If you’re a musician – or for that matter, if you’ve devoted yourself to mastering any discipline – you can relate to this brief exchange between myself and the Polish emigré pianist Adam Makowicz. He had just finished a set at some venue in San Jose, most of which involved blowing the minds of every knowledgeable member of the audience. His technique was world-class, among the very best in jazz piano. In song after song, ballad to up-tempo, there seemed to be no limit to his command of the keys. It was such a tour de force that I had to run up to the stage, get his attention and ask one simple question.
“How did you develop those chops of yours?”
“You’ve gotta practice,” he said.
And I replied, “I was afraid you’d say that.”
The fact is, there isn’t any shortcut, not if you really want to get to that point where you can play literally anything you can imagine. It’s easy to see why this can discourage rather than inspire so many budding performers – me, for instance. Ever since I was old enough to trundle over to my dad’s baby grand and clamber up onto the bench, I loved bashing away at it. In fact, I can remember the first song I ever picked out, when I was maybe three or four: It was “Three Blind Mice,” which I played in F-sharp because that cluster of three black keys seemed like a good place to start.
I usually began my recitals at around six each morning. In those days the piano was in our living room, maybe two feet away from the door to my parents’ bedroom. Yet never, not once, did either of them stagger out to suggest I find some quieter amusement for the next hour or so. In this respect, they were saints, for whose forbearance I remain grateful.
Then came the day they announced I would begin taking piano lessons. On that first day, in the home of the kindly older woman who would be my instructor, I learned that to be a real musician, you had to do two things: Get used to sleeping later. And figure out how to read notation. On my first day, she introduced me to the John Thompson Modern Course for the Piano book. After playing the first two exercises, pointing out how each key corresponded to a speck on the staff, she sent me home with instructions to master these mini-compositions and play them back for her a week later.
This went on for a few months, with the lessons getting a little more complicated. Apparently I was acing each one, which prompted the teacher to report my progress to my parents. “Bobby must be practicing diligently,” she speculated. In fact, I wasn’t. I was still banging away every day, improvising, trying to play back what I’d heard on the radio, but never playing the Thompson drills. That’s when they figured out that I had been filing away the teacher’s demonstration of each new piece, then playing it back from memory at the next lesson. Learning to read the music was never part of the process. But they had to be sure.
At my next lesson, the teacher deliberately played the next exercise in the wrong key. That’s how I played it back a week later, at what turned out to be my last lesson. Somehow I still managed to develop into a decent pianist, but now and then I still feel guilty about my ruse nearly sixty years ago.
And this leads to my interview with the Panamanian virtuoso, teacher and activist Danilo Pérez. With a résumé that stretched from Dizzy Gillespite to Wynton Marsalis, and a stylistic breadth that encompasses straight-ahead jazz, fusion, classical and various Latin folk traditions, Pérez has also accomplished much as a Berklee instructor, founder of the Panama Jazz Festival and advocate for illuminating impoverished audiences throughout the world with the light of music and political reform.
For reasons I can’t quite recall, we focused exclusively on the topic of practice. Stranger than that, I’ve forgotten for whom and when we spoke: I have the transcript but no record of where or even if it was published. Still, I’m including this for several reasons: Danilo’s extraordinary artistry, the unusually singular focus and therefore instructive value of our conversation and of course to atone for my trying to fool my one and only teacher. I wasn’t fooling anybody but myself.
****
Has practicing always come easily to you?
One of the things I learned from when I was a kid -- and fortunately I never understood it until now; I think it's nice to do things without understanding sometimes -- was to practice in a way that seemed like I was performing. In that way I never isolated practicing, like it was a boring thing I had to do. All my life I've made practicing something I like to do. That's something my father taught me.
Did you take your first lessons from your father?
Yeah. He would show me things and I would look at what he did. He would show me a little chord on the guitar; I'd look at it and try to emulate it. When I took piano lessons, it was the same feeling. My teacher taught me to enjoy the playing aspect in front of her as much as the practicing behind doors.
