[Dixielandjazz] Bob Milne's wisdom on playing well

[Eli Newberger]

Dear List:
Bob Milne sent me the following message.  Because it was so provocative,
and important to keeping this music alive, I asked for his permission to
post it here.  
Eli Newberger
 
Hi Eli:
 
    If I may be so bold, I'd like to share with you my own perspectives
with you on playing ragtime.  My only excuse for my kind of playing is
that I did whatever had to be done in order to keep from being fired.
I've made my living (feeding myself, finding shelter, etc.) from playing
pianos since 1964.  Piano playing has been my one and only source of
income for almost 40 years now, so I developed my own "rules" to survive
by.
 
    In 1964 there was no printed music for ragtime.  I started off as a
sing-a-long piano player in saloons, and developed syncopation in such
tunes as "Bill Bailey" so that the piano could be heard more easily in
noisy environments.  (Two hands hitting the keyboard at different times
didn't sound as muddy as having them hit together.  "Too many notes...")
The first time I heard a rag, I thought, "Goodness: this style must have
been developed by people who played in noisy environments, like me."  I
became fascinated with rags, learning them by ear as fast as I could
hear them.  "How fast should they be played?" was the main question to
me, and the answer was different for different surroundings.  In
saloons, as the noise level and general level of intensity increased
with each later hour of the evening, I found that the audiences
responded better when I played the rags (or anything else for that
matter) slightly faster.  "No," not trying to placate a bunch of drunks,
because we had people who threw the drunks out, but driven by the fact
that the human psyche seemed to be more aggressive during certain times.
(Dealing a woman, perhaps?  With a lot of other males around, does a
male on the prowl at 11:00 prefer the music to be a little more forceful
to spur his masculinity just a bit?)  I don't know the psychological
answers, but I do know that by NOT playing the faster tempo during the
"heyday of the evening," I was likely to be looking for another job in
short order.  
 
    Compare this to a job I played this last weekend in central Iowa.  A
mansion-estate, of which the grounds seemed to rival Buckingham Palace,
had its annual "Summer Days at Brucemore," and I played ragtime outside,
under the huge, spreading shade trees which towered above.  A 1905 Rolls
Royce was on the lawn, about 200 feet away, and the grounds were filled
with people dressed in spectacular 1890's attire, strolling among the
cultured gardens, wearing their top hats, derby hats, or carrying their
delicate parasols.  In an environment such as this, all tempos slow down
to a slow drag.  I learned many years ago to play AS SLOWLY AS POSSIBLE
WITHOUT HAVING THE PIECE FALL APART in outdoor settings.  So I was
playing the same tunes that roared in the beerhall to inspire the male
ego or whatever, but now in a totally different, and decidedly slower,
fashion: people could be seen to slowly strut, or even sashay a little,
to the gentle strains of ragtime.  It seems to me that tempos must fit
the environs, sort of like playing to silent movies (which I've done
quite a bit of).  I often look around, when I'm playing a job, and try
to set the tempos with whatever speed would fit in with the movement of
the listeners.  ("The world is a stage....," or something like that.)
 
    So where does that leave someone like me in regards to "tempo?"
"Hmmm," thought I, "the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, none
other."  I also, years ago, realized that Scott Joplin wasn't going to
get fired from the job for not playing right, I was.  So it was up to me
to make the right choices or get fired.  So much for tempo markings.  
 
    On the musical notes themselves...
 
    I quickly realized, years ago, that the people who were listening to
this stuff didn't know what the printed notes were.  That was all right,
because neither did I.  I'd hear "The St. Louis Rag," or "Carolina
Shout," or any of the other great ragtime pieces, and learn them from
the few hearings I was lucky enough to get.  (Remember: no printed music
yet in the 1960's.  Also, were the guys I was listening to playing
"correctly?"  Hmmm, what is "correctly?")  Nor did I care about the
printed music.  All I knew was that the listening public had no
difficulty in telling whether a piano player was any good or not.  Their
opinions were not based on "who could play the fastest," or any such
notion.  Their opinions were based totally on whether the music "fit
them like a suit of clothes" at the moment, or not.  I also learned that
the same listening public, who told me time and time again that they
"didn't know anything about music," would at the same time complain to
me about some piano player who "always played everything the same way."
How did they know this, if they "didn't know anything about music," as
they claimed?  Well, the answer is, I decided, that the listening public
is VERY MUSICALLY INTELLIGENT, whether they know it or not, and also, MY
JOB DEPENDS ON THESE PEOPLE!  Play to THEM, not to some stone sculpture
sitting on a post somewhere!
 
        The composer's intentions?  Well, to me, I wanted to play "The
Maple Leaf Rag" in such a way that would make Eubie, James P., or
someone like that, proud.  "But Scott Joplin didn't intend for that,"
someone wails.  Well, I don't really see why a "boom-ching" bass can be
any different from tubas playing on the beat and French horns and
clarinets playing off the beat.  Is the bass line rising or descending?
Well, I know from listening to Bach that contrapuntal motion is a lot
more interesting that parallel.  The same can be said of boogie-woogie,
a topic that many purists demean, but, "oh, well."  "How about the
complex chords of Joseph Lamb," someone yells.  Well, there's lots of
ways to "complex" a chord, by adding other notes to it other than the
chord tones.  If I play an augmented fifth chord at a certain place in a
Lamb rag, can the listening audience tell later on if I play a "III 7th"
chord?  Or a similarly related set of notes?  The answer is, "they can,"
and they'll like it if I don't play the "complexities" the same way all
the time.  Anyone who knows how to manipulate chords can make "Mary Had
a Little Lamb" sound like Beethoven, or whatever composer they want.  I
was always "orchestrating" the tunes or rags anyways, so why can't I
just tell someone that, "I'm playing the piano orchestration version,"
or something like that?  Then I'd be referring to a sacred set of
printed notes, even though they didn't exist!  (I actually did that a
few times to placate some the madding crowd.) 
 
