Nick's Café Canadien

I visited Manhattan for the first time before and after the Orlando NSC, and one doesn’t visit Manhattan for the first time without coming back with a swarm of impressions that cling to the memory like barnacles.

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.

Continued »

Saturday’s Oscar Peterson tribute concert is now available online. You can listen to it in segments, but I obviously recommend sitting through the whole thing; if you do have to pick and choose, though, make it Herbie Hancock’s speech and performance. (More on him later.) Having just returned to school after three weeks out of the country, I wasn’t able to make the pilgrimage to Hogtown, but after listening to some of the heartfelt eulogies I’m beginning to think I should have stood out in the cold for ten hours on the steps of Roy Thomson Hall with the rest of the throng of ladies, gentlemen and music-lovers all who, like me, would not have the sense of personal identity they possess today were it not for the inspiration of the greatest jazz pianist there ever was or ever will be—and my favourite musician of any stripe, period.

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.

Continued »

I left Canada 21 December and returned this afternoon; only a minute ago did I find out that Oscar Peterson passed away on the 23rd, the day I was stranded in China while my Siamese destination made its way back to democracy. I have a lot to write down, but I think I may have to set everything aside to compose a lengthy and personal obituary.

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.

Music can take you to some interesting places and unexpected situations, and its predilection for adventure is as evident as ever in the Christmas season. As my readers know, every now and then I hit black things and white things and make a lot of noise that might just resolve into the coherent pattern of a convenient overtone series (if I’m lucky). On the odd occasion I even get to do it while somebody else is singing.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to do just that with a local fantasy author of my acquaintance. It was not an especially public gig—only a Christmas-themed recital by the students of a vocal teacher—but one of the experiential benefits of being an instrumentalist in an auxiliary role, rather than the centre of attention, is the opportunity to communicate musically with people who are not there to see you.

The voice teacher in question already had a dedicated and polished accompanist, but the vocalist hired me on anyway for my apparent versatility—that I can read music straight up, but also improvise blues licks over a gospel groove if need be. From my perspective, this was a fairly routine procedure and nothing out of the ordinary—which is why I was so surprised at how well received my playing was, especially because it was honestly a tad sloppy (tripped up, no doubt, by the fact that I had to turn pages, something I never learned to do properly).

The compliments were beyond the layman’s usual polite appreciation, to boot: at least one of the students’ parents approached me after the concert, passed me a business card, and asked me in earnest to send her a CD. I had to tell her that regrettably, I don’t have one ready at the moment. In truth, for some time now I’ve been mentally drafting some ideas for a well-produced solo studio recording on a proper pianoforte, ideas I won’t reveal until the time is ripe. If I start telling people that I’m sketching an impressionistic suite of spontaneous meditations on the poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien, they might develop unreasonable expectations.

Whoops.

Nevertheless, the reaction at the concert drew my attention to the prevailing gap of perception regarding improvised music that persists even among trained musicians. There is a notion, among many developing instrumentalists, that you need the guidance of sheet music in order to play; indeed, that is often the first thing they ask for when they watch something on the order of an impressive YouTube video. How does one imitate that, they want to know? The first step, I think, is to realize that regardless of whether or not one is reading off the page, playing music is not a mechanical process, but a matter of the imagination.

When it comes to musical accreditations, we don’t just impose requirements of scale technique and basic harmonic theory to make you sweat: we do it to encourage thinking on higher levels of abstraction. You can’t solve a Rubik’s Cube if you only proceed twist by twist; you need to think of corner swaps and edge rotations. And the only real trick to improvised music is to stop thinking note by note. It’s the trivium at work: from grammar to logic to rhetoric.

9-8 (+512). This is the third consecutive time I’ve finished the 17-round Western Canadian Scrabble Championship with a 9-8 record in Division 2—an indication of a personal plateau if I’ve ever seen one. Here’s the photographic evidence for your inspiration or mocking amusement, depending on how good you are.