Did you improvise from the beginning?
My father encouraged improvisation. He had me listening to a lot of different music, and especially Cuban and Panamanian piano players that he likes. The beginning of transcription was my father: He'd say, "That's a nice phrase there. Check it out." And he'd repeat it over and over until I'd get it. That was one part of practicing that he taught me. Then my classical piano teacher taught me the repertory. She would allow me to keep doing the things from my father, even if I found a little tumbau that I learned from a Latin record. Papo Luca was very influential. She would say, "Move your hands in and out." She saw the [sounds like: things elastic] involved with that.
You didn't do drills and arpeggios; you were making music as part of your practice.
Exactly. My teacher always talked about doing scales really slow, so I did that with her. But just as my father did, she encouraged me to understand sound, to look for and really work with the sound. My father always combined the notes with the drumming aspect, with the percussion. He would have me walking, and a little faster he would have me moving the hand. There was a visual thing with the [ballet?] too, like a coordination that he was teaching me at the same time. So when I was practicing the scale, I was imagining other things, like a line of people walking; the intervals would be two people. It wasn't just a drill. In other words, he and my teacher didn't talk about it, but now when I look back I see they didn't create a gap, like, "Now you're going to sit down and learn a scale, so you have to be bored." He would find a way to make it fun.
“My teachers taught me the values of scales and arpeggios without teaching me to hate them.”
Lots of teachers teach their students not to love music by forcing them through military drills without connecting that to the fun of really playing.
That's great, man. My teachers taught me the values of scales and arpeggios without teaching me to hate them. I really enjoy sitting and playing a scale, because she said, "You know, when you play a scale, there are so many ways you could do it." In other words, she told me to be creative: You can put it in staccato, you can put it in portamento, you can do it really soft, you can do it really loud. In the process of practicing these things that are so valuable, she also taught me to be creative. For example, she would say, "There's a C major scale. Music is made from scales, arpeggios …" She taught me to see that this is something I'm going to encounter all my life. Knowing how to interpret them in so many ways, and understanding the relationship note to note, she taught me to appreciate every possible variation of that. For example, with the tetrachords, from C to F, there's one tetrachord from G to C back, and it was connected by whole-step, and in the middle it was connected by half-whole-whole-half. She taught me to see the connection with the steps, like stairs. One stair is one interval; half a stair is a half-interval. You can do that fast or you can do that slowly. I would enjoy combining these things in my practice.
Many teachers would have been furious with you for not doing it evenly all the time.
[Laughs.] Oh, yeah! The part she always emphasized was to practice very slowly. It's so important to learn to love practicing these basic things. I feel very sad when I see somebody going through this like it's just a motion. When you play a scale, there are so many details that you could look at. You're making music or you're making an exercise. In Latin music you hear a lot of people playing up and down [articulates a rhythm] like they play the scales, but you can hear the different percussion apply different rhythms to those scales. That makes it interesting to hear in that context.
Do you have a regular period of time that you set aside for practice?
Bob, I'm working on it, but with the schedule I have now, when I'm home, if I'm not touring, I'm teaching. So I don't really have a schedule anymore. I used to. In 1995 I encountered the [sounds like: top moniste] to a piano with Edna Golansky [sp?], who I went to because I wanted to understand certain mechanics of piano playing. She helped me a lot to focus, so that even if I take just ten or fifteen minutes, that could be a valuable time for practice. So I try to go to the piano before each concert for forty or forty-five minutes. That's why I encourage everybody who's starting right now to do it all now, because it gets difficult once you start touring and traveling. Nevertheless, when I'm on the plane, for example, I listen to music and I try to follow it with my fingers. I take a recording and write some music down.
When you were able to practice more regularly, were there any teachers who helped you organize that time?
