The Song I'm Writing

There’s this piano tune I’ve had in my head the past two years. It doesn’t have a name yet, but I’ve been playing it in five-minute bursts since before this blog was born. It’s all arpeggios, staccatos and blues notes; Fmajor, very simple chord structure. Lots of B-flats, major-sevenths - I wish I had a composer’s vocabulary to describe the sound. I'm a pretty lousy pianist, but mostly self-taught. I go to the YMCA every few days and sit for a few minutes and I ‘compose’ before getting up to do my workout. The piano there is all I have access to downtown in the summer. It sits at the bottom of a stairwell and every couple minutes some musclehead walks by from the main gym to the conditioning room and probably wonders what I’m doing making fairy-piano-music when this is a place for sweating etc and why don't I get an iPod…. To be interrupted doesn’t bother me though; the acoustics are great in that stairwell and mostly I get to be alone, though I admit it’s nice when someone notices and appreciates the recital. Anyway the tune itself is happy, flirtatious, yet shy. I don’t know enough jazz to say it’s all that original, but it feels genuine. It’s filled with mistakes (my pitch is bad; I play by trial-and-error) and I play it different every time, but always it comes back to the same theme. The left-hand does a simple alternating descent by semitones across octaves usually starting from B-flat and the right-hand does variations on a cyclical four-fingered flick across F, sometimes C. It only takes hold of me when I’m physically in front of a piano, but when I’m playing it it’s like the piano was only built for this one song. It’s like wind chimes or a conversation between birds, and I can't stop working on it. It’s half-jazz, half-blues, and in five or ten years I think I’ll have enough for a movie score. So if ever you’re passing by my stairwell in the West End Y - I’m in grey sweat pants and a blue t-shirt, standing at the weathered brown Yahama. Look out, John Williams.