What converged today was fun, excitement, inspiration, and all that jazz.

After a prolonged wait and a series of negotiation with the parents who lamented my uncontrolled expenditure to learn music, coupled with some minutes counting, my earnest dream of an apprenticeship under a famous jazz pianist finally turned reality today.

Jazz is a genre like no other, a genre soothing enough to mend broken hearts and bring serenity to life, a genre free enough to allow its players to play whatever they feel without having to adhere to the complex rules of theory of music, the genre that has the groove that makes you wanna snap your finger at the 2nd and 4th beat. Undoubtedly, my favourite genre of all time.

My fantasy of course, is to be able to play my favourite jazz tune of all time, “Autumn Leaves” as good as, if not better than jazz pianist Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson in one-months time. Absolutely unrealistic, which is really why I am starting my apprenticeship now albeit I am really really busy recently.

Meeting Mr Alex Tan was really exciting. He studied at Monash University. That was what he claimed at first. Some time later, I asked him where he studied (again), and he replied ICOM (International College of Music), which makes things contradictory. But no big deal though.

And so, he started the interrogation part, asking me on my music background. Before I knew it, I started telling him lots of stuffs, digressing in between, asking lots of questions, and so on. After completing the very first lesson, there is a sense of guilt of talking too much, much more that the teacher.

Amid the uncontrolled babbling, I accidentally (actually, intentionally) leaked out the fact that “Autumn Leaves” is my favourite song (in hope that he will teach me how to play it). I was then asked to play it on the piano for him to do some assessment on what kind of jazz level I belonged to at the moment. I played a little, but wasn’t remarkable. Partially due to some reservations on what it could mean if he discovered that I play with the wrong self-learn jazz technique all the while, partially due to my paucity of predilection for the piano I am playing on, which is really deep in its tone intrinsically, which in turn makes it difficult to fully gain control of the dynamics of the song that I was playing. It sounds more like I am trying to find some justifiable excuses to downplay my mediocre jazz improvisation techniques, pretty much like what the fox would say in the sour grape story.

Next comes test number 2. I was asked to play a set of chord progressions spontaneously, and the chords are not written in a notation form, but in the form of Roman letters, like F maj 7, etc. Here comes by biggest blow. I have not learn anything about these Roman letters and how they should play. So in this situation, like any other amateur pianist, I found myself cruising through the chord progressions with sweaty palms and forehead, like cruising through an ocean of starving sharks. Even now when I am writing this down, I still dread thinking how I did at that time.

Next, he opened up his book of probably 300 pages thick. And miraculously he flipped open the page that contains the song “Autumn Leaves”. (Insert the jazzy tune of sheer excitement). And of course, the whole aim of bring up the “Autumn Leaves” issue had accomplished. There was even an assurance that this song will be the first song that he will teach me.

That was also the first encounter I had with a real Jazz music score. What was unexpected was the simplicity of the score. The notes are written at its basic/core form, together with some chords written in the form of Roman letters, which explained why he tested me on that earlier. The idea is to create a whole new realm of ample freedom. What the jazz pianist will do is the improvisation, that adds more colours and energy into a simple dull piece of music using their creativity.

Finally, he gave me some “homework” where I have to play all major scales with the 7th note, together with the multiple inversion scales practice. I have always expect scales to be part of Jazz, especially improvisation. The intriguing thing is that he took 6 months to master all skills, apparently, which corroborates the fact that my unrealistic fantasy of playing “Autumn Leaves” in a month’s time is truly,well, unrealistic.

In the meantime, I shall practice hard and surprise him further. Playing in one-month’s time might be unrealistic, but at least with practice I am able to go closer to reality in a shorter period of time.

For now, the whole jazzy affair is all about jazz scales, really tedious jazz scales.

But the long-term result will be astonishing, I hope.