An Improv Duet with Lukey

Lukey and Kenzie spent a few days with us last week during their break from school.  We had a good time with them and stayed pretty busy.  Gee had to work but I spent time doing activities with them each day.  

Every now and then, Lukey and I will sit at the piano for a bit to do some improvisation and we did that again last week.  There is an audio clip, below, of our spur-of-the-moment ballad duet if you prefer to skip down to that so you can listen while you read the rest of this blog entry.  

Lukey is now 10 years old and, although he has never had any true structured and regular lessons, he has an interest in the piano and sits at the piano to play at our house whenever possible.  Whenever I sit at the piano to play, he is quick to come over to the armchair right next to the piano so he can watch and listen.  In this way, he kind of reminds me of my cousin William.  William always sat right next to the piano whenever I played and he was a good page-turner for me since he read music as well.  Lukey definitely shows an interest in this instrument and it is obvious whenever he jumps up to come sit next to the piano..  

He actually seems to like much of the stuff that I play and I lean mostly toward classical piano from the Romantic period but I also push a bit beyond both ends of that period with select composers.  Over this past summer, he really enjoyed listening to me whenever I played a particular Bruce Hornsby song, Song C, which has a bit of a Gaelic and classical sound to it.  During their visit last week, he showed just as much interest when I played Debussy's Clair de Lune.  I wasn't so surprised by his interest in Song C but his interest in Debussy actually surprised me!

Whenever we do sit at the piano together, I try to keep things as simple as possible yet as interesting as possible.  Well, I would always do this with my students as well but things are more casual with Lukey with less emphasis on reinforcing proper technique since he is rarely at a piano.  We do some listening exercises...  some finger exercises...  we discuss technique and correct technique on the fly...  and then we try to put it all together as a song of some sort.  That is what we did again this time around.  Lukey came up with all sorts of interesting melodies...  switching to triplets, playing with both hands, using multiple fingers and even improvising chords.  I was pretty surprised as we were playing!  

Each of our sessions together ends up being about the same length as a typical lesson but the difference is that rather than getting four lessons a month he only gets two or three lessons in a year.  Imagine what he could accomplish with regular lesson time and far more effective practice time.  

On this particular day, we tried a few different styles and a few different baselines before we found a combination that worked for both of us.  For these duets, I always play the baselines and control the percussion styles while Lukey experiments with melodies.  I prefer using percussion styles rather than a metronome.  Actually, no student of mine has ever heard a single metronome at any of my lessons.  Solo music should never be that rigid...  solo music needs to breathe with a life of its own.  This, however, is ensemble work so, once we find a combination of baseline and percussion style that we both like, I show him which keys would work for our key and let him do whatever he feels.  We landed on an improvisational ballad as being the best option this time around.  After we had all of that figured out, I started recording.  Here is the relatively short recording of this improvisational ballad...  

As Lukey and I played, Kenzie danced around the living room.  

For someone who does not practice regularly nor has a teacher other than my couple of sessions with him each year, he is pretty good.  

Unlike Lukey, improvisation was always one of my weakest skills when I was a young student.  By the time I was in high school, I was more interested in jazz and improvisation.  During my 12 years of lessons, though, I was more of a classically trained student in solo performance.  While I prefer to have a written score in front of me, Lukey seems to like just feeling the music and picking out a melody of his own.  When I was a child, I could hear a classical piece of music and just play it the way I heard it.  Even as a child, I was more of a realist.  I despised fiction.  My books of choice were about history, current events, advanced science and mechanical texts, magazines and how-to.  I would even venture to say that using my imagination for anything was extremely difficult for me as a child, if not impossible.  This carried over into music and improvisation for me as well.  

All in all, we had a good time and Lukey was pretty happy with the results!