Ask An Expert: Starting Late

Let's start off the week with an Ask the Expert question I hear a lot. In this case, it came from TJ...

Q: I'm currently 27 years old and I have been playing guitar since I was 9 (well... intermittently). I guess you could say I have played rock/blues style music mostly by ear since I started. I don't plan on becoming a full time professional musician, but I would love to learn how to play really good jazz piano. What disadvantages/ advantages do I have? What am I in store for in terms of time (assuming the law of averages)? Why am I so intimidated? I know as professionally trained musicians, you may scoff at those of us who don't fully understand what we are playing, but having a decent ear should help me learn right?

Well, first off, I would never scoff at anyone who plays music for any reason. And yes, having a decent ear and prior musical experience is always helpful when picking up a new instrument. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that having played guitar, which is a chord-based instrument (as opposed to single-line instruments like clarinet or violin,) should also make some aspects of learning another chord-based instrument (piano) easier.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the reason you're intimidated is that, with your experienced ear, you've probably detected that jazz, like classical music, is a heck of a lot more complicated than rock and blues. The beauty of blues is rooted in its simplicity, and much as I love rock music, the vast majority of it just doesn't contain all that many twists and turns, from a music theory standpoint. Just mastering the basics of jazz can take years, and that's before we even begin to discuss the whole improvisation thing.

Also working against you, TJ, is the fact that you're an adult. The adage that youth is wasted on the young is never more true than in music, for the simple reason that kids' brains are basically giant sponges capable of absorbing new information and hard-wiring it into the system at a rate that puts us 20- and 30-something geezers to shame. Which is irritating, because when you tell a 7-year-old something new about his instrument, you can just see that he hasn't the faintest idea what you're talking about, or why, for instance, it should matter whether his bow is pulled perfectly perpendicular to his violin's fingerboard. But with a couple of weeks practice, that 7-year-old will create new connections in his brain which will cause his right arm to be able to pull a straight bow, no problem. Most of the time, he won't even have to think about it.

Meanwhile, an adult who understands immediately why a straight bow is important might never actually be able