Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

  While the men positioned the instrument in the darkest corner of the front room, Alice set out the tea and scones. The driver had the sense to consume two scones and a cup of scalding black tea quickly before leaving the friendly farmer to his stern-faced wife.

  ‘I thought you’d be happy,’ George said into his teacup, once the rattle of the departing cart had faded.

  ‘I am,’ she said, thinking how words covered over the truth of things like the paperbark over the cool trunks of the gum trees. ‘Just…surprised, that’s all.’ She put her hand on George’s shoulder and softened her expression.

  He looked up at her quickly, as she had expected him to do, seeking permission for the next step, which was to reach for her hand and squeeze it. A husband, afraid of his own wife. She didn’t know whether to cry, or laugh in his face.

  Alice felt the gulf between them, as vast as the ocean she had crossed, but had no clue how to bridge it even if she’d wanted to. George would expect her to welcome him into her bed tonight. He rarely dared approach her since the baby arrived, and because of the piano she felt she could not say no. She found the physical act itself unremarkable, if messy; what she feared lay beyond the realm of the senses, too easily deceived, in the invisible country of intimacy. It was a land to which she seemed to be refused entry. This time she hoped to have a boy.

  Alice sat down to familiarise herself with the piano, George’s eyes hot on the back of her neck. It didn’t feel like she had imagined it would, having a piano of her own at last. The piano room of her dreams was devoted to music, with a gramophone in the corner opposite the instrument, etchings of the great composers hung on one wall, and shelves stacked neatly with choral arrangements. On Devon Farm, the piano competed for space with a large wireless, a settee and a big basket of wool punctured with crochet and knitting needles. She wanted to disappear at the piano, to slide down the rabbit hole on her fingertips to a musical world of her own making, like she used to do when she was a girl and her brothers were running amok. Instead she was the focus of her husband’s attention.

  Alice didn’t care for the reflection the instrument cast back at her. In her home-made apron and with her permanent cigarette, she reminded herself of no one more than her mother. Despite the heat of the afternoon, the ivory keys were cool to her fingertips. She did her best not to flinch at how flat the notes were. At first her fingers felt like dancers who couldn’t remember their routine. But slowly they found their way through some of the old Scottish songs, and the notated music formed a picture in her mind’s eye as clear as John Henry Edwards’ face. At the end of each piece, Alice recalled, was the same instruction. Da capo, it said. Return to the beginning.

  ‘Maybe you’ll teach Charlotte to play, when she’s old enough,’ came George’s voice behind her. Until this moment Alice hadn’t thought about her daughter learning the instrument, and was shocked to feel her stomach lurch at the idea.

  When she’d told George that she was expecting a baby, he had choked back tears and suggested that they should name a girl after Alice’s mother. She had smiled and nodded her agreement, thinking how impossible it was to make a fresh start of anything in life. At the end of everything was da capo.

  30

  ‘GET OVER THERE, THEY WON’T BITE ya,’ said Freddy Wilson, shooing me to the far left corner of the converted garage at the back of his garden in Boronia Park, a leafy suburb a few minutes from the one where I had grown up.

  I picked my way between wonky music stands and chipped coffee mugs to the electronic keyboard and sat on a black stool whose torn vinyl seat had padded years of bottoms. To my immediate left was standing-room only for the double-bass player and his instrument, as long as he didn’t swing too literally. And on his left, in the far right corner of the garage, sat the drummer at his kit. I had finally become the piano player in a jazz band, and I felt as hip as a prosthesis.

  I’d had to wait some months for a place in one of Freddy’s weekly amateur jazz workshops, which gave singers and instrumental soloists the rare opportunity to perform live with a rhythm section. The diminutive drummer had been a band leader and arranger in the big band heyday of the 1950s and 60s. Since then, Freddy and his wife Bev had been running workshops for singers and instrumentalists from their home. Slim and weathered, Bev towered over her husband. When I’d showed up early for the first night of the ten-week term, she had greeted me like a long-lost friend and ushered me inside, where a handful of other new students perched on an ad hoc arrangement of chairs, sipping instant coffee.

