard, “I Got Rhythm”—and boy, does she ever—which she introduced in Calgary as a tribute to her “superhero” (and every other pianist’s), Oscar Peterson.

This is the odd thing about attending jazz concerts in the age of YouTube: you can go home and compare notes with the performer’s previous appearances. In a genre so reliant on improvisation, one of the most tantalizing mysteries in a concert setting is to sort out the spontaneous invention from the premeditated conspiracy of the arrangement. The magic of a great jazz band is that often, you can’t tell—and certainly not from one performance alone. Jazz collectors treasure alternate takes for precisely this reason. The only thing as surprising as the prevalence of well-practiced licks is the astounding synchronicity of a band’s adventures into the unplanned. So the experience of seeing a ghostly resemblance of what you just saw on stage squeezed into a browser window with lo-fi audio is, well, uncanny.

I also feel compelled to add that the performance approximated by the video above is about as representative of the rest of the concert as a musical photo negative. In other words, for the rest of their time onstage, Hiromi’s Sonicbloom (with Tony Grey on bass, Martin Valihora on drums, and David Fiuczynski on a double-necked guitar), playing selections from their 2007 album Time Control alongside standards like “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”, “Ue wo muite arukuo” (“Sukiyaki”), and “Caravan”, sounded like anything and everything but Oscar Peterson.

Most instrumentalists can be said to trace a glutinous outline of all their forebears in varying concentrations. But Hiromi isn’t every jazz piano style rolled into one: she’s any jazz piano style at discrete pockets of time. She’ll stride into the scene like Erroll Garner, let the grand piano ring over a melodious staircase of Kenny Barron intervals, take a Chick Corea minute to sing and sob on all her pads at once, launch into a Herbie Hancock space-age funk, and top it off a dash of Ahmad Jamal’s crispy blues—sometimes all in the same suite, and with the sporadic slam of the fists or forearm on the keys to make sure you’re paying attention.

I would not call this “seamless”, a word that implies the continuity of a polynomial. The transitions are abrupt, the stylistic lineages unmistakable. Listening to Hiromi is like witnessing a cubist tour of jazz and rock piano with the edges sharpened and the innards bursting out of frame. And while I’m admittedly not too fluent with the evolutionary histories of the other instruments, I get the distinct sense that her bandmates are doing the same, pushing their axes to the limits of their prog-rock vocabulary.

As exciting as it is to listen to musicians who grew up on everything and decided to play it all, one has to wonder if there’s anywhere to go next. If the contemporary style is a collision of styles, where do we go from here? Collisions within collisions, or somewhere else? A sonic bloom, indeed.

When a shockingly incompetent amateur poses as a professional source of wisdom, is oblivious to said incompetence, and puts it on display for everyone to see in the form of an instructional video—well, that’s comedy, and it is my duty as a responsible citizen to point and guffaw as hard as I can so no poor fool gets suckered.

Meet Austin McBride, the worst “jazz” “pianist” on the Internet.

Ever wondered what it would be like to hear Sarah Palin deliver a lecture about foreign policy? That’s Austin McBride.

There is a very real possibility that he’s a sick comic genius. The timing of his musical offences is almost too perfect: the consistent pattern in his minute-long videos is to begin with a mangled explanation that might sound plausible to the absolute beginner, and follow it up with a punch line of an “experimental” demonstration.

Who else could come up with gems like this:

• “Here we have a little thing that I wrote in 5/4.” [proceeds to stomp out a 4/4 riff while counting aloud to five... and losing count] “There’s some 5/4 timing…”
• “Experimental jazz is often called free jazz because you’re free to do whatever the hell you want to do… so basically it’s playing jazz music as though a little kid would play.” [proceeds to play like a little kid]
• “So in a jazz trio you have three elements: typically, jazz drums, jazz piano, and jazz trumpet… there’s obviously different variations of this—saxophone, whatever… if you’re musically inclined you could attempt to beatbox with your mouth, and then you’d have the drums and you’d be a complete one-man jazz band.” [proceeds to demonstrate to the tearful screams of his victims]

But I’ve seen intentional jazz parodies. (Hans Groiner comes to mind.) Intentional parodies are musically literate enough to be deliberate about straying as far from the elements of jazz as possible, and leaving a trail of stylistic breadcrumbs to make it obvious. This fellow—well, I suppose he also offers tutorials on breakdancing and bouncing golf balls on clubs, but I’m still not convinced it’s a joke.

