Bob Gluck's Blog

At long last, my journey from playing piano in my trio (with Christopher Dean Sullivan and Karl Latham) – focusing on music by Pat Metheny – to writing a book based on the trio’s repertoire, traveled full circle this past week when after an extended pause, I returned to playing with the trio. It’s been a long haul, from pandemic to an auto accident to my ongoing recovery from my injuries. There remains a way to go, but performing again represents a personal landmark moment that will continue this year.

The pandemic didn’t bring our performances to an end; one show was on a street corner and it was followed by remote studio streams. The auto accident was another matter. I am grateful to have recovered this far after a driver ran a light and drove nearly head-on into my car in the middle of a large intersection. Misdiagnosis of my injuries led me to keep playing for several months, something that became increasingly untenable. Still, after substantially slowing down, I maintained twenty minutes of playing while standing every other day, then retreating to a recliner, my lower back wrapped in an icepack. These efforts netted a multitrack solo keyboard album (and every fleck of russet), which came out in January 2024.

It wasn’t until June 2024 that I began to play again every day at home. I was on an alternating 20-minutes sitting, 20-minutes standing routine for most of this time, but gradually worked up to longer periods sitting. My trusty icepack was never far away, and so it remains. I must credit Christopher Dean Sullivan and Karl Latham, my trio partners, for their continually encouragement. By July, I was ready to take a leap and schedule a couple of gigs following the August release of the book. The first one took place on September 25, 2024, with a second show scheduled for a month later. The spacing of these is quite intentional as my recovery remains gradual. Happily, we are developing plans to play more by the Spring.

As a young person, I spent two or more hours at the piano every day. I took an extended breather from playing after college. I returned to performing in 1999, but substantially as an electronic musician rather than a pianist. I should have known that music making was eventually going to lead me back to the piano. Once I was back at the piano in the early 2000s, I was all-in and it returned to the center of my life until the auto accident in October 2021. Through those sixteen years of steady playing, I juggled my career as a pianist with an academic career, which meant far less performing than I might have preferred. But I found the exchange to be a fair one as it made a solid home life possible as an alternative to a life on the road.

Around the mid-point between the accident and now, I was fortunate to discover a practitioner who correctly diagnosed my injuries and set me on a better reparative course. The good news is that for the past few months, when I hurt, it’s a matter of a day or two rather than weeks to be back on track. I remain quite unused to the limitations that shook my assumption that my body can do whatever I want it to. My current daily morning stretches are helpful and I’m learning to not draw conclusions from pain beyond the message that I need to slow down and not get ahead of myself. We all have limitations, and one must pay closer attention to them as one ages.

Some of my adaptations are the gear I am currently using – lighten than what I used to haul around. And as I pack my gear and roll it down the hallway – as I had done for many years – I’m aware that bending and pushing can be as bad news as sitting and playing. I am beginning to acknowledge that someone other than me needs to do the heavier lifting. At this point, hiring a roadie is not in the cards, so I must rely on friends and family.

Playing has rarely ever meant arriving, performing, and then heading home. Performance time inevitably includes packing, hauling, transporting, loading and unloading, setting up and taking down, and once home, again loading and unloading. This all requires care, pacing, and assistance. I think that drummers and keyboard players come to understand this relatively quickly. I have also chosen gear that weighs less than my former keyboards, relying more on software than hardware and being highly selective about what kinds of controllers become part of my set-up. Thankfully I know how to cobble together an assortment of devices and, equally important, packing them efficiently. Little about this is intuitive and all digital musicians should take a serious seminar to learn about all this.

Playing the first show was a joy. It also required a fair bit of recovery time. Hopefully over time the time needed to bounce back will shorten. Honestly, though, there’s nothing like playing with other musicians and I am cautiously excited about the future. I am always finding new angles to approach the Metheny material, and I’ve composed a fair bit of material this past year. There is a lot I’d like to do musically, along side the continuing lesson in patience.

~ by bobgluck on September 30, 2024.

Posted in In the hands of readers, music and the body, Pat Metheny, Personal notes, playing the music, the book's life in the world
Tags: bob gluck, christopher dean sullivan, improvisation, jazz, jazz piano, Karl Latham, music, news, Pat Metheny, piano, piano trio