    In 1974 I went to the first ragtime festival of my life, in Toronto.
Having now been playing for 10 years (but still feeling inferior to
everyone else because I was just a "home-grown, day-to-day-survivalist,
play-by-your-wits" piano player) one of the first topics of discussions
I heard going on was, "How far from the written score is it permissible
to deviate?"  I didn't know what they were talking about.  Yes, the
movie "The Sting" was out by now, and "yes," printed scores were now
available, but it was all meaningless to me as a saloon piano player.
On top of that, I'd already "written" a bunch of my own rags, and NEVER
played them the same way twice!  (Remember?  The audiences didn't go for
predictable piano players.)  I decided that the printed scores were for
people who's livings weren't dependant on playing the piano, and that
their arguments didn't apply to me.  (This got me into trouble.  Being
naive, I told someone at that festival that, "playing by notes was for
people who didn't know how to play the piano."  Yes, I wish I'd never
said that, but I did say it, and I meant it at the time.  My livelihood
depended on what I was doing on the keyboard: theirs didn't.)
 
      [Allow me, at this point, to insert a little aphorism that I'd
learned early in life, which is horrifyingly appropriate for the art of
musical survival.  It's an observation on some doggerel:  
            "Her breath is fragrant, as of the wafting of the gentle
breezes across the morning roses..."  The first person who said this was
a poet.  The second was an idiot.]
 
    Well, this aphorism is true of among the listening public.  In
Mozart's day, anyone who played the same thing the same way all the time
was looked down upon as being a "mechanicus."  (Clementi was a
"mechanicus" to Mozart.)  The art of improvisation was called, "playing
with taste," and was expected of the superior musicians.  (The same as
was expected of James P., Luckey Roberts, or any other top professional
in the era.)  The same "playing with taste" applied to Beethoven, and
all the early piano virtuosos of Europe.  (Alexander Dreishock, a
Russian pianist, played the left hand of Chopin's "Revolutionary Etude"
in octaves at full speed.  It was astounding, even to Chopin: he loved
it.)  Well, I could see why the performing classicists "played with
taste:" my own little saloon job training had already showed me why all
this was.  And I surmised, too, that James P., Willie "The Lion," Eubie,
and all the rest of the "home-grown, day-to-day-survivalist,
play-by-your-wits" piano players were probably keeping their jobs and
blowing away the competition by making the piano "their own," not
somebody else's!
 
    At any rate, I finally came to the conclusion that there are not
one, but many ways to play all music (not just ragtime).  Being a
life-long violator of the printed notes, I have read everything I can
find to justify this.  (I'm actually a classical musician: French horn
at the Eastman School of Music, the Rochester Philharmonic, the
Baltimore Symphony, and countless smaller orchestras.)  I have studied
in great detail the lives of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Liszt,
Chopin, Brahms, and on and on, to see what those guys did in regards to
playing "as written," and discovered that none of them did: not even
their own tunes!  (Chopin came the closest.)  The rest of them "played
with taste," as was the phrase of the day, and went after their music
with the showmanship of a high-wire performer, thrilling their audiences
between breath-taking balances of either great delicacy or stunning
daring.  This, to me, was the nature of the true performing artist.
 
     I always tried to play in such a way that the listener would be
pleased.  If it was Beethoven, I'd embellish it in the way I envisioned
Beethoven would have done it, taking the chances that I thought he'd
have taken.  If it was ragtime, I'd try to play it in such a way that
would be identifiable to anyone as ragtime, either slow, fast, or
somewhere in the middle.  It's not possible to fool the listening public
by playing trite music for very long: you'll get fired.  So in regards
to the different playing styles, I have always noticed that Jelly Roll
didn't try to imitate Eubie, and Eubie didn't imitate Joplin, and Joplin
didn't try to imitate Turpin, and on and on.  So why should I, or anyone
else, try to imitate them?  The real judge was, and remains to me, my
listening audience.  Play good and they'll love you: play pap and
they'll fire you.
 
        If you're still reading this lengthy tome, thank you.  Your
paper is brilliant, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, as well as
appreciating the huge amount of work you put into writing it.  If the
above ravings have any relevance on the wanton insertions of different
rhythmic patterns, note patterns, or outright deviating from printed
scores, I will feel honored to have shared them with someone.  These are
simply my own ideas and approaches to surviving in this field.  
    And right now, sitting here, I feel like I just told you why I stole
the watermelon when I was a kid.  It's "because it was there," just like
the notes on the piano.  
    All the best, Eli.  Thanks for sending me your paper.  I am...
 
    Sincerely yours,
 
    Bob Milne