More likely, Austin McBride is a tone-deaf scrub who’s never heard a bar of jazz in his life. And if anything he’s doing is reflective of the general perception of what jazz sounds like—a bunch of nonsense licks and blues scales over repetitive block chords—we, as a civilization, are in a serious heap of trouble.

[Edit (9/29): Given the amount of traffic this page gets from people curious about Mr McBride, it behooves me to acknowledge that it has since become clear the whole shebang was a joke. If you are still on the fence, please consult this video, where he sports a deliberately ridiculous beatnik outfit and plays in five while counting in four.]

It appears Ms. Palin has a confident flair for the flowing rhythms of natural speech that would make Thelonious Monk proud. Her recitative on the economy, as sung to Katie Couric with impeccable enunciation:

And here she is with John McCain in a bright, vaudevillian demonstration of their appeal to down-home real America:

Not content with restricting myself to the usual landmark-hopping tourist experience of scheduling ill-lit drive-by shootings (now in digital), I thought it would be rewarding to amble around the City That Sleeps As Much As I Do with little planning and forethought, and let adventure ambush me as it will. At times, the excursion assumed the manner of a pilgrimage. Mecca, with less ululation. This isn’t to say that I didn’t tick my way down the usual checklist—the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more navigable corners of Central Park, a Broadway production or two—but stopping there wouldn’t have made it my New York, and like any good tourist, I populated my list of things to see with a few sentimental items, guided as always by the invisible hand of personal entitlement.

So when I wasn’t busy getting lost in more of Central Park than most New Yorkers will ever see, I went looking for Scrabble and jazz.

For readability’s sake, let’s switch to point form. I intend to meander, after all.

First, Scrabble:

• If you’ve read Stefan Fatsis’s Word Freak, the definitive book on the subculture of competitive Scrabble, you know about the “parkies”—the legendary players in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park, some of them reputed to be the best players outside of the tournament circuit. (This was before the rise of online play, of course; now there’s a whole generation of players on ISC and Scrabulous who have never touched a real set of tiles.) Naturally, I went hunting. To my chagrin, the parkies were nowhere to be found: the entire northwest quadrant of Washington Square Park had been torn up for restoration.
• This didn’t stop a chess hustler from pulling me aside at the southwest corner, where the chess tables lie. Now, I know I’m not very good at chess, and I accept his challenge fully expecting to lose a few bucks. At five dollars a game, it doesn’t sound like such a bad proposition. What I didn’t foresee was how quickly he’d turn my pockets inside out. The first warning was when he pulled out a clock and set it to five minutes apiece. Dear God, chess I can handle—but speed chess? I don’t think it should come as a surprise that I lost the first game on time. My opponent swept the pieces aside and set up another game with the colours reversed, and the spicy taste of challenge was enough to pull me back in. With the pressure of the clock now firmly in mind, I tried to play like a speed demon. Careless, that: his queen kicked me in the nuts in five or six moves.
• After a reluctant escape—and believe me, that Stockholm-syndrome part of me wanted to remain captive, especially when the hustler offered to play without time constraints—I toured the perimeter of the park just in case there was Scrabble about. Later, I passed by the chess corner again: there was a prowler amidst the tables, and an arrest in progress. The scene would have made for an exceptional photograph, but I thought better of it: I wasn’t about to get involved in a mess in front of the NYPD and the most dangerous chess players in all of Manhattan.
• Still intent on playing Scrabble with people I didn’t know, I paid a visit to the weekly meeting of NSA Club #56, directed by former World Champion Joel Sherman. This was actually my first experience of club play outside Alberta, and the fact that it was one of the most competitive clubs in North America (and also featured in Word Freak) was a bonus. “G.I. Joel” runs four rounds a night in two divisions, and works out all the pairings himself. The Manhattan club plays under a time limit of 23 minutes instead of the usual 25, and several of the players have boards shaped like apples. There is also a frozen yogurt machine on the 14th floor.
• “Nicholas Tam? From Calgary?” I was flattered that Joel Sherman (the Joel Sherman!) had at least a cursory recognition of who I was, given that Scrabble-wise, I haven’t done anything that I would be known for in the last four years at least. (Joe Edley knew my name when I was introduced to him at New Orleans, but that was back in my prime, when I was bounding up the standings 100 rating points at a time.) Then I remembered that I was talking to a guy who knew every word in the dictionary up to nine or ten letters. At one point, another player argued that he was certain BEJESTS* was a word. “Look in this book,” said Joel, holding a dictionary shut. “You will find BEJEEZUS and BEJEWEL. You will not find BEJESTS*.”
• The two divisions at the Manhattan club are divided by NSA rating, with the boundary line at 1300. I was in the unique circumstance of being above 1300 before Orlando, and tumbling to about 1260 after my little four-day disaster, so Joel let me choose where I wanted to play. Naturally, I picked the upper division. I lost every game, and this time around, I couldn’t even post any decent scores. For record-keeping purposes, the club has a spread cap of 200 points—that is, you record a +200 or -200 even if the spread in the game exceeds that margin. I’m embarrassed to say that I had to use it twice.

