It was around the same time that I joined an African band in London where I was introduced to a whole new way of making music. The door to music started opening and I began making the connections between ear, notes, and keys. I learned that dedicated teachers are always one of their own students. As I figured out a method and built a course, I found that I was again teaching myself. To supplement my earnings from gigs, I started teaching jazz piano.
#Ear practice music how to#
But without a proper teacher I did not know how to achieve this. I knew that was what a real musician could do. It was not flowing easily from my inner ear through to my fingers and into sound. I knew instinctively that I had entered music the wrong way. Although I was immersing myself in the glory and groove of it all, I was desperate to get properly ‘in’ and understand it. However, during my whole musical experience up to this time, I still felt like that young piano student, dragging his feet. I learned songs and picked my way through Bach and more. And so, I had to teach myself, consuming composition and analysis books by the armload, listening to records, and studying scores. At this time there were no colleges teaching jazz and no conservatoires or universities that thought like I did-that Mahler and Duke Ellington were worthy of the same investigation. And my music-making seemed to split as well, down two routes: on a quest to become a serious jazz pianist, and with the hope of becoming a composer. I grew and in time our band edged towards fame, we got a manager, and a van… and then we split up. I started sitting at the piano making things up-things we could play in the band, and I found that chords, rhythms, and tunes came to me easily. Very soon I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life. But then, at age 14 I was asked to join a band-“you play the piano, don’t you?”-and a light switched on for me when I discovered music I loved. I found them boring, practice was boring, and even when a piece was right, it was boring too. I was an unhappy child pianist, dragging my feet along the sidewalk to my lessons. My journey to developing my musical ear and really understanding the music I hear was a long one.
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