Saint Art

There is an exercise I’m working on, it’s something from the school of Art Tatum. Morphing scales of C and C# an unexpected way of hearing two things together that ordinarily don’t go together. I’m working on it slowly (does one have another choice). If I later arrive anywhere close to being swift it will be amazing, and then I’ll try it adding left hand ideas. While I work at this each day, there are some daydreams present about the brain of Art Tatum, technically blind and able to play faster than the Tazmanian devil, and by that I don’t just mean velocity but the complex length of his phrases and consistent accuracy of each crazy notes waterfall. Once or twice while listening to Keith Jarrett even Bill Evans, I heard something that I thought was an error, a passing note, a momentary clam, happens to everyone (and when I heard it, it made me feel like a million bucks because they were suddenly normal instead of Gods) but I’m yet to ever hear it from the blind guy who died of a painful kidney problem in his forties. I wonder about the kind of brain that would make a cute melodic sequence out of playing C & C# together, can’t help but gush over how a mind could solve a problem that never existed.

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