And now, jazz:

• The first leg of my visit had the good fortune of coinciding with the Jazz in July festival at 92nd Street Y, a posh concert series directed by pianist Bill Charlap, who plays in every concert but refrains from carrying on like a star. If I had my way, I’d have attended every night: at the price of $25 per concert for under-35s, it wouldn’t have been infeasible. There was a concert dedicated to Leonard Bernstein featuring vocalist Kurt Elling, whom I saw wow Edmonton at the Citadel two years ago. An all-star tribute to George Shearing. Another tribute to Billy Strayhorn. A piano masterclass that regrettably overlapped with my trip to Orlando, though I received fair compensation for missing it: it took place on the apotheotic Day 3. I’m satisfied with what I did see: a piano jam on twin grands, featuring rotating permutations of Charlap, Billy Taylor, Bill Mays, and Cedar Walton, including a few solo improvisations and a two-pianos, eight-hands setting that involved more than a little on-the-fly seat-swapping. Or should I call it musical chairs?
• The most pleasant surprise of the piano jam was not a pianist at all, but cornetist Warren Vaché. This is the same Vaché whose recording with the Scottish Ensemble, Don’t Look Back, was the subject of a Paul Wells encomium not too long ago. Vaché has an ineffable stage presence that stops just short of calling too much attention to itself. When he isn’t delivering his pithy bebop aphorisms with clarity and grace, he responds to the music around him with a substrate of subtle gestures—a brush of the knee here, a straightening of the collar there, as Sandy Stewart (Charlap’s vocalist mother) danced over the lyrics of “Tea for Two”. Needless to say, I bought myself a copy of Don’t Look Back, which is every bit the landmark jazzer-with-strings recording that Wells venerates. To be fair, I was sold on it already, thanks to Vaché’s interpretation of what is probably my favourite Irish reel, the Percy Grainger setting of “Molly on the Shore”.
• I missed Monty Alexander when he played at the Calgary International Jazz Festival in June, but I caught his engagement at Birdland for about the same price—that is, before you count the souvenir polo shirt, chocolate martini, and succulent striploin steak. This isn’t the original Birdland, Birdland-comma-Lullaby-of, the Charlie Parker temple that witnessed the doorstep billy-clubbing of Miles Davis, which has long since closed. The Birdland name carries on at a fine little dinner establishment where they seat you along a semicircle of candlelit tables that hug a nine-foot Steinway handpicked by Oscar Peterson. In a trio setting, Alexander’s brand of jazz piano belongs to the same branch of the family tree as Peterson’s glistening swing, but with a homegrown Caribbean presence in its rhythmic underbelly. I was seated at a table from which I couldn’t see the keys, nor could I see bassist Hassan Shakur behind the lid of the piano; at first, this seemed to be a problem, but I seized on that whole other dimension of entertainment in live music performance: the facial expressions, the stomping of feet. It provides an insight into improvisational thought that we too often forget.
• I wasn’t about to leave New York without a visit to the Village Vanguard. For those of you who don’t know, the Village Vanguard—a cozy, intimate basement club with a fire-hazard capacity of 123 and no food—is a site of monumental importance in jazz history, the venue at which a staggering number of legendary concert recordings were produced. Chief among them are the last recorded sessions of the original Bill Evans Trio (Evans on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass, and Paul Motian on drums; LaFaro would die in a car accident two weeks later). As a piano enthusiast, The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (originally released as Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby) is the crown jewel of my CD library. I’d say more, but Adam Gopnik’s article in The New Yorker will do more than I can to convince you that the Bill Evans engagement at the Vanguard was, and remains, a very, very big deal.
• So it was, to say the least, a special occasion for me to visit the Village Vanguard to see Paul Motian, the original Bill Evans Trio’s last surviving member. Motian played in a nonet setting—in essence, the septet from his 2006 album Garden of Eden plus Jacob Sacks on piano and Matt Maneri on viola. The curious thing about Motian is how he manages to remain a background presence, never overpowering his soloists and and never taking extended solos himself, while always doing something interesting whenever you consciously decide to pay attention to him. The music for the evening consisted mostly of originals with an emphasis on collective improvisation over free structures that appear to defy harmony, but somehow manage to remain coherent. There was only one standard: Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, the jazz canon’s preeminent funeral dirge.
• Here’s something I don’t get to do every day: solicit an autograph from Paul Motian at the Village Vanguard, a few feet away from a 47-year-old photograph on the wall of Motian sitting with Evans and LaFaro… at the Village Vanguard. Motian doesn’t look anything like his picture anymore, now that he’s shed the moustache (and indeed, any trace of hair on his head), and wears shades when he’s under the lights. I tell him that I wish I’d brought my Evans albums with me, to get his autograph on them as well. “Yeah, I heard from a lady in London,” he says, as he struggles to help me unseal a copy of his own CD. “She’s doing a documentary on Bill Evans, and she wants to interview me—fifty years later!”