I would say two people helped me a lot. Charlie Banacos and Edna Golansky gave me the final touch to keep moving and keep developing in the technical aspect. For example, Edna is into what happens with your hands when you play a note. Sometimes I have my elbows too far out; she said that if you're aware of that and you don't put your elbows out, you'll see that through the night you'll feel better. Then she told me to not use the fingers so much. She helped me to understand the mechanics at another level.
When she advised against using your fingers too much, was she advising you to use more arm weight?
First of all, we are taught to have these isolated exercises, like moving the thumb up and down and all the fingers up and down. But she made me understand that the thumb doesn't move up and down; it moves sideways. Then I understood why Bud Powell almost had a hand-drum movement when he played; it was like a half-circle. Then she made me understand what I was doing right in that sense. She was saying, "See how you're moving your elbow? Timing the movement of the elbow with the fingers is what gives you the velocity and the movement, and the sound is more beautiful." In other words, if you put your hands on the side and you do circles, you'll see that the elbows move really fast. Then she said, "Timing that circle, almost as if you're doing a trill, you're going to learn that behind the fingers there is extra coordinated movement from the elbows."
When you practice, do you run through a mental list, making sure the elbows are working right, the fingers coordinating with them, and so on?
Yes. For example, I try not to let my elbows open up too much. Another thing is, I try to coordinate breathing out with the actual hit of the first note that I'm going to play. That's very important because we breathe when we get nervous, but when we play a note we don't breathe out. I just do that a little bit until I feel that I'm letting all the weight go down and letting the gravity work. Then I do the scale, but I do it in groupings. For example, I get aware that I'm playing the C with the thumb and the E with the third finger. I'll see that I have to move my hands out a little bit because the third finger is longer than the thumb. I watch the really small things. I see that when I cross my fingers it's almost like a dancer. I just look at the movement and start coordinating my whole body with that. Then I go into scales. I'll think, "I'm feeling a little stuck here in my shoulder," because my whole body gets involved. Sometimes my pelvis is tight and that gets in the way too, because I'm getting too close to the piano and that gets in the way too. I'm just becoming aware of how my body interacts with the space I'm sitting in. I'm very picky about piano height too, trying not to be too low or too high. Before sound check, I really pay attention to that.
When you do feel some physical discomfort at a practice session, do you try to address that and make the pain go away? Or do you postpone practicing until it gets better?
I've been looking up to other things for feeling better, like yoga. I do a little bit of yoga and a little bit of tai chi, and I'm getting into Pilates now. Then I stretch out my shoulders; that's where I get the most tight, around the rhomboid area. So I do some breathing exercises, then I sit at the piano and address it with the instrument itself. Really, I do a lot of breathing; I can get a lot accomplished in just fifteen minutes through just breathing, like holding my arms at the elbow and doing [slow inhalation and exhalation] and let the hands fall down at the same time that you're letting the air out. Man, just being able to do that changed my life.
If you are able to do some regular practicing, what happens before the session begins? Do you like the room to be a certain way? What do you do to prepare?
That's great! Man, you're a musician, definitely [laughs]. First of all, I like to get to the piano as soon as I get to a place, just to know the instrument: What kind of sound does it have? Which notes stick out more in a voicing? It's almost like I'm talking to him, like, "Hey, man. How are you doing?" After that, if there's a swimming pool, I try to get a little relaxation there. Then I try to eat before I play; about two hours before would be perfect. Then I like to have my espresso, because that's like a little awakening for me. Sometimes with dinner I like a little bit of red wine; that adds a certain dimension. And that's it. Also, praying before I play is very important for me. I go in the room and I give thanks to God for this opportunity. I always pray for God to help me to celebrate life when that moment [of practicing] comes in. I try to get to the point where I can look at the piano, touch one note, and feel this … [makes a warm, contented sound].
What if you have a day when, for whatever reason, your mind is wandering, or maybe you're a little sad about something, or maybe you're kind of bored? Do you ever have to force yourself to practice, or do you wait until you feel like it?
