When I was a little girl taking classical piano lessons in Chicago, I took sitting still for granted. Reading music seated on a piano bench reminded me of reading words seated at my desk in school. My grandmotherly teacher did not ask me to sing or clap out a rhythm. At home, the piano was in the living room, not a place the kids hung out, and aside from my practicing no one touched it. The adults in my family didn’t sing or dance or listen to music, either on records or on the radio, and we didn’t go to church. At school, we sang songs like “The Red River Valley,” “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” “Dixie,” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” There was no foot-tapping or marching involved.
My lessons ended at age ten, when we moved to Washington, D.C. I asked to start again in eighth grade. I had heard more classical piano at a new school and understood better what the goal of lessons might be—plus I found my own teacher, a younger woman, who seemed to enjoy playing, despite her Canadian reserve. She took me to concerts where I absorbed the decorum of classical pianists: sit still and look absorbed, don’t smile foolishly. The audience only clapped at the end of the piece, not between movements and not at moments of great virtuosity. I watched Andre Watts, a black classical pianist, play in a Young Peoples concert on TV, and saw that he conformed to convention.
In those days, popular music for me was Motown and the Beatles. We didn’t see the Motown musicians when the singing groups appeared on television. None of the Beatles played keyboards on Ed Sullivan. Rock-and-roll was all about the guitar. I caught snippets of gospel piano style when the networks flashed a shot of a black church choir, like a trigger warning, before civil rights news. The protest coverage was my first exposure to spirituals and freedom songs. I figured we were the only Negroes in America who didn’t belong to a church. When I was seventeen, I saw Little Stevie Wonder perform “Fingertips” at Carter Barron, the outdoor amphitheater in Rock Creek Park. He was eighteen and never stopped moving, playing piano and harmonica. It was my introduction to an alternate piano universe, just before I left for college and learned about jazz.
Decades later, when I resumed piano lessons and tried playing jazz standards, the teacher suggested that I tap my toe. After so many years of counting in my head, it felt odd to mark time with my foot. An ergonomic jazz teacher instructed me to tap my heel, rather than my toe, because she said that motion was easier to sustain. She was right. I liked tapping my foot: it felt like a support. I started watching the feet of piano players. I noticed that the “jazz” piano players didn’t move when they played in a classical setting, like Herbie Hancock playing “Rhap-sody in Blue” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (You can find this, as I did, on YouTube.) I learned that Hancock had played Mozart with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age eleven, so I imagine he had some practice sitting still.
Over the years, I’ve taken adult-school jazz classes as well as private lessons. At the first meeting, the teacher goes around the room and asks about our musical training and what we hope to learn in class. Inevitably, the women, like me, took classical lessons as children and now want to learn to improvise for jazz. The men sheepishly admit that they couldn’t sit still for lessons as boys, but learned to pick out tunes themselves. They want to learn technique and theory. It is as though we girls learned Spanish by reading the textbook and the boys learned to speak listening to their friends. We missed the ear training, they missed the grammar.
Judging from my children’s musical education, which was experiential and multicultural (lots of drumming), I get a sense that the field has evolved. They sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Imag-ine” in school. My piano teacher lets children suggest what music they would like to play. Conservatories offer jazz classes. One could be lulled into the belief that immobility no longer distinguishes the classical musician, and that the rigid segregation of musical genres belongs to the past.
Recently, though, I encountered an old-school teacher. My friend and I had started playing four-handed one-piano classical duets, mostly French: Bizet, Fauré, Debussy. Early on, we visited her piano teacher for some pointers. We were struggling to keep the rhythm together, because each of us had always played alone. That teacher immediately told me to stop bobbing my head. At first I was mortified, because I supposedly knew better; but on reflection, I was pleased that I no longer automatically sit still. Chatting later, the teacher asked what I was learning in my own piano lessons. She knew the piece, “The Graceful Ghost Rag,” by a contemporary musician, William Bolcom. Her comment was, “He wrote some real music, too.”
Her judgment caught me off-guard, like a casual slap. I thought of retorts, but I said nothing. Her reality may be limited to classical music, but mine is not. At a jazz festival recently, I watched the feet of the piano players: Chucho Valdez, from Cuba, stomping in black patent leather oxfords (at least size fourteen); Joey Alexander, the teenager from Indonesia, jiggling his right leg and sneakered foot; Eliane Elias, from Brazil, rocking back and forth on both glittering high heels—all of them completely focused, playing real music.
My piano teacher, with whom I study both classical and jazz, compares playing music to a huge sky. Wherever we point the telescope, he says, details resolve.
Toni Martin is a writer and physician who lives in Berkeley.
