So in the afternoon, I watched Inside the Actor’s Studio: Sir Elton John. My sister, who subscribes to all the premium channels in the universe, had taped it and we’d met for lunch on Tuesday so she could bring it to me. (Funny sidebar: It took three tries beginning in November to get it recorded. The first time her husband had set the VCR for the wrong time and the second time he simply forgot to set it at all. Fortunately this episode is now in late-night rotation on Bravo, and I was able to find a third showing at 1:00 am, or some such, and he got it for me.)

I love music. I like a lot of Elton John’s music, but I would not have wanted to see this episode simply because he was appearing. I wanted to see it because of a note written to the QuiltArt list back in November by a man who’d seen it on its first run-through. At the end of the program, he said, someone handed Elton a book and challenged him to write music to a random paragraph, then and there. And Elton sat down at the piano, chose a part of Scene II of Peer Gynt, began noodling around on the keys and came up with a spontaneous composition.

Well, this fascinated me. It sounded like the musical equivalent of what we do as artists when we “audition” fabrics against a design wall, or cut out pieces and pin them up there to see how they work together. Some of us are terrific at this, working in an intuitive way that comes together apparently effortlessly, while others of us have to really work at it.

So I watched it yesterday, while waiting for my fogged brain to clear. He’s a little heavier than he used to be, his voice a little deeper, more mature, and without the swooping falsetto of “Benny and the Jets” and “Rocketman” (the result of surgery in 1988 to remove nodules from his vocal cords). He’s charming, devastatingly honest, and funny as hell. He’s also completely serious about his music, and he’s a much more accomplished and highly talented musician than I had ever realized. He was trained in classical piano at the Royal Academy of Music, although he says he was discouraged by his teachers, who told him that with his short, stubby little hands he’d never make a good pianist. Their judgment didn’t stop him studying, but when he started hearing Jerry Lee Lewis and Otis Redding and Ray Charles on the radio, he knew that he wanted to concentrate on contemporary music. And then, he said, his mother brought home a copy of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, and it was all over.

The “noodle” scene was indeed at the very end of the program, perhaps the last five minutes. One of the audience members asked him about staying fresh — How many variations can there be in writing popular music? Do you ever worry about running out of new material, new lyrics to write music to?

He answered (and I’m paraphrasing) that the music always came as a response to the words, and as long as there were words he’d be in business. Any words. “Anybody got a book? Any book.”

He took the copy of Ibsen’s play which was handed to him, opened it at random, sat down at the piano, and chuckled that he might very well make an ass of himself, but here goes. Two chords, then another, and he began to sing the lines from the play along with the improvisation that grew under his short, stubby fingers like magic. He played and sang for a couple of minutes; it started out perhaps a bit tentative, but toward the end there were flashes of something that could send chills down the spine if it were fully developed. It was amazing and humbling to watch.

So how does this relate to creativity and all the stuff we do as visual artists? It relates to a lot of the thinking I’ve been doing about trusting one’s intuition, about not getting too wrapped up in making everything perfect the first time out. I’m a Virgo. I have to be perfect. But watching him be willing to trust in his ability, to be willing to make a fool of himself in public, opened up for me the possibility that maybe it’s okay to just do and not worry so much about every jot and tittle along the way.

The lecture next Monday will go just fine.

I got a nice check today, too, the first installment on a commissioned piece, plus an inquiry on another small commission.

And my birthday present to me arrived this afternoon. I gave myself the new Richard Elliot CD metro blue, plus an obscure 1985 movie soundtrack by Pat Metheny, The Falcon and the Snowman, which contains an absolutely stunning track with David Bowie called “This is Not America.” Highly recommended.

My ears are in a state of bliss this evening.

This morning I have SKY.fm playing while I work*, and I just heard a rather pleasant tenor sax piece that sounded exactly like KennyG. Except… it didn’t, somehow.

(I’m not a great fan of KennyG — I like the odd piece here and there, but much of it sounds like what Thomas Kinkade would record if he were a musician.)

So I pulled up the Sky.fm website to see who it was.

Igor?????

Who the heck is Igor?

Turns out he is originally Russian and rather well-known in Australia but not much in the U.S. CDBaby has samples of music from this CD, a review by Norm Breest, and links to Igor’s home website.

The song I was hearing was “Shelly Beach,” which I liked very much. It’s not a an intellectual piece of music — you don’t have to sit down and concentrate to unravel all the layers of meaning in it — but it’s very pleasant and calming. A good choice on a day when life has you a little frazzled.

*Judge Judy isn’t on until 3 pm. :D

I’m bad. And it’s that good.

I’m not a trained musician. I can hear and enjoy the complexities in music, and presented with the written score I can read it without too much difficulty. It’s rather like taking two semesters of French in college and then ten years later finding oneself in Paris – yes, I can sorta-kinda read the newspapers and street signs, but it takes some mental effort at translation and there are some words or phrases that I won’t know unless I look them up in a dictionary.

Jeff Lorber’s “State of Grace” is like that. I can hear that there is something beautiful-but-strange going on with the time signature in the middle of the piece, but unless it is written out for me I can’t tell exactly what it is.

Is someone out there familiar with this piece and willing to “translate” for me?� I’d be forever grateful.� :)

Listening to: