A musical brother of mine, David Aaron, based in New York but formerly a Toronto guy who had the record store Flip City in the 80s/90s near The Cameron, wrote me about listening again to Diamond Mine after many years. He loved the extended solo. I often had extended solos, as was Greg’s wishes. He also controlled how they ended. Having spent the previous years playing only freely improvised piano music, day and night at York University. Playing in this band was a like one more exercise in improvisation. The rules this time to keep improvising over just two chords while the drums, bass and guitars remain a loop. I would travel as far as I could imagine. If it was in C I might go to C#. Greg kept his head down listening, when he felt the statement reached its end he would send me a signal to return to Earth. His signals were facial expressions not unlike someone about to steer a high-speed car into a brick wall. It came natural to him. One time he told me what he loved about my solos was that he felt like he was doing the soloing. I understood he meant that as a compliment, but I had to think it over to try making sense out of it. I think he meant I had access to playing in a few directions and he wished he could too, therefore, he felt like he was also doing it. Like parachuting into Madrid and hanging around Spanish speakers, then concluding you speak Spanish too.
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I played a solo piano piece one time and wasn’t pleased with it. Later a woman complimented me and with my disappointed feelings, I started explaining that she was wrong to speak nicely about it. That was so ridiculous. I only realized later from the confused look on her face that I hurt her feelings. You don’t know what someone else is experiencing and who is to say they are incorrect about their experience? One of the nicest compliments I ever got was around the same time, a musician who was a songwriter, heard me play an improvisation and told me I don’t know what you’re doing but I really like it.