Every year, the month of October hits me upside the head and I come to the sudden and unwelcome realization that I haven’t studied or practised in months. The fact that I’ve been letting my word knowledge atrophy is probably the biggest reason my rating has been hovering around the 1300 zone for years now, and cramming the week or the night or the morning before the tournament doesn’t tend to help—because after all, what should you cram? With this in mind, the preparation I did for the tournament amounted to a lot of sleep, a lot of tea, and several hours at a Yamaha grand.

Did it help?

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Nobody known to me who reads this space was there to see it, but I guarantee you that my jaunt to the Yardbird tonight led to what is unquestionably the worst I have played in years. For some reason, I just flat-out forgot how to work a piano (in a profoundly public situation, no less). It may have been because the B-flat feedback on my monitor sent me into a timid corner wherein I performed with an impotent absence of confidence and conviction, or because I hadn’t so much as touched a keyboard in three days and had committed my fingers to more rudimentary motor functions like the inspection and sorting of resistors, or because the hundred-some tunes I’d taken to the woodshed in the past half a year curiously did not include much in the way of rhythm changes (let alone a head as tricky as “Oleo”), or because I’ve fully diverted the attention of my Creative Processing Unit to the writing of fast-food prose (which is going quite smoothly, thank you), or because of that Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile (I remain convinced I play better after a drink or two, but maybe that only applies when I’ve had dinner), but no matter the cause, that was an embarrassment on the order of a slaughter on the sandlot with Charlie Brown on the pitcher’s mound.

Well, let us make the best of this debacle and not smother the furious passion of disappointment, but stoke it into a phoenix of a bonfire. I have a 50,000-word trek ahead of me, and I need fuel.

But first, I’ll get lost in the woods.

Confession: I’m not entirely sure, but I think I played with six-time Grammy nominee Mark Murphy last night and had no idea who he was. Consider the circumstantial evidence and decide for yourself: he was a singer, he looked like Mark Murphy (now that I’ve sifted through some recent publicity materials and am in a position to say that), and Mark Murphy happens to be headlining two shows at the Yardbird Suite this weekend. I won’t be able to attend, as I’ll be busy playing Scrabble.

Did you know he wrote the effectively canonical lyrics to “Stolen Moments”? Neither did I. I was too busy dreading having to play in a jam band with a vocalist. Of the jams at the Yardbird I’ve been to this year, there have been at least two or three nights where I had to say to myself, “Why did I have to get the band with a singer?”

See, I’m really glad I play for a choir of fun and agreeable individuals. If it weren’t for them, I suspect I’d have an unrestrained hate-on for singers right now, which is saying something, considering how it was primarily vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald who got me into jazz in the first place. Virtually every jam-session set I’ve played where there was a singer involved has been an experience somewhere along the spectrum between minor irritation and full-on Rocky Mountain trainwreck, and only so much of it could be my fault.

Last night’s set went a lot better. We only had time for one tune with vocals (“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” for those of you keeping score), but most of the usual problems were absent. It was in a reasonable key. It stayed at a reasonable tempo. The chart was readable enough that the form was reasonably clear. Nobody got completely lost. These might seem like pretty basic expectations, but I’ve learned not to take them for granted. I’ve learned it the hard way.

The only hiccup was a bit of a miscommunication to the band in terms of whether or not we were supposed to give the vocalist an intro, and if so, for how long – so we just hit some chords for about eight bars, wondering why he hadn’t come in. Then he came in.

Decent singer, the guy who upon reflection may or may not have been Mark Murphy.

Decent singers are considerate of their bands. If you ever show up with charts marked in some ridiculous sharp key and ambiguously defined solo sections, then count us off in a tempo you can’t handle without letting us know when you want to come in – all of which I’ve seen happen, while onstage, no less – we’ll take you for a prima donna, and we will break you. More accurately, you’ll break yourself.