At a certain point when I was a boy they took me to the house of a piano teacher, an older woman who had two grand pianos side by side. I never understood everything she tried to teach me and she was disappointed each week when I returned revealing I didn’t know anything because I hardly practised since I didn’t understand it or why I was there. She got angry at me as if that would make me do the work. I pleaded with my parents to stop the lessons. I wanted nothing to do with this music business if this was what it was all about. I like the podcast Freakonomics and their byline, “the hidden side of everything”. I like their interest in the analysis of what incentives are in place or not, to understand why people successfully work at anything. I’m fortunate my brother was interested in playing blues piano and the combination of wanting to be like him (or perhaps liked by him) and liking the blues music he was playing, made me interested in playing piano too, soon it was all the time. Eventually, at school I noticed kids who took piano lessons, who might brag about what grade they were in from the established system of piano evaluation, couldn’t play by ear, couldn’t play the blues or anything on the radio which by then I could do by ear because learning the blues taught me that. They were freaked out if I played You’re Mama Don’t Dance and Your Daddy Don’t Rock n’ Roll (even in three keys). They didn’t understand how I could do it without notation. Many told me growing up that I was born with a gift which is absolutely untrue. Whoever can play, simply found pleasure doing it.