Hearing Pianos from Different Rooms: A Discussion and a Playlist

When a piano makes a chord, how far can it echo through your tissues?

To find out, I enlisted @TheJK — Breakup Gaming Society's Chief Spiritual Officer and author of the excellent Me Being Serious newsletter, which tracks both I Ching and cultural currents — for an interview.

We began with this quote I found in Hampton Hawes’ autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, and just went from there.

The piano was the only sure friend I had because it was the only thing that was consistent, always made sense and responded directly to what I did. Pianos don’t ever change. Sittin’ there every day. You wanna play me, here I am. The D is still here, the A flat’s still here, they’re always going to be there and it don’t matter whether it’s Sunday, Ash Wednesday or the Fourth of July. Play it right and it comes out right; mess with it and it’ll make you back up. A piano don’t lie. Check the prancing players with the sparkles in their eyes and the pretty fingernails flashing up and down the keyboard — listen closely and that’s all there is, just flash and icing, no more depth or meaning than a wood chip dancing down a waterfall. A keyboard is more consistent than life, it gives you back what you put into it, no more, no less. In the forties Bud Powell had grease in his veins and burned the motherfucker up; Thelonious Monk plays it strange and beautiful because he feels strange and beautiful. The piano was the first secure and honest thing in my life, I could approach it on my own and fail or be good. Straight to the point and quick.

THE JK: That's interesting about "It gives you back what you put into it." To me, the piano is a movie instrument. It's like a film camera.

You can say any instrument can paint a picture, but a piano with the right fingers can create sudden suspense, peace, or chaos (many will say any instrument can do this, and that's fine).

Other instruments, to me, often feel like they announce themselves coming and going more than a piano does. A piano feels slippery, and sneaky.

If piano was a planet, to me, it'd be Mercury. It can trick, it can communicate, it can be incredibly fast, it can be malleable.

Electric guitar or drums I'd probably say belonged to Mars. The microphone to the Sun, a sampler, like an MPC, to Saturn, since it can deconstruct and manipulate the dead.

But, piano, I'd say belonged to Mercury.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: OK, that was a lot to chew on and I want to get into some of this with you. I also love the piano, and know you to be both a serious head and a cerebral person. 

But I’ve noticed that while we share that reverence for music, a lot of the stuff — even within genres we both love, like hip hop and jazz — we gravitate to is wildly different. Like when I get drunk and text you all those random tracks and am stunned to learn that I was not, in fact, listening with your ears. 

I like the boogie and swing and stride. You like the fusion and funk and experimental stuff.

So what piano song these days is painting the trickiest pictures for you these days? 

Or help me understand a piano song you think of as classically mercurial and cinematic.

THE JK: Yeah, we do have different tastes with that.

There's nothing new at the moment that comes to mind, but I thought about some older stuff:

That DJ Premier beat sounds like a tiger creeping through an NYC alley.

Or for piano used a bit differently, you have "Runaway" by Kanye West.

There was an original version that doesn't have the buildup, but the album version has a plink that keeps hitting like a drop of water in the sink until the rest of the song comes rushing in.

As far as cinematic, the first thing that comes to mind is an actual movie (my favorite movie of all time): Eyes Wide Shut and this song: 

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: When you started talking about piano snippets in Golden Era joints, the first thing that bubbled up in my head was “Hip Hop Rules” by Boogie Down Productions off their Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop LP. It’s funny, not to oversimplify, but I feel like I’m drawn to the percussive qualities of the left hand while you’re thinking about how the right hand leads and makes moods.

Speaking of which, I haven’t watched Eyes Wide Shut since its theater release, but I do remember that piano figure that keeps repeating — it definitely seemed to carry the themes of menace and alienation in the movie. Halting, haunting, spare.

I had a buddy who was a true polymath who could write and play for piano and guitar. One summer he taught me how to pound out simple left-hand octaves with my left hand and mirror them with three-finger chords and he was always like, “Remember, the piano is a percussion instrument.”

One night we got wrecked in my folks’ home in Park Hill when they were gone somewhere and he videotaped us pulling off some stupid duet where I played the one thing I could do with the technique he taught me and he just effortlessly followed along. I didn’t have any knowledge, but I did have rhythm, and we just knocked the living hell out of that basic-ass melody until past midnight and that was probably one of the best nights of my life.

THE JK: Honestly, Return of The Boom Bap is probably the KRS album I return to the most, so I wasn't familiar with that song, but it's good. 

That is interesting, especially if the left and right hands serve different purposes while playing, because I wasn't aware of that. I dropped out of my piano class (along with many other classes) in college.

That's also interesting about the percussive instrument stuff. 

It sounds like a good time. I don't have any first-person stories like that, but my grandfather used to tell me his dad would play the piano drunk, sing songs in Austrian (or Czech, or Slovak, I don't know which one my family was using) and put his arm around him on some "My son!" shit.

That's one thing about piano, I guess, as shown by your story: It can be a collaborative instrument.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: We were piss poor on the farm in Missouri, but The Moms did have a piano. She tried to teach me. I was lazy and I quit. The plodding folk melodies in the beginner’s books blinded me with boredom. Trying to read the sheet music. Quarter notes, half beats, all the notation…it made me insane. I just wanted to boogie.

But before I ever got sat down for a lesson, I have this memory of approaching the keyboard with “Yankee Doodle” in my head. So I thought I was just going to sit down and play that shit. I started pecking at the keys thinking it was just going to come out. I was horrified at what I heard. How could this be? Why couldn’t I just bang out the song? So I think that’s one of the things that spoke to me in the Hawes passage, that envy of someone who can just sit down in front of that tool and work it, make what’s happening in their head happen with the keys and pedals.

I cannot tell you the size of the impression that hearing boogie woogie made on me when they’d play it during evening programs on the radio on whatever NPR affiliate my parents liked. I was transfixed. I revistied the giants of the ‘30s — Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Meade Luxe Lewis — and I not only was still in love with it, but it started a growing sense in my mind that maybe I belonged to that time and not here. It leapt out the speakers with such immediacy that I swear I could understand being in the room the day it was made.

And back to that left hand: eight beats to the bar like a jackhammer, never tiresome in its repeating (well, because the right hand flourishes bring the melody out and the soloing was…basically rock and roll, except it’s 1938 or something). Like Freddie Slack said in “Down the Road a Piece,” “If you want boogie woogie, then you’ll get your fill/It’ll put the eight beats through you like an old steam drill.” That’s what happened. I am still marked by it and still return to it weekly and I love it so much it hurts me.

When people treat old jazz like ambient brunch music or lazy cultural shorthand or irrelevant, it makes me feel very lonely, it feels like I’m the only person alive in the room.

THE JK: Yeah, sheet music is a little too much for me. It feels like math. And this is coming from someone that dedicated their life to the I Ching.

I feel you, but I think we all have one talent or skill that would cause someone else to say "Wow," if they saw us putting it into action. Not to discount any masterful piano players or anything, I just think we all got a little something.

That's interesting you can pinpoint when exactly it was that the instrument put you in a headlock. I'm not sure I can do that.

I think a lot of people don't realize just how many styles of jazz are out there when they look at it that way. Of course, it's all dependent on personal tastes. There's a lot of masters in the past, but if the style isn't my kind of jazz, it won't really resonate.

Rap album liner notes were my gateway drug, and it led me to people like Ahmad Jamal.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Yes, tracing samples back through time is crazy fun. That’s why I think I may get one more tattoo before I die: the Beatnuts logo, which they lifted off the Hank Mobley “Turnaround” LP. It’s all right there: the spirit of jazz and hip hop in one beautiful, organic, swirling arrow. (Funny side note: When “U Can’t Touch This” broke, did you ever meet anybody who heard that song before they heard “Superfreak” and they were like, “Heyyyy, he stole that from Hammer!” XD XD XD). I guess we could get on a different thread about the vanishing of historical awareness, but yeah.

So Ahmad Jamal. He algorthimed into my rotation last year. Now we’re back at the piano. 

My jam by him is “Poinciana” from a live ’58 recording. It’s miced exquisitely. The percussion is so crisp and warm at once. I kept it in my Likes because it is fairly long and it defied my expectations of what a ’58 cut would be: minute after minute, I’m waiting for the piano or a lead sax to erupt in solo, but it…just keeps gliding and gliding with subtle fillips here and there to keep you tickled. Patient and buoyant. Full of light. I love that song.

THE JK: I didn't realize they got their logo from that. Haa, I was only three years old when "U Can't Touch This" came out, and while I knew of the song when it dropped, I wasn't privy to those kinds of conversations. I did, however, get my uncles ribbing me about all of the stuff Puffy sampled in the late '90s, like "Kashmir."

I don't know that one off the top of my head, but I may have heard it. I don't know if there's someone I'd rather hear on the piano than him. 

It made me remember, though, that in my producing days I think I sampled him on this track I did for a friend: 

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Wait a goddamn minute. 

Did you just cap this with an original beat? Was not ready for that. God bless you. That’s a good loop.

One final question: you said drum and sampler energy issued from fundamentally different planets. So which planet belongs to the TR808 kick drum? Does it reside in the MPC/sampler bucket, the drum bucket, or does it have a star of its own? Your ruling will be accepted as final for purposes of this conversation.

THE JK: Thank you, man.

Haa, I mean, I'd say the sampler is a Saturnian device, but the 808 sound itself, I'd still say is a Mars thing. There's a reason crunk music threw that shit into everything. It's an inciting sound. 

It's a Martian ghost summoned by a Roland Ouija board, possessing us with the same conflict that caused the apocalyptic event that turned that planet into a red desert that billionaire neo-feudalists lust over.

-finis-