Luke Jerram: Artist

In one of those funny little twists of fate my attention has been drawn to artist Luke Jerram's work from two directions recently.

Firstly - he is the artist whose ongoing touring work "Play Me, I'm Yours!" currently has 50 Golden Street Pianos  dotted around London.

How could I not love this live-art intervention? As a pianist the invitation is enough. Play me, I'm yours! How liberating. I don't have to be Lil Armstrong or Mitsuko Uchida to play one. They're ours and we can all play them whether we're not a piano player at all or we're a great concert pianist. It's heady just thinking about it.

I'm am spending some time seeking them out and playing them. I've played two so far. I love the way it subtly transforms the urban space. On one level, while you're playing, London churns by. People ignore you, slow to take a look, stop to listen & take a picture. I especially enjoyed playing the one in Reuters Plaza, Canary Wharf. This little gold painted piano, underneath a tree, dwarfed by the forbidding glass surfaces of the towers of mordor capitalism. Music being made by anybody who wants to make it. From the little kid just exploring the sounds the piano makes, through me (middling, returning to playing after taking a long break because I thought I wasn't good enough), to the virtuoso playing rippling 19th century music. In Canary Wharf, anyway, it's this little, free, transient, human thing that's been snuck in among the banking skyscrapers and the shopping malls. It whispers softly that there might be another way...

There is even a piano on Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath. I very much want to play this piano as my friend Andy's ashes were scattered there. It's a place that means a lot to me. Even though he's been gone for 7 years I still miss him. I often wish I could share this new piano playing part of my creative life with him. I continue to be inspired by his example. He was in a bands, wrote songs and zines alongside having a day job, doing an MA and being a really good friend to a lot of people. You can find out more about Andy's by reading his zine RRR#1 in which he is very eloquent about why making your own art matters, and samosas.*

Then at work this image cropped up. A glass sculpture of an HIV virus. Part of a collection of Glass Microbiology Sculptures which I think are breathtaking. The Wellcome Collection apparrently have on of these sculptures so hopefully I can actually see one sometime soon. It's the kind of thing that makes me raise an eyebrow when people say that there's a science/art war going on.

Luke Jerram's Website http://www.lukejerram.com/

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*The zine has been scanned and published by Andy's amazing daughter!

Well You Needn't - Thelonious Monk

So. Let's start in the middle and work outwards. With the last CD I bought. Thelonious Monk Live at the It Club. I got it second hand from Amazon for the price of about a pint and a half of beer.*

At my last piano lesson my teacher decided that I should learn something written by a "jazz" composer. Until now most of the things I'm working on are standards of the show tune/ popular love song breed*. Oh calloo callay when the lead sheet for Well You Needn't was popped onto the music rest in front of me. Do you like Thelonious Monk? my teacher asks. I nod. Oh! Yes!

What do I love about Thelonious Monk? Well firstly it's the force of his musical personality. It doesn't really matter who is playing you can hear that it's a Monk composition. Then there's his playing - the very definition of idiosyncratic. On the surface kind of wrong but at the same time deeply, joyously, stompingly right.

Monk's relationship to music seems to have been a physical one. He would get up and dance while other people were taking a solo. The 'liner notes' for this CD tell me that he used to dance when checking takes in the recording studio - and it wasn't right until he could dance to it. I like this as a litmus test. Does it make me want to boogie?

There's an incredible sense of fun here. When I listen to it (and when I practice it) I feel this great urge to muck about. It makes about six of my inner clowns shout with glee and start running about the place. You want to just randomly chuck in a 'comping chord in an outlying register of the piano - simply because it's there. Or to dance round the living room throwing shapes you'd be embarrassed by in a club. 

It is a thing of clownish joy. Irreverent, out-there, and fun. Which is not to say that it is light or shallow. To say something is clownish, to me, is also to say that it reveals and yet contains and marshalls elements of chaos, nonsense, anti-sense and reistance. It acknowledges our darknesses and struggles and invites us to dance in the face of them.
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Footnotes
* Yes I'm one of those irritating preachy people who believe in actually paying for music and films. Or borrowing them through legitimate channels - like public lending libraries - so that the people involved in creation get their negotiated share. This here blog explains the issues very well.
**Beautiful Love (well Tolerably Adequate Love the way I play it. Sigh), Once Day My Prince Frog Will Come, Manha De Carnaval....