Wow, that's a great question. I've been dealing with that for years. I love the piano, but I'm not in love with the piano. For example, over the last year I've gotten into playing the [Hohner] Melodica because of the breathing, because of the awareness of one note; that means you have to be more aware of the melody and to leave more space. I wanted to leave more space and be more aware that less is more. The Melodica helps me with that because it brings a childish quality out of me. Sometimes I'm away from music because I like to explore other things. I'm family-oriented; when I go home to see my parents, I'm not the kind of guy that has to be practicing every day on the piano. So it's great when I'm back from those long vacations, but it's really hard to get back into it. I've noticed that I can do it through two ways. One way is to take the Melodica with me and just sit in around town and play with people. I don't force the music; I just let it come in slowly. Then if I see somebody who's really inspiring to me or I listen to certain music, I'm like, "Wow, I need to practice!" If I have a gig coming up with Wayne [Shorter], for example, that adds the dimension of, "Wow, I need to get back to that creative space."
So you've never felt bored while practicing?
I've never felt bored, for sure. I've felt detached sometimes, because I've been away for so long, but with the Melodica I get back much sooner than I used to, because I can pick it up and sit in anywhere -- in a restaurant. My father is a singer, so sometimes we play together. That's how I do it. And if the gig is in two days and I haven't practiced, I'll sit the whole day with the piano and I talk to him. I'll say, "Man, listen, I'm sorry I was away," and he says, "Okay, I'm going to give you a break." It's like a contract, back and forth. It may take one whole day of sitting down, playing, listening, playing drums and percussion, being in touch with the music again. With Charlie Banacos I've learned a lot about practicing very focused. That's something I never did before. He connected my whole experience of being an electronics major with music, actually. I would say that he, Donna Brown, and Herb Pomeroy taught me to connect those things. They showed me the value of codifying the value of things you're doing; you'll say, "Wow, this sounds great" … but why and how? I'd just say, "That was a nice idea. What does that imply?" They showed me the what, how, and when concept of playing.
Do you divide your practice between things you work on each time and things that need immediate attention?
I'll take one thing that I want to do. For example, if there's a core sound that I like very much, I take it and look at it and try to get to know it really well. Then I'll put different rhythms to it and put it in different environments, so it goes back to the beginnings of playing a scale.
Do you mean a certain kind of harmony?
Right. For example, if I like a chord that has an interval of a sharp four, I'll say, "Let me see how that sounds with a C in the bass. Let me see how it sounds with a C-sharp." I'll go through all the chromatic notes and try to move it around in thirds and stuff. I work on it: "How would this sound if I play this as a scale?" I ask myself questions and practice that. That's it; that would be the practice. If I have half an hour, that's all I would do.
So practice is ideas as well as chops.
Exactly. When I want to feel lucid and I want to work on my touch, I pick up the Chopin Études and play them. If I want to practice some independence, I go to Bach. I have certain things that I go through because they are the seeds of my development. For a contrapuntal kind of playing that has all this perfection going on, I would pick up Brahms. Now I'm really into the Impressionistic sound, trying to understand and really hear the music every day … or African drumming, or Latin. That's what I do. I do that with everything I have as a goal in mind. Usually I'll just listen a lot. Sometimes I have no idea what's going on, which happens to me with Wayne. I don't understand maybe three quarters of the stuff he does, but the background of listening and knowing the intervals and the scales has helped me a lot to make that moment be as creative as I can.
Do you monitor your technique as you perform and file away areas that you need to work on?
