Breaking the rules

An Evening With Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea In Concert; Herbie Hancock, piano; Chick Corea, piano

I was never really a rule-breaker. Two days ago, I boarded an Amtrak train in Chicago, coach class, bound for Minneapolis. After I ascended the stairs of my destination car, I saw that there was plenty of room and took advantage of two seats in the front. I sat there for a full sixty seconds before I noticed the sign in the aisle above the seats: “Reserved for parties of two.” Rats. I picked up my stuff and went toward the back of the car. Every pair of seats that didn’t have that reserved sign above it had a passenger or passengers. So, finally I just took one of the reserved seats in the back, but I was uncomfortable all the way to Minneapolis, concerned that, at any minute, the car attendant would, all of a sudden, notice the sign above my seats and make me move. I don’t like breaking the rules.

We all learn to how to print letters in first-grade, or maybe even kindergarten. About the time that we hit third grade, we start to learn cursive writing. From that time forward, our teacher told us, “We expect you to write in this fashion, and so does every instructor from now on.”

I’ve never had good penmanship. It was legible but that's about it. I had too much to say in a short amount of time to be careful with loopy lines and curly Q’s. In retrospect, you would think that I would have easily taken to this artsy aspect of drawing in writing – shaping that perfect “M” and that elegant “L”. Nope. I was a little boy. Any time spent doing something school-related was time away from TV and the piano.

One day, in the autumn of my seventh grade year, the rebel in me rose out of the simmering fire. “You don’t want to write in cursive anymore, do you?” I don’t want to write in cursive anymore. “You can print much faster and neater than you can in cursive, can’t you?” I can print much faster and neater than I can in cursive. “You want to scream at the top of your lungs, punch in all the lockers, bust down the double doors and set the building on fire, don’t you?” No, I just want to print from now on. “That’s all?” Yeah. “Chicken.” ~Sigh~ Yeah.

So, I held my breath, printed my assignment for English class and waited to get called into the office. But I never got called. Not that day, nor the next, nor the next, nor the next ten thousand nexts. I shut the door on cursive writing on that day and never looked back. I don’t even remember how to do it.

Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, on the other hand, LOOK for rules to break when they play two-piano concerts together. The great Gershwin/Gershwin tune “Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away)” is a bouncy, catchy little tune, and, indeed, that’s where Corea and Hancock begin. But by the fourth time through the tune, “Liza” is beyond recognition, becoming more of a caricature of herself with each pass through the form, shedding melody, harmony and rhythms. And, yet, each chorus is interesting, exciting. By the end, “Liza” has her act back together again and chases those clouds away just as effectively as in the beginning

Both Mr. Corea and Mr. Hancock played in Miles Davis’ quintet in the 1960’s, often times simultaneously, one playing acoustic piano and the other on keyboards. In the late 1970’s, they set up a tour of concerts where two Yamaha concert grands would be fitted together so that the jazz masters could face each other. Playing compositions by both pianists and other composers, the duo took turns accompanying the other while they soloed, traded whole, half and quarter choruses with each other and played at extreme reaches of the piano, one in the bass and one in the treble, yet keeping virtually constant eye contact with each other in an effort to “read” what the other will try next.

I haven’t broken many rules since my peaceful uprising from the cursive writing. I think I once sneaked some M&M’s into a movie. And I added cinnamon to a brownie mix, one time, when the recipe didn’t call for any. But I like to follow the rules. Unless they frustrate my evil purposes. Then I crush them like a bug.

Credits: To Amtrak, for keeping the trains alive, and making train travel fun.