  Ten minutes later the flyscreen door that gave on to the rear porch slid open to admit Freddy Wilson himself. Immune to the conventional repertoire of human facial expression, Freddy offered newcomers only a grunt, an upward nod and a raised eyebrow. We trudged across the illuminated lawn behind him like a trail of ants towards the single-car garage that had been reborn as a rehearsal space. Grey carpet lined the walls in an effort to muffle the sound. Besides the rhythm section of keyboard, acoustic bass and drums were a saxophone player, a trumpeter, an acoustic guitarist and three singers. Fresh air wafted into the garage only when the door opened to admit a latecomer. The singers lined up on stools near the door waiting their turn under the extreme lighting, which would have been sufficient to power a small aircraft.

  After a quick point-and-name introduction of each participant, Freddy got down to business.

  ‘Yeah, everyone. Listen up. Here’s how it works,’ he began with a tap of his cigarette. ‘The singers get two songs each, one at a time. Band members, you get a solo of two choruses, one for each song. Work out among yourselves who’s going first.’ A neglected ashtray sat on the edge of a bookshelf in easy tipping reach. Freddy preferred to let his embers fall to the concrete floor where they joined a general smudge at his feet. He ran on cigarette smoke and coffee for the duration of the two-hour workshop, and the garage door remained closed. ‘Okay, singers, who’s gonna be first? How ’bout you, Lisa? Whatcha doing tonight?’

  ‘“Cry Me a River”,’ Lisa said, pulling at her underpants through her faded jeans as she stood up.

  ‘All right.’ Freddy rummaged in a deep cardboard box whose corners were reinforced with duct tape, his cigarette dangling from one corner of his downturned mouth, searching for the music charts to hand out to everyone. Though the singers were mostly women, I was the only female member of the band.

  The one-page chart for ‘Cry Me a River’ showed only the melody on a series of treble staves and the chords underpinning it, each marked by its quality—C-6 or EЬMaj7, for example—in a kind of Esperanto for accompanying and improvising. I propped the sheet on the keyboard’s rickety music stand, thrilled that my years of mucking around at home by myself with Fake Books had not been in vain.

  For a jazz standard, ‘Cry Me a River’ begins on a relatively high first note, the sixth of the tonic or home key, and is held for the first two beats of the four-bar measure while the singer vocalises the first word: ‘Now’. Which wouldn’t be too high a bar to fly over were it not for the fact that the diphthong ‘ow’ is difficult to sing even without a broad Australian accent, or that the song is a ballad, and slower songs are notoriously harder to get right than faster ones. One of the most-recorded abandoned-lover laments, ‘Cry Me a River’ is paradoxically both more difficult to sing than it appears, and a standard of choice for beginner jazz singers. In other spheres of the performing arts, technical complexity would be enough to discourage beginners—because of, say, the threat of physical pain in the case of a ballet dancer attempting a pirouette en pointe. But of course, anyone who has a voice can attempt to sing anything.

  ‘Know the lyrics yet?’ Freddy asked Lisa.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Freddy!’

  ‘Christ, Lisa. Yer gotta know the words. No excuses.’

  Freddy counted us in. ‘Ah-one, ah-two, ah-one-two-three-ugh!’ We played a four-bar introduction before Lisa wobbled on the first word like a tightrope walker about to lose her footing.

 
; After Lisa careened through one chorus, meaning the full thirty-two bars of the song, the instrumentalists took solos from the head in the conventional manner of the jazz ensemble. To take a solo means to create spontaneously a musical idea and play for the duration of one or more choruses—to improvise based on some combination of the harmonic structure, the melody and the rhythm of the song. I had never done this with other musicians, but it was exactly why I’d been drawn to these workshops. Despite my heart being stuck in my throat, I couldn’t wait to solo. Fortunately, for the first chorus the saxophone player took the solo, so I had extra time to think about the structure of the song.

