Eric Levy

I play piano in Alumnae Hall fairly often. I don't always play at midnight anymore - sometimes I'm sleepy, and sometimes it's cold, and sometimes I'm just not in the mood - but I still go frequently. Now that it's during the day, I often get visitors of some sort.

This Monday, I got a visitor. I was in the middle of playing Rage, Rage when a tall, black, 35-or-so, bald, tattooed security guard in full uniform walked into the room from the far corner. Like most of my visitors, he wasn't in a rush to get over to me. I was expecting the normal security guard check - you allowed to be in here? Can I see your key? Etc.

But not with Eric. The first thing he said to me was something very close to, "Hey man, you mind if I come watch you play for a little bit?"

I was very surprised. Seriously, I asked him? Yes, definitely! he said. He'd been taking some music theory classes, he told me, so he knew all about how music was supposed to go down, but he was just having trouble getting it to go onto the keyboard. He asked if I would play a little something more, so I said sure, of course I'll play - what kind of stuff do you like to listen to? All kind of stuff, he said. I figured I'd play Chemical Road.

He talked, before that point, about how he was familiar with chords, but not terribly familiar with how to use them on a piano. Chemical Road is pretty easy to detect chords in - especially in the left hand - so I pointed that out to him before I started playing. Then I started.

I kept my left hand in fifths - I usually don't do that, but he was new and I wanted it to be really obvious to him the way my left hand was moving. He was tapping his foot throughout the song. At first it wasn't always with the beat, and it was more like in half-time than what I usually think of as the song's beat. But by the end of it, the last chorus, where I was singing, "Coming home, coming home, won't see you coming home," he was tapping his foot on the accents and playing drums in the air. He seemed to really like it.

When I finished, he laughed and said, "Man, that's a hit right there! Did you write that? I can hear the drums in the background through the whoooole thing, and how it goes up and down... up and down... that's really awesome!" [I'm not trying to toot my own horn, I'm just recalling an experience] So of course I say yes, I wrote it, and thank you many times... but I didn't really care about me and I wanted to know more about him so I asked him some more.

He took his music theory classes as part of his church. They're not incredibly in depth, he said - just six weeks - but enough to get people started for a choir piano part at a church. He said his church has really good music, and a number of musicians [sax and drumset included, and a full choir that he sings in], but the piano player sometimes wanted a break, or to know that when he was gone, someone would be around in the community to carry on. Not to mention Eric just wanted to let him know that other people cared as much as he did about what he was truly passionate about. So he decided to learn.

He grew up listening to a lot of gospel, and a lot of jazz. He reads music, but he was new to bass clef, and I'm pretty sure his ear is a lot better than mine because of what he grew up with. He says that now he listens to a lot of alternative rock - Hootie and the Blowfish, Pearl Jam, that sort of thing.

He had a girlfriend a while ago who was German, and her grandmother forced her to play piano. Very rigid, very uptight - would smack her hands if she played wrong and smacked her shoulders if she sat wrong. But she stuck with it - unlike me in the story I was telling - and she finally found it to be a really powerful emotional release. That's part of what Eric wanted, and what he said he liked about Chemical Road - he could tell that I actually cared about it.

He asked the best way to learn, and he was talking about his practicing. Sometimes he would sit down and work at a single part for hours and hours, and get frustrated and angry and give up and sometimes not touch a piano for a month...! But he said he definitely had to start practicing, every day, he said, for hours. I was like, "Oh no! That's way too much!" It really is... it can't be something you force yourself to do. If you come to it slowly, that's how it happens. So I told him that - just find some sheet music that you really like, with chords and bass and treble, that you REALLY want to learn, and just sit down whenever you're a little bored and take a look at it. After all, that was what his piano teacher wanted him to do - to really love piano - so I thought that was definitely the best course for him.

He also needed sheet music. I told him about musicfiles.com [but told him it might also be musicnotes.com] and told him how to work it, and hopefully that'll come through for him.

I can't remember a whole lot more about what we said... those are most of the important things. In any case, I really liked Eric and I hope I see him again. I hope he starts playing, too. It seems like he really wants to want to play, and I just hope that comes through for him. I'm really starting to enjoy Alumnae Hall Strange Time Piano Playing as a way of meeting people.

Peace out.