I did for a while, but nowadays I prefer to find things that have a musical context and practice those things at the same time. The hardest work for us is to choose the material that will give you the context and also the ability to do it. For example, [sounds like: with times go back] I say, "I would never play sixths very well because I really haven't played much music that involved that." It's going to be engrained slowly as I do the research of finding or writing my own material that has those things. We have to understand that the concept is to make it really simple. That's really a magical thing, like listening to Chopin do all the sixths stuff. I say, "Wow, that sounds so beautiful. I want to do it." Then when I try, it's like, it's hard! In content, that struggling is what I'm looking for now. I sit down and try to decode a way to get to that piece, but without it now. I think at one time I forgot the lesson and I was isolating things too much, so when it really came down to do it in a musical term I couldn't do it because of the environment or the breathing or the time signature. Sometimes you can play a scale so perfect, but when you have to play the same scale and react to the drum feel, you miss all the notes [laughs]. So how do we prepare for that? I think you address it by finding pieces of music that have those elements.
“Sometimes when I'm playing I'm listening much more to what the other people are doing than to what I want to do. It's a way of practicing life.”
What about broader concepts, such as the emotional arc of an entire performance? Can you rehearse for that?
The best way to do that is by watching how people interact with each other in a human sense. I know for a fact that sometimes when I'm playing I'm listening much more to what the other people are doing than to what I want to do. It's a way of practicing life, I think, by listening more and trying to focus on how we answer the questions and the remarks that happen. That reflects on the music. That's one of the first things with Wayne that was apparent. I was like, "Oh, my God, I don't know what's going to happen." The only thing to do is to listen and to struggle to find out together what's going to happen. That listening aspect is so important -- when to come in and when to go out. I relate that a lot to playing basketball and actually to boxing too. When you play basketball, you have to pass the ball. And when you're boxing, every little thing that you do can somehow connect to music. When I feel a low blow, that reminds me of a bass drum. And when I see a combination jab, it could be [sounds like: a manos]. When I see the tenth or eleventh round, that's probably getting to the end of the concert [laughs]. But relating the performance to the moment, sometimes one concert might not be that concert. Five concerts may be one concert. In other words, at one concert you feel like you've really got things rolling. It's okay for us to learn to live in that moment and let it happen and to continue the next concert and to keep going until you find that moment when all the struggles you've been through pay off, like, "Wow, we're really scoring points now!"
Sometimes when you practice you have to go into overtime.
That's right [laughs]! This is one thing I learned from Wayne: If you view playing in front of people as a way of practicing, something will change. Taking the element of succeeding in a performance and making that a practicing experience -- Miles used to tell them that too. He'd say, "Let's play like we're practicing," with the extra pressure of having to play good.
Practicing is where you explore, and there's no reason why you can't do that at a gig.
Exactly. I like that word: "exploring." Wow.
Is there something on the new album that might be the product of specific practice?
One of the things I've been doing for the last couple of years in playing the Melodica is to assume a role kind of like a singer. From that perspective, I know that I've been able to grow an amount of phrasing into my playing, like understanding when to put a phrase in and answer it back and then leave a space for the others and not think of what I play as a solo as much as part of a dialog. There's a piano solo, something improvised. I had a little motif that I wrote for something I premiered at Lincoln Center; I took that idea and improvised over that. You can hear the whole idea of bringing the concept of my country's rhythmic environment with something I've been working on, which is the dissonant idea of the Monk influence with the influence of European classical harmony. He has a very interesting color about that. This is the first time I heard it, and I did it in a very improvised way. I tried to isolate it, like the influence of Bach in a different environment in my left hand. I practiced Bach in 6/8, for example, which was really weird; I wanted to have the left hand tell a different story and do a counterpoint to the right. A lot of the things that I've been following through the years came through in that piece.
What's the name of that piece?
It's called "Improvisation In Red." One thing I learned from Wayne is how to follow a beautiful melody with the harmony and the rhythms making the intention, not just the melody and not just the harmony, but the harmony, the rhythm, and the melody telling you a story all together. That's something I've been growing into with him. In this record I'm starting to understand how harmony plays an important role in the feeling where you hear something and you go, "Wow, how beautiful is that? Not only the melody, but the voices and how things are moving along the way." I've been developing my awareness of this for the past three years.
