Discovering Ray Charles and Michael Jackson

One of the pleasures of youth is how exciting everything is when it's new. 
Then you start to analyze it, tease it apart, learn how to do it and the magic dissipates, but you have learned something and that is pretty cool, and it doesn't wreck what you've learned, but it changes where you get the pleasure from.

When I was six or seven, I learned how to catch a football, how to fake while running with the football, and I learned how to swim, and how to swim faster to compete, and I learned wrestling, which is much more technique than strength. And learning those things never wrecked them for me, but simply made them more interesting. Much later, I learned how to hit a baseball and how to track down a fly ball, but those things could only be taught to a point.

I tried to learn French, but never did, not much. In retrospect, I think a lot had to do with the way it was taught. I did way better and learned much more with some teachers than with others.

And I learned all sorts of techniques in my chosen profession, and that was really fun, because the people who taught me were very good teachers and because I was old enough to appreciate what a debt I owed them for taking the time to teach me something they could have done in a third the time, but they took the time to teach me.

But now, in my dotage, things have gotten  to be repetitive. My father used to say, you're not good at anything until you've done it so many times, it's a little boring. The famous practicing something 10,000 times or 10,000 hours. 
 I'm still learning baseball, but a what you can learn about baseball is limited by your reflexes, your eyesight and the condition of your joints.

So, I'm trying to learn to play the piano.
It is not exactly agonizing, but it is not easy. There are a lot of moving parts: where the notes are, which fingers to hit them with, triads, chords, octaves.  It's like one of those computer games, where you are flying the plane and all sorts of stuff is coming at you, all  at once.
It's way more complicated than learning typing, which you do by simple repetition in a month or two and after a while you cannot even write down where the keys on the board are--your fingers find them by themselves. My fingers will never find the piano keys by themselves. 

One problem with playing piano is there are seven notes and only five fingers on one hand. You'd think they could have worked that one out, but for some magical reason, you need seven different notes. Certain notes just don't sound right together, but others sound great together. Explain that.

Which brings me to Ray Charles. He does all this stuff, using two hands, one hand doing something different from the other,  and he sings at the same time and as much as I have loved his stuff , now I love it and am amazed anyone can hit the keys, sing the notes and inject phrasing and emotion into it all at the same time. Anything he does sounds better than almost anyone else--just listen to him play Fur Elise. It just comes out of nowhere, and then he slides into "I Got a Woman." 

 My piano teacher tells me Ray Charles  learned it the same way I am learning it, painfully, slowly, step by step. My piano teacher says someone taught Ray Charles to play piano,  but I do not believe a word of that. He just came out of the womb doing this. I am suffering through each step and will never get close. But that thought doesn't depress me; on the contrary, it excites me to think a person whose genetic code is 99% like that a chimpanzee, just like mine, can use that remaining 1% to do astonishing things no chimpanzee and certainly not I, can ever do.

And then there is Michael Jackson. Never could understand what all the excitement was about with Michael Jackson. Still don't get why my musician son thinks so highly of his music.  But his dancing.  Just try doing what he does. And he can sing as he's doing it.  I watched the Youtube of the first time he did the moon walk steps singing "Billie Jean," and had to pick myself up off the floor. I knew it was coming. The Youtube people tell you it's coming, but he holds off until he's into the last eighth of the song and then, after a bunch of other pretty astonishing moves, he just does it. You can hear the audience gasp, if you can hear the sound over your own gasp. And then you are waiting for him to do it again, and he does it again, just before the end, as if to say: "I can blow you away any time I want. But I only want to just right now." 

So even at my advanced old age, with my involuting brain and less than prime body, I can still experience something new. I can still be wonder struck.

All it took were piano lessons, Youtube and Ray Charles and Michael Jackson. 
What a wondrous world we live in.