Billy Joel - legend!

One of the most underrated living singer-songwriters has got to be Billy Joel. I spend far too much of my spare time playing his songs, and as a pianist I have to say that his piano writing is far superior to the likes of Elton John or even (gasp!) Freddie Mercury. I've posted a reasonably lame attempt of mine to recreate his classic 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant' which comes from his great album 'The Stranger' - and in this song we see Joel as a balladeer, showman, supreme musician, poet and composer. He has also had the services of  great saxophone players in Richie Canata, who played on the recordings of 'Scenes' and 'New York State of Mind', and, since the 1980s, Mark Rivera, whose playing on Joel's live albums such as '12 Gardens' has to be heard to be believed.

Over and above his eminently singable melodies and superb arrangements (many thanks to Phil Ramone, his producer throughout much of the 70s and 80s), Joel is a terrific lyricist and his work appeals to Americans and New Yorkers in particular because he writes from real life experiences, often mentioning people and places who are particularly close to him. His partners have inspired songs like 'Just the way you are' and 'Uptown Girl', his daughter Alexa (now a musician in her own right) gets frequent mentions and had a beautiful 'Lullabye' written for her, and even history teachers can thank Joel for 'We didn't start the fire' which contains about 40 years of historical events in its lyrics.

He writes in so many styles - the album 'An Innocent Man' is a homage to 1950s rock n roll and doo-wop, there are blues and jazz tunes, heavy rock songs, all-American anthems, protest songs (like 'Goodnight Saigon'), and of course the great piano ballads - not just the love songs, but the stories like 'The Ballad of Billy the Kid'. 

My favourite Joel songs - well, 'Scenes' is right up there, of course, along with 'Miami 2017', 'New York State of Mind' and 'And So it Goes'. Please let me know what your favourite is!

Oh, and the video of 'Scenes' is in the video bar to the right of this page. I think I took it a little too fast.....

Are music, dance and drama exams worth it?

I've just waved my eight-year-old daughter off as she goes to her ballet exam. She seems ok about it! There's a lot of debate about whether exams in the performing arts are valuable or not, and I've heard plenty of stories, maybe exaggerated, maybe not, about 'nightmare' experiences when taking grade 2 trumpet or whatever it might be.

Are these exams valuable or just unnecessary suffering brought on by over zealous teachers and pushy parents? Well, in my opinion, it really depends on what you think the point of them are.

I think exams in performing arts have a lot of value, and a lot of point. If you act, dance, sing or play an instrument then presumably you are doing it to give pleasure to yourself and, most importantly, others. You are an entertainer, a story-teller, you provide an opportunity for escapism, a suspension of reality, you are an ARTIST. 

It doesn't matter if you are performing for 3000 people in the Royal Albert Hall or Granny and Grandad on a Sunday after lunch, you are doing the same thing.

Artists perform for people. They act, sing, dance and play in front of people who watch them. Not wanting to do this is like deciding to become a vet so long as it doesn't involve animals. Exams can be scary, nerve-wracking, they can go well and they can go badly. Examiners can be lovely, warm people, and they can be cold and heartless. 

In my view, exams provide experience, in handy bite-sized chunks, of performing under pressure, which is what every artist chooses to do. Of course they are also indicators of progress, targets.

You might disagree or agree - feel free to comment!

Some new music

I must blog more regularly!

I've spent the last week writing like mad and am really pleased with the results. I'm going to do a new video of one of the new songs soon, but for the moment, there's a new song called 'Waiting For You To Come Home' posted on my website. It's a country-style tear jerker, sort of in the Rascal Flatts style I guess.

Towards the end of last term at my school my Year 10 GCSE set and I were really inspired by a famous video doing the YouTube rounds at the moment. A filmmaker, under the banner 'Playing For Change', has traversed the globe recording street musicians from Johannesburg to Toulouse, San Diego to Moscow and has compiled an entire album of songs carefully put together from his recordings, so that they are playing together, without actually knowing their fellow musicians.

Anyway, we thought we could do this too, and the resulting version of 'Stand By Me', as performed by 16 Year 10 students, is fun! You can download it at my website.

By the way, I'd really welcome comments on these blogs. Is there anyone out there?

Reactions to the Michael Jackson memorial

I just sat through all two hours of the televised Michael Jackson memorial service. Here are my reactions to it!

• Stevie Wonder - never fails to amaze me. One of my biggest influences
• Jennifer Hudson - one very brave individual
• Shaheen - GO SHAHEEN! Can you believe he's only 12? And slightly cynically, I bet Simon Cowell is over the moon about that performance
• Al Sharpton - that guy could get a standing ovation reading out the phone book. Good speech!
• Martin Luther King III - the great man's words didn't quite come across the way the great man himself could make them
• Heal the World - everything that Michael stood for and represented at the end of the service - lovely
• Usher - hats off to you mate
• I would have liked the wonders of technology to have allowed video of Michael to sing the lead on Heal the World
• The family - clearly very strong and close-knit. His daughter - what a beautiful girl

Some might say cheesy, some might say shallow, but actually I thought it was everything that Michael would want it to be, and that's what counts. 

Can you teach someone to write music?

How do you teach someone to be creative? I've been working on a project with some 13 year olds at my school, using logic pro to write a short piece based on three or four chords and some basic rhythms. 

Having given them the important info about chords and how they relate to each other, we then got on to talking about how you develop your piece once you've worked out your chord progression, and then how to arrange different instrumental sounds to make it effective, and then how to spice it up with some funky rhythms and maybe a catchy melody.

It struck me sometime during all this that there has to be a point where the person teaching needs to just let the student 'be creative'. So where is that point? If a student's piece is all out of time, or the melody clashes with the chords, why is that not OK? There's plenty of music out there which has little sense of rhythmic or harmonic 'order'.

I guess it could be like a politics teacher trying to impose certain political views on a student. All we should be doing in composition is showing the students what successful composers of the past did, but then letting them get on with it. After all, neither Mozart or John Lennon made their name by doing exactly what someone told them to!