  ‘Cry Me a River’ has a conventional AABA jazz standard pattern, with its thirty-two bars split into two lots of eight (A), a bridge (B) of eight bars, and a final eight-bar section to finish (A). If you know a song with such a structure well enough, you intuitively hear that pattern without being conscious of it. Ideally, that means when you perform it you don’t have to think about counting numbers of bars, or whether you’re on the first or second eight of the A section, or where you are in the bridge. Needless to say, in Freddy’s workshops I did a lot of counting, very loudly, inside my head. There was also a lot of heel-tapping with my right foot, and whacking of my left calf muscle against the stool I sat on.

  While it sounds as though I spent my whole performance stuck in my head counting bars, I didn’t—there just wasn’t time. I’d hardly got started with my solo when it was all over. It was someone else’s turn in the 32-bar spotlight. The beautiful thing is that even when one of us forgot where we were in the song, or got lost in the middle, somehow the rest of the band carried us in its current. We could re-enter the stream when we regained our footing, without too much disruption to the overall momentum.

  My relief at not having to be perfect was exhilarating. Here was a way to play the piano with others, and not have to memorise twenty minutes of intricately annotated music, and not have to reproduce it perfectly and the same way each time I played it.

  After the instrumentalists had each taken their solo, Lisa sang another chorus before we came to the end.

  ‘Well that was a fuckin’ train wreck, wasn’t it?!’ said Freddy, looking back and grinning at the other singers-in-waiting who had just clapped their appreciation for Lisa’s effort. He pointed his cigarette at them and raised his bushy eyebrows for emphasis. ‘Remember, a short note’s a good note.’

  Lisa nodded, unfazed.

  ‘Take it again, from the top.’

  Freddy’s method was nothing if not consistent. First he’d fix you with his death stare, then offer a few brief but tasty phrases through a mouth that barely moved:

  ‘Yeah, good, but yer too slow. It’s not a fuckin’ funeral.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Don’t be afraid not to play.’

  ‘Yer gotta be yerself.’

  Freddy wasn’t interested in contemporary jazz, which he defined as anything composed after 1959. He’d already seen and heard everyone he believed worth hearing. ‘They’re all up their own arses as far as I’m concerned,’ he said, referring to Miles Davis and Kind of Blue.

  I didn’t want to be myself. I wanted to be able to play exactly like Bill Evans, who had begun by studying classical piano, and ended up as one of the twentieth century’s most influential improvisers and composers. His nuanced chord voicings on Kind of Blue were a large part of Miles Davis’s phenomenal success with that album, despite Freddy’s tin ear for the landmark recording. In a 1966 documentary made by his brother Harry, Bill confessed that when he first began improvising, he considered that he’d done well if he had played one note differently from how a piece had been notated. One note! And here I was, having deviated from the notated music almost as soon as I’d started reading it, never daring to pursue it seriously through all these years of playing.

  I wonder if I’d had a different teacher, studied a different repertoire, not focused on the annual grade exams, if that might have led me to study improvisation and become a professional musician. If only I had seen that documentary when I was thirteen, I say to myself sometimes, fantasising about what it might have been like to live the life of a jazz musician in New York—at the same time knowing that, even if I’d had the chops, it was a life I would never have had the courage to lead. It was a life Bill Evans himself, despite his distinctive harmonic voicings and startlingly original compositions, found impossible to lead without heroin and later cocaine, both of which contributed to his death at fifty-one in 1980.

  Outside the confines of Freddy’s garage, I had formed the distinct impression that everyone else I knew had a firm idea of what they wanted to do with their lives. Friends were becoming lawyers, radio producers, journalists, book editors. Acquaintances were morphing into architects or political consultants, or going into the family business. They were working and earning a living. I, on the other hand, was pursuing a graduate degree in English Literature.

  I was researching a PhD because a scholarship had permitted me to defer any actual choice about what I was going to do and where I was going to do it. I wanted to do everything except become an academic. Write books. Play music. Read everything. Travel everywhere. But I was afraid of my own passion, and corralled it by accepting the scholarship and hiding out in the University of Sydney library. Serious budding academics were devoting themselves to literary theory and years of research to the exclusion of other interests; they weren’t hanging out for the weekly opportunity to play jazz with like-minded enthusiasts. And although playing with other musicians was thrilling, I knew the workshops weren’t the path to professional musicianship: serious jazz musicians were auditioning for the Jazz Studies course at the Conservatorium of Music. At this stage, a sense of purpose, a goal for my research, a vision for my life—or a boyfriend—might have helped.

