It's not what it sounds like.

Pianist. Geeze, what a crappy word. Every time you say it, guaranteed there's someone who's like "...what did you say?"

There's a surprising number of ways you can procrastinate when avoiding summatives and general homework. After exhausting all other possibilities (ie. Facebook, DeviantART, and looking at prom hairstyles), I figured I might as well practice piano. For those of you who aren't aware, I've been taking jazz piano lessons this year, since completing my grade 8 piano exam last June. I wanted to switch it up a bit, you know, get out of the cramp of playing classical music. Ok I'm getting a little off track here but I might as well just tell you my life story. So I really didn't know anything about what jazz piano playing was when I decided I wanted to take jazz lessons...turns out it's mostly improv! What I hate most. Or USED to hate most. I'm totally pro-star at it now...well maybe not QUITE that good but I've got a pretty good grasp of it. Jazz piano is definitely a lot harder than I thought it'd be, though. I figured I'd just be playing normal scored music, but noooo, since jazz is mostly improv, they have this thing called a fake book, which is like, the melody of the song with chords above it. Chords written like A7 or G#7b5. And of course, an A7 is not as easy as playing A C# E G, there's JAZZ VOICINGS meaning I have to basically memorize approximately 36 new chords (for the 7, maj 7, and -7) whaaaat fun. BAH So then what you do is play the "head", or the melody with the chords, straight through once, and then you go crazy and improvise.

Now, as much as I've complained about jazz piano, it's actually kinda fun, now that I know the chords and I'm more comfortable improvising.

BUT back to the point of this entry. So I'm procrastinating by practising piano, which turned into procrastinating practising jazz so I played through "Somewhere Out There" (from An American Tail) and then I was suddenly inspired to play my grade 8 piano exam songs! So I dug out my grade 8 book from the piano bench and flipped through until I found my songs (I couldn't remember what they were called) and...I was REALLY surprised to find I could still play them pretty fluently! I mean sure, a few mistakes, but it was pretty good! And it's honestly been like, exactly a year since I've played these songs. It was sweet.

And, with my new-found love of classical music (Wolfy!), I've decided that I'm going to buy the grade 9 book and teach myself it this summer. Or some of it, at least. It'll have a good collection of classical/romantic/baroque songs that'll be the right level for me. And it'll be nice to play some scored music again. EEE I love when I'm excited to play my instruments.