The myriad tributes in O.P.’s honour, both in print since his passing and in the concert, offer a personal underscore to something I always knew about, but only on paper—that he was not only an exemplary musician, but an extraordinary role model in every respect: someone who demonstrated that you can have your cake and eat it too—that great jazz doesn’t have to come at the price of drug addiction or poisoned race relations. The real condition of its production is the will to be the calibre of artist you want. And the kind of man who realizes that is the kind of man who will play his way through a debilitating stroke and live to the ripe old age of 82.

I’m not a sucker for biography. I like to imagine that you can appreciate art apart from its creator, and that in the majority of cases, you should. But sometimes, I have to wonder how much of that is a matter of burying my head in the sand—not wanting to acknowledge that Bill Evans’ sentimental figurations were paying the tab for the heroin coursing through his left arm—and it’s a relief to look up to someone like Oscar Peterson and not have to make a single excuse.

That’s when you know you’ve picked a hero. For Nicholas Tam, that moment came at the age of fifteen.

As a nugget of personal history, I should probably emphasize that growing up, there was never any jazz in my household. It wasn’t anything deliberate on the part of my custodians—it’s just that the whole genre of music was a world apart from our workaday family life at Tam Manor, as I suspect it is for the entire lives of most of the people you and I know, who live and die their way through existences they personally find fulfilling and don’t have the remotest conception of the wonders they missed along the way.

Around this time my primary musical interests were movie soundtracks, showtunes, doo-wop and the Beatles—a recipe for a future jazz addiction if I ever saw one. I’d been taking classic cinema seriously for at least a year or two, and classical piano for about seven or eight—and somewhere between the two, The Sting introduced me to the syncopated intricacies of Scott Joplin, which vaulted the adolescent me into the Savoy stomping grounds of big bands and Benny Goodman. By accident or design, I landed in the middle of Ross Porter’s After Hours on CBC Radio Two weeknights at 10pm. As is probably true for everybody who discovers modern jazz for the first time, a lot of the music came off as a beautiful jumble of notes that I didn’t understand.

So perhaps it’s understandable that early on, I developed an ideal vision of the jazz I liked as a blend of the traditional melodic clarity of swinging songbooks in the Gershwin mould and the raw magic of virtuosic improvisation, and latched onto two artists in particular. One was Ella Fitzgerald. The other was… well, you know who he is by now.

How would I describe the music of Oscar Peterson? Spectacular without being strictly technical. Melodically dedicated, but never repetitive. Impeccably clean—360 beats per minute and nary a “wrong note” in sight. In a word, gospel; and above all, so much fun.

Here’s what you notice if you’re an upstart amateur in high school on a tea break from Liszt who’s trying to imitate Oscar Peterson with little hands that span half the breadth of his Rachmaninov-class paws: you can’t. You get yourself into the habit of swinging too hard, playing too fast and dumping ornamental clichés all over the floor—and you realize two things: it was what he played, not how fast he played it. He was the quickest on the draw because he aimed from the hip bars in advance, when his fingers were still gunning away on an entirely different set of triggers.

(I heard Oscar say in an interview once that contrary to intuition, most of his figures would probably be easier with small hands. That was swell of him, but that doesn’t mean I can’t harbour a bit of resentment at the genetic lottery for not giving me a left hand that comfortably spans a tenth.)