Bill Evans offers a good example of that.
Yeah. Sometimes when you listen to him, there's always a story that you don't see so clearly -- the subtlety of the things. It's like that with Wayne: "Wow, that melody repeats so many times. It's so beautiful. But what makes it move is how the inner harmony is moving with it."
How do you feel after a very good practice session?
I think I become more compassionate about everything. Learning about my weaknesses and strengths reflects how fragile we are too. If I couldn't do something, I would get mad. Then when I went out, I reflected that onto other people. When I had a good practice, I was so compassionate with myself, to let myself grow, that I wouldn't see things so [bold? bald?]. But life is like a flower, like a seed: We have to put water on it and watch it slowly. It makes me respect that we all have a work in progress in our life. Respecting that idea of a work in progress was very clear every time I had a great practice session.
“Looking deep into yourself, that's what practicing really is.”
Practice is about so much more than making music.
Exactly. It's like meditation. That's why I relate it to breathing and meditation. When we have a good one, it's almost as if you've been in an environment that allows opportunities for you to grow. Also, looking deep into yourself, that's what practicing really is. We all want to do things so fast, but with practice you reflect on yourself; it makes you look inside and see all this stuff that we need to improve. We address it as we address life, with a sense of happiness.
It's almost like martial arts …
Exactly!
You build the technique, but you don't need to use it all the time; getting to the technique is the main point.
That's beautiful, man! That's great! Playing with Steve Lacy, I went to his house. When we played duos, he took me to see a painting in New York; it was like exploring life. That's the thing with people like Steve and Wayne and Jack DeJohnnette; the music becomes more relevant than just the notes. It's about how open we are to being connected to the universe outside. I read this book that Steve Lacy wrote, and one of his quotes was that as we get older, life and music become one. I'm so up for that, man. Music has got to be a celebration. That's what it comes down to.
Passing the Wisdom Along
Where do you teach?
I teach at the New England Conservatory and at Berklee too.
What are the biggest problems that students and young problems have that may be corrected through practice?
Man, that's a great question. I actually came from a faculty meeting at the New England Conservatory and we were addressing exactly this same issue. First of all, from my experience, the teacher has a responsibility to teach the student to love the music, to feel that every minute of their life is an incredible gift to give, actually. That's our job. We have to do it in many different ways. If it means taking them to concerts, that's one way. But I would say that they should always go back to the basics. I see a lack in a lot of the teaching material, which is that people have to go down to the basics of music. For example, we should teach people to connect the singing part, the percussion part, and the dance part -- body movement with percussion. All of that tied up to a cultural background will give us a whole different perspective. There are too many books out there that give you access to information that's too easy; you lose the element of research. We have to tie up all these things with the most basic elements in life. In many of the countries of the world people don't have access to this information. They don't even have teachers. All this struggle that Duke Ellington, Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Wayne went through made it more personal, more passionate. I certainly see that the technical level is going up, for sure. But I would have the students be more worldly, to open their eyes to more, and to always remind them that music is to celebrate our lives.
The jazz world has changed to the point that the experiences you describe are no longer available, except as taught in academic settings.
Jazz is a communion, a dialog. It's something we don't think about only as music but as part of our daily life. That's when we're going to get to the next level. It's a challenge for teachers to expose that, but if we live under those codes as teachers, like this is a music that brings dialog and it brings creativity up. If we can achieve that with these students, we have done a great work with them. We teach to not only think of music as [sounds like: decent?] but to see it as a part of our whole life. Every time we practice, what are we doing? Every time we play with people on the stand, we need to understand the basic concept: What are we doing, man? We want to unify. We want a communion. In African drumming, you play to the Lord. The spiritual side is exactly what I'm talking about.
Anything else?
One of our goals as musicians is to become magicians [laughs]. The practice part becomes invisible. Then you do something that people see as being simple. That's when we achieve that magic and inspire people to want to do it too.
####