Tag: music

Me and my banjo, a lamentable song

You might know that a little over a year ago I bought a banjo. It was a decision made on a whim at the moment that, instead of heading straight from Zayed Sports City after the rugby carnival, I turned left and headed out towards Raha Mall. I had no idea whether the music shop out there would even have a banjo and, as it turned out, nor did they. The person at the counter had to go and check with the person out the back who had to go and check with the owner who eventually came out and said, ‘Did you want a 4 string or 5?’ (His accent was Australian, east coast.)

‘Oh, five,’ I said.

It didn’t have a price on it, and he pulled a number from the air and said, ‘What do you think?’

Numbers fall out of my head the minute I hear them, so I can’t remember what I paid exactly. The owner disappeared back out the back and along with the banjo I bought the only banjo book they had and also some picks.

Picks aren’t picks.

When I got home and opened the book I discovered that guitar picks and banjo picks aren’t the same thing and of course there being only one banjo in the shop it was hardly surprising that there were no banjo picks and they had sold me the ones for guitar (not deliberately, they didn’t know). Then I was cross because they hadn’t even put them in for free.

It’s reasonably easy to get a good sound out of a banjo because, unlike guitar, the open strings make a lovely chord. I had this idea that one day – probably the next day and if not then definitely next week – I’d be able to play Rainbow Connection. I used to play that on the piano in 1983 and 84, my god I loved it. To play it on the banjo would be such retro fun. A new party trick (not that I had an old party trick, but you know what I mean).

Time has taught me that my natural talents do not lie with the banjo. I’m shit at it.

I taught myself a few things, and then I went to lessons last year, taught by a wonderful young man of excellent music talent. I’m sure he dreaded my lessons. I’m sure that every time I turned up he went home thinking Do I really the money this much? And that every time I cancelled he was like, oh, there really is a god.

I haven’t got very far. I can play a couple of chords, but my rolls are still very slow. My biggest disadvantage though is that I can’t really sing. I can hit a range of about five notes (two down from middle C and two up) with vague precision, but that does limit a person’s repertoire. So even though I learn a new song each week all I really do is play the same chords in different combinations.

The only way I’m really going to get any better is to play a whole lot more than I do. But the thing about middle age is that you have this ever-increasing awareness of the value of time and there are so many things I want to get better at in the space where banjo might be – sewing, baking, reading poetry. I want to read more books and watch more movies than I do.

I’ve always lived my life by doing more things, but I wonder if that’s changing. Maybe I want to commit to other things by deciding that I’m not committed to my banjo.

What would Kermit do?

Where my piano led me

I’ve got a piano. My grandfather bought it for us when I was young and a piano was a monetary stretch too far for my parents, teachers in their late twenties who had not come from landed gentry.

Long story, but in the last year, the piano has finally followed us to Abu Dhabi. We’ve put it in the little alcove the stairs make. It was a pragmatic choice because I didn’t want to risk having it dragged up and down the stairs. The loungeroom was out because I know enough not to put a piano against an outside wall and the only other wall with enough space is the one we share with our neighbour and what with the baby on their side and the dog with the mighty bark and the lads who never stop running on our side a piano seemed a step too far.

As it turns out, it’s an excellent place for a piano. Just a few steps in front of the door, it fits nicely in its nook and having a piano at the physical heart of the house. It’s excellent.

I play it every now and then. I’m stuck on pieces I learnt as an adolescent. Playing those pieces conjures up times and places that have gone, but live so deep inside I can’t ever lose them. This has been especially the case over the last six months which have been sad ones for me.

Best of all about having the piano here has been watching my eldest lad. He plays the sax, and he’s getting ready for his first lot of exams, but he also picked up my first piano books and started to teach himself. My heart, she sang. Of course my heart she also wept as she was forced to relive pieces she’d already played a thousand, million times. Greensleeves, anyone? Music Box Dancer? Oats and Beans?

Still, I never scream ‘Stop, please stop’ unless it’s that one, you know the one that everybody plays and it’s got a high part and a low part? What’s that called? My mother used to yell at me, ‘Stop, please stop’. I suppose at some point I must have stopped. I wonder, when was the last time I played that piece?

Anyhoo and moving on, he didn’t stop and thank goodness for that, because then he started doing something I never did. Transposing it. Adding in new chords. Changing the timing. And now every time he walks past the piano (which is often) he adds another note or two. He’s written three or four little pieces now all of them really lovely (I know, I would say that).

My heart, she sings.

He’s got an excellent sense of humour that boy. He’s thirteen so my goodness me he’s a pain in the arse, but he makes me laugh.

Things are going well for him, but he is thirteen and he’s a little bit lost and I’m trying to find some anchors he might be able to use in the choppy seas that are a human’s adolescence. Books. Music. It’s all I really know.

This is me last night: Genius idea! I will introduce him to the magic that is Tim Minchin. And then he (my eldest lad) can see that he could put together all his ridiculous jokes and all his slapstick and all the little bits and pieces he is writing on the piano and make something fully sick, totes amazeballs and OMG.

I told you he’s thirteen, didn’t I?

We went to youtube. Look! I said. And there’s Tim Minchin with an orchestra. An orchestra! What could go wrong?

In our house, you aren’t supposed to sit at the computer with headphones on. Cyber safety and all that, but because of reasons, I am having to study the rules of netball in great depth so I asked him to put the headphones on so I could concentrate.

I concentrated. And so did my eldest lad.

I had forgotten about some of the more hardcore Tim Minchin pieces. In truth, I’m not sure I’d ever listened to the Pope song.

(‘Mum, have you ever listened to this?’
We listen together.
‘Okay, so apart from the swearing do you know what he’s trying to say?’
‘Yeah, don’t protect paedophiles’
I guess that about sums it up).

So today, there’s a whole lot of stuff me and the mister don’t need to teach our eldest lad.

And today I was sitting here, in this very chair, faffing around the internet, looking at the expat lady blog which today is asking why people think it’s okay to give you their second baby clothes and whether it’s better to buy your diamonds in Dubai or in New York. And Tim Minchin’s words, the ones I heard before the earphones went on, came back to haunt me. I try to be intellectually honest, he said.

I closed the bulletin board and I sat at the piano and played Fantasia in D Minor which I first learnt in 1983. And as I played, it occurred to me that my relationship with this paper and this pattern of keys is one of the oldest relationships I’ve got.

I played it again and then once more. I do hope that it wasn’t our neighbour’s baby’s sleep time.