  Jeff, a sweet-natured bank teller, literally and musically speaking stood head and shoulders above the other amateur singers. A veteran of Freddy Wilson’s workshops, Jeff lived to sing jazz standards. Endlessly cheerful, he stood well over six feet tall and sported a mop of thick blond hair and a soft clear voice. He’d walk up Freddy’s unlit driveway at night, scat-singing as a warm-up exercise before class. Whenever I heard the line ‘Why not take all of me?’ floating out of the pitch-dark, I knew instantly it was Jeff and felt bad that my immediate next thought was No thanks.

  One night towards the end of my first term, Jeff handed me a cassette tape. ‘It’s my demo,’ he said. ‘Have a listen and let me know what you think.’

  Looking down, I saw that he had photocopied a black and white photograph of himself smiling directly at the camera and used it to line the cassette’s plastic casing. I pictured him in his lunch hour, a home-made tuna sandwich in one hand, lurking near the bank’s photocopier.

  ‘I thought maybe you’d like to rehearse with me sometime,’ he continued. ‘You know, get some gigs as a duo.’ Though flattered, for two mutually exclusive reasons I failed to picture myself performing in a suburban restaurant or shopping mall. The first: I was convinced I wasn’t remotely good enough to perform in a mall. Second, I had fancied myself playing my own compositions to a packed house at the Village Vanguard rather than jazz favourites at Chatswood Chase. But without making a choice, my fantasies of a creative professional life would remain just that.

  Despite my reservations, a few weeks later I headed to Jeff’s apartment. It seemed appropriate that he lived in a suburb called Neutral Bay. Historically, Neutral Bay was one harbour in which foreign vessels could safely dock, and I felt few qualms about rehearsing there with Jeff. He welcomed me with a cup of peppermint tea and smiled constantly to put me at ease, which had precisely the opposite effect. I was no Madame Bovary. Instead of inventing piano lessons in order to meet my lover, I had abandoned years of classical piano lessons and chosen instead to rehearse jazz standards with a bank teller to whom I felt no flicker of attraction.

  We warmed up for a few minutes before Jeff said, apropo
s of nothing, ‘Freddy thinks you’re a shit-hot piano player.’

  I took a gulp of hot tea and a moment to digest. It was the first scrap of feedback I’d had about my months-long participation in the workshops, and it wasn’t what I’d expected. What did it mean to be ‘shit-hot’? The phrase sounded oxymoronic—not to mention moronic. Was this how real musicians spoke about each other? If so, I would have to toughen up my ears to the professional language of jazz musicians if I wanted to be taken seriously. Clearly I was spending too much time among the dead poets on the library shelves.

  But I could neither truly picture myself as a professional musician—the late-night gigs and the lack of money, supplementing performance opportunities with wedding gigs and teaching—nor feel comfortable with the label amateur. The outside chance of playing professionally cast a shameful light on just playing for fun. Perhaps it was my father’s voice in my ear as a teenager, the self-made man urging my brother and me to make ourselves financially self-sufficient by the age of forty (however one was supposed to do that); or perhaps it was my mother’s voice, repeatedly insisting that I always have my own money separate from a man’s. Either way I was fixated on the necessity of having a ‘proper job’ even as I avoided the workforce with the postgraduate scholarship and scraped by living under my parents’ roof.

  In a Peanuts cartoon strip, Lucy van Pelt asks Schroeder: ‘What happens if you practise for twenty years, and then end up not being rich and famous?’

  ‘The joy is in the playing,’ he says.

  ‘You’re kidding!’ says Lucy.57

  Why couldn’t I learn Schroeder’s lesson? I would have discontinued my PhD and forged ahead with the jazz workshops, instead of the other way around. But Jeff and I never tried very hard to get a gig, and I stopped attending the workshops. Unlike Schroeder, I felt ashamed of my amateurism. Somehow I couldn’t simply enjoy being a competent pianist for its own sake. Playing solely for fun seemed pointless—especially when I had few job prospects and a dissertation to write.