Eventually my awareness of jazz branched out, as it had to, and I was surprised to discover that not everybody thought well of Oscar’s virtuosic stylings; Miles Davis, always the minimalist, criticized his playing for its excess of sound and deficit of silence. And I’ll admit that by no means is Oscar all-encompassing; no musician is the alpha and omega of his instrument, and you’ll never perceive the whole of jazz piano’s dynamism as a medium if you don’t consider the remarkably different contributions of Evans, Tyner, Hancock, Mehldau and so on. It’s surprisingly difficult to fit O.P. into the canonical Armstrong-Parker-Davis-Coltrane axis of American jazz history that takes us from trad to bop to modal and into the avant-garde. I personally think of him as the one who carried Art Tatum’s torch to its logical conclusion—exemplifying, perfecting it at every turnaround.

What the critics who disregard Oscar’s speedy shimmers don’t realize is how much intention and direction he put into his improvisations. A little over a year ago I wrote a paper on Canadiana Suite that dabbled here and there in musical semiotics—I won’t reprint it at this precise moment, but I may do so in future. To provide a capsule: upon a very close listen of his best-known extended composition, what I discovered was that his spontaneous explorations—their ranges, their rhythms—are every bit as programmatic as the tunes in which they are embedded. He scales his usual peaks in “Land of the Misty Giants”, restrains himself to the lower elevations as he rolls across the prairies in “Wheatland”, pulses along at a lazy pace over Ed Thigpen’s locomotive drumwork in “Blues of the Prairies” and clangs the upper registers with a mallet-like percussiveness in “March Past”. His romantic vision of Canada arises directly from a targeted juxtaposition of bluesy breakneck urbanity and nature at its most diatonic and pristine, and it all comes through in the way he plays—nay, imagines. I’d go as far as to say that Canadiana Suite lays a very strong claim to being the the definitive nationalist work of music in our country, and I invite my readers to suggest worthy challengers if you dare.

I’d like to draw attention to one final story of remembrance that I’ve been following—that of Herbie Hancock. Consider this: at 67, Herbie’s now the elder statesman of jazz piano (and pretty much every conceivable instrument, analog or electric, that resembles a the black-and-white layout of a piano keyboard), and he grew up on Oscar Peterson.

A powerful reminder, isn’t it, that everyone who’s the best at what they do had to go through a phase of futility where someone had already laid claim to being the best there ever will be:

Peterson was quick, however, to acknowledge that he stood on the shoulders of giants. Hancock recalled a dinner at Quincy Jones’ home a few years ago, at which he gathered the courage to ask a question of Peterson that had long troubled him.

“I’d always been afraid to ask,” said Hancock. “But, knowing my own feelings about Art Tatum, I was curious about how Oscar felt about him. So I asked, and he said, ‘Lemme tell you, sir…’

“And he went on to tell me how, when he was a kid, he was a pretty good piano player, and he’d always hold his own in the cutting contests that young players had. And he said he got really cocky about it.

“So one day his father, who would take him to places to hear other piano players, said there was a guy coming in town that he might want to listen to. And Oscar said he thought, ‘Well, who could this be? I can beat the best of them.’

“It was Art Tatum, of course. And he said that after he heard Tatum play, he went home, went up to the second floor of his house and immediately tried to push his piano out the window. He said he was never cocky again. And I said, ‘You too, Oscar?’ And he said, ‘Me too. Tatum scared me to death.’”

They’re an odd couple if you think about it; if you’ve ever heard Mr. Hancock’s music, you know that he doesn’t sound even remotely like Oscar. Yet that’s where he started. That’s what took Herbie Hancock from a major in electrical engineering to a storied career in composition, production, and improvisation across all contemporary genres. A late starter in jazz, looking at what he’s accomplished is almost enough to make me feel young again—and the way he tells it, he owes it all to O.P.

Or, as Herbie put it in his speech on Saturday:

“If it wasn’t for Oscar Peterson, there might have been another electrical engineer in the world.”

Make that two, Mr. Hancock. Make that two. Oscar Emmanuel Peterson, merci.

Oscar Peterson was without question one of the most important figures in my life, and has been since I was old enough to discover the myriad human wonders of the world for myself. On only two other occasions have I been so affected by the passing of a celebrated individual whom I never met (Douglas Adams, Charles M. Schulz), and in both of those cases, I found out as soon as the story broke and shared in the mourning with those who remembered their lives and works with a fondness of similar profundity.

I never did get to see him play.