[From Bill Powers (2012.10.03.0830 MDT)]
I have heard her and talked with
her personally. She is from St Louis. Her dad is retired from tech
support at Principia HS in St Louis. She gave a concert at our local
Ethical Society last year. She is endearing, but that jazz she puts out
is mean. I think I also remember her doing some great stride work.Glad to share another common uncommon love.
Yes, some great, even incredibly great, stride work. She has said herself
that it’s “demanding” and requires a lot of endurance and
precision. It’s quite unusual for her to hit more than one or two wrong
notes (that I could hear) during a piece. From a PCT standpoint stride
piano involves the left hand alternating between hitting a note in the
bass and then, still with the left hand, a chord in the middle range, at
the rate of perhaps two or three complete cycles per second and a
distance that is often 18 inches to two feet, with an accuracy of plus or
minus a quarter to half an inch, and doing all this for 3 to 6 minutes.
The bass notes follow a walking pattern much like what you hear played on
a string bass in a jazz band and the chords change accordingly. All this
goes on while the right hand is executing intricate fast figures in the
treble clef. In the interview I mentioned, she said that while she was
taking lessons, age 5 to 18, she practiced an hour a day. Now she
practices eight hours a day. I can readily believe that this is the level
of effort required to maintain all those control systems working so
well.
Interestingly, in telling others how to do this, her advice is
“relax.” I take that to mean that even trying to play that way
would would be impossible for anyone with significant conflicts.
I connect with her so strongly because in high school friends called me
the Boogie Woogie King. I learned a lot of pieces by listening to
recordings of Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Earl “Father” Hines,
Meade “Lux” Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson, and many
others – the same artists that Stephanie Trick learned boogie woogie
from in the same way. You can find samples on YouTube by googling on the
names. When she plays boogie it is totally authentic, and about a dozen
levels of skill above anything I ever achieved, though there are
occasional spots where she sounds the way I did back in the day. I was a
great success in the early '40s, for the sole reason that no real
musician in the school was interested in playing boogie woogie. Now, as I
said to my sister Alice, I have learned what real humility feels
like. Painful, but at the same time a great joy.
Stride piano is much harder than boogie woogie. In boogie woogie, the
left hand simply plays a repeating eighth-note pattern, shifting from (in
my case) the key of C to F to G in a standard pattern, whle the right
hand plays various riffs. I used to practice the left-hand patterns for
hours to make them automatic, while reading a book. Some
musician.
Best,
Bill P.
P.S. Lloyd (and everyone else), if there is to be a CSG meeting in 2013,
someone else is going to have to organize it. I’m kind of flat about it
since encountering massive indifference at CU, and my COPD, as predicted,
is not getting better. On oxygen 24-7. The main symptom is simply running
out of breath after any physical effort like walking 50 feet – otherwise
everything seems quite normal, even my thinking (although that may be a
matter of opinion). You might contact Fred Good and Mike Mermel, or
anyone else who seems interested. It would be nice to spend a week much
nearer to sea level at some place that can be reached by train from
Denver.
Mary, our original organizer, will have been gone for eight years next
week, on October 8th at 3:30 PM MST. Spare her a thought.
BP
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At 04:50 PM 10/2/2012 -0500, lloydk@klinedinst.com wrote: