ON PLAYING THE PIANO "BY EAR" IN THE KEY OF C...(ONLY)

I've mentioned quite a bit about Saranac Lake (my hometown,) my parents, Loretto Leonard (my piano teacher,) and some of my youthful escapades. Now it's time to give some thought to telling how I learned to play the piano "by ear" in the key of C (only, at first...)

Playing songs in the key of C is easier both in reading music and if you are doing it "by ear." First of all, let us consider what the last expression means: you hear a piece of music (usually a song) and figure out how to play it using only the white keys of the piano. First, you have to get the melody right and of course, you have to play the melody notes in the correct rhythm. At that, missing element is harmony (usually chords) which you probably play in your left hand. Plunking out the melody isn't too hard. Getting the right chords is a lot trickier. That's where your "ear for music" (or lack thereof) really shows up. It has to do with another musical element: harmony. One of the best ways to find out if you truly have a musical ear is to try to play a "bass line" that sounds good with your one-finger melody. That would be a sort left hand "melody" that sounds good with your right hand tune. At first, you might want to play your two-line piece for a musician (a good one) who could spot whether or not your bass part makes "musical sense." (Can't go any further in that area now...)

Back to my experience:

At first, I started playing hymns I had heard (I was an altar boy.) Since I heard them most of the time when they were played in church and sung by the choir, most of the harmony I had heard was in four parts, or "choral style." (That's the sopranos (melody,) altos (harmony) tenors (harmony) and the bass (harmony.) So my early "ear playing" in the key of C was mostly in four parts. Later, I began to try to play popular songs...as usual in the Key of C. Now, with both the hymns and pop tunes I found that even though I was playing in the Key of C occasionally I had
to use some black keys. Usually there were not too many, and I managed.

Gradually, I managed to create my own style of playing. My idol was Carmen Cavallero, whose playing style absolutely enthralled me. Remember, this was in Saranac Lake and no young musicians (hep-cats) around to tell me that Carmen was corny, or that I was playing in a corny style. All I know is, I loved it, and I started to build up a large repertoire of songs that I could play by ear in the Key of C only. Don't forget too, that I was playing the straight melody of all the songs. (Both of these aspects of my playing were at first going to cause me pain after I went to music school at Potsdam. Ultimately, each of these playing habits were to benefit me greatly, each in its own way!

I should add that this time period was the early forties, when boogie-woogie got very popular with the likes of Tommy Dorsey's BOOGIE-WOOGIE and three fabulous boogie-woogie players: Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis. I became the boogie-woogie king of Saranac Lake! (And guess what? I migrated to the key of F for my boogie-woogie playing.) I must confess, there was another motivation for my desire to be able to play the piano (especially boogie-) GIRLS!! Not being a jock is an awful cross for a high school boy to bear. One must resort to other devices. Mine was the piano. I was very skinny. Painfully! This resulted in a number of nicknames. My pal, Dew-Drop Morgan of bobsled fame called me "Ichabod." I had an assortment of other nicknames, the most enduring being "Tracks." There's a story connected with that one, which I'll explain in another tale. My other highly-developed skill was playing pinball machines, although toward the end of my young years in Saranac I resorted to artificial aids such as wires and drills. You see, those machines paid off - in nickels. A jackpot of forty nichols was considered a bonanza. (After all, in those years, you could hitchhike over to Lake Placid and get any sandwich or beverage in the house for a nickel! (With one exception - the house delicacy was 10 cents. Guess what it was? A chicken sandwich.

But I'm getting far afield here from my subject (playing by ear in the Key of C.) It was approaching 1945, and I was to join the U.S. Navy in January of that year. I'll continue my story about ear-playing after I describe my heroic year-and-a-half in the Navy. When I came home in 1946, my professional musical career was about to begin! Ciao...