The Joys of Competition

Last night, I had the grand pleasure of hearing jazz pianist Hiromi perform a solo piano concert. I had seen her play solo last year and was mightily impressed, but this was another universe altogether. The blend of extraordinary virtuosic technique with exquisite dynamic control, her physical engagement that could be seen as showmanship but instead was wholly authentic and engaging, her playfulness with the music and the audience, setting up our expectation for certain notes and then fooling us, the remarkable range of style that was impossible to classify in any one genre, the use of every single note on the keyboard from the lowest to the highest, including reaching into the piano for other sonic effects damping or plucking string. I could go on. Of course, none of this conveys the experience of being there and the good news is it’s likely she’ll play in your part of the world someday. I think I was in Spain some years back when I passed a small jazz club and she was scheduled to play!

 

In her run at SF Jazz, she played duet the night before with a tap dancer (!) and tonight she plays in a trio. I would love to see her and Yuja Wang play a duet concert, though you’d have to have the fire department standing by as the sparks would be flying! Worth noticing that it’s a Chinese woman wholly mastering a European classical repertoire and a Japanese woman wholly mastering an American jazz repertoire and both playing a little bit (at least) of the other genre.Yet further proof that we all are part of a shared collective unconscious that defies geography, ethnicity, gender and more. 

 

I’m about to play with my band today for my party and it’s tempting to react the way jazz pianists did when they heard Art Tatum play. “Why bother?” they sighed and changed their careers to go into accounting. Or knowing that she has climbed Mt. Everest and the best I can do is walk up a few San Francisco hills, take the “comparisons are odious” route and just play as well as I can, connecting to whatever I’m playing, be it simple or complex, as deeply as I can and connecting to any listeners as well as I can. As I did yesterday at the Jewish Home for the Aged, lifting us up with my Tea for Two shtick and embracing us all in the comfort of Schubert’s Ave Maria. 

 

I saw a movie about Isaac Stern in China and he was watching an extraordinary gymnast do his routine and then quipped, “Yeah, but can he play Mozart?” So I could say to Hiromi, “Yeah, but can she teach three-year-olds?” Actually, she’d probably be great, as she wholly embodied the playful 3-year-old spirit. 

 

But it's not a competition. Or rather, it is a competition in the root sense of that word.  “Com” meaning “with, “petition” meaning to offer supplication to a particular person, office or more profoundly, a deity. When two jazz players are trading 8’s or two experts playing tennis, they are both together petitioning the gods of jazz and tennis. They are doing so with each other, not against each other. Each spurring the other on to greater heights of accomplishment and expression. At the end, you can see that as the best musicians and athletes hug each other in thanks for raising them higher in their craft. 

 

So thanks to Hiromi for kickin’ my butt to kingdom come and back to work—and play—I go.