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PREFACE: RAHN BURTON (VIA RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK) SENDS A MESSAGE

 

(This is the pianist, Rahn Burton, who by soloing for 10 minutes
on a pop Motown song in many different classical and jazz styles
convinced me to forget about music schools and look for the
best private teachers )

RAHN BURTON (VIA RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK) SENDS A MESSAGE
 
            After Frosty's band broke up I continued studying music, returning to the music school (from which I had dropped out to travel with Frosty's band) to study music theory.
            I was given a grad student there to tutor me.  On the second week he gave me an assignment, to re-harmonize a popular song.  I was into Motown at the time (thanks to Marvin Gaye's opus) and chose 'My Girl' as the song to be the source of the harmonic variations.
            When I told my tutor the name of the song I had worked on, he shook his head in a vigorous negative.  "No, Lee.  I meant a standard or Broadway song, something with 32 bars and a lot of harmonic movement already in it.
You cannot possibly write interesting variations on a song with just three or four chords!" 
            "But I think I did, sir! Take a look at it."
            But my tutor refused to look at my work, indeed, refused to even look down so he wouldn't even have to see my paper.  He ordered me to redo the assignment, this time chosing a suitably 'advanced' song from the Broadway or 'Great American Songbook' repertory.
            I went home furious.  He never even glanced at my paper!  How could he be so sure that the new harmonies were not complex and didn't work?
            Now Rahsaan Roland Kirk's band was playing that night in Boston, and I had been a big Kirk fan from the time he worked with Mingus and up to his current album Volunteered Slavery (appropriately enough, about 'volunteering' to play current R&B tunes which were not his first choice but the choice of Black youth).  
            As always, it was a wonderful set, and I relished the chance to see live his pianist, Rahn Burton, a full-fingered pianist in the Art Tatum/Jaki Byard tradition, with a lot of gospel in his sound. 
            For the closing number of the first set, Rahsaan announced "Now we are going to play 'My Girl'.  Rahn, take it away!"
            You can imagine how excited I was by this turn of events.   What would the full-fingered Burton do with this song? 
            Well, what he did was to solo on it for at least ten minutes, in a solo which was a brief selected history of keyboard music, starting with playing 'My Girl' in the style of Bach, then of Beethoven, then of Brahms or Dvorak, then of Debussy, then into the Black American tradition with ragtime and New Orleans, swing, bop, and ending with the modal style of McCoy Tyner.  And from what I could hear, there was a-plenty of new harmonies with each new style.
            Ten minutes!  Probably more!  The most complex piano solo I had heard since Duke Ellington's solo piano musings on "My fathers, far greater men than me" in 1970. 
            So well before Burton had finished, I knew that I had to find teachers from outside the conservatory, that I had to find on my own individual music teachers who had open as well as highly-trained minds,
            For a bonus, Rahn turned out to be very friendly at the set break, willing to spend a hunk of his precious off-time to give me advice on practicing - the only thing I remember now was he said he started every daily practice session with some hard work with the Hanon and Czerny technique books before going on to his improvisation work.
            And you can bet for the rest of my performing career - from around 1973 to 2010 (when I became more of a teacher than a performer), Hanon, Czerny, and other technique books were my daily bread (and from the African-American side,  Oliver Nelson's Patterns for Improvisation and Yusef Lateef's  Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns.  (For best results, play the exercises in these books in 12 keys.  That will last you a lifetime!) (especially if combined with Charlie Banacos's advice, to start each day's practice by playing a song in all 12 keys  = or as many as you can manage: I never got past 4 keys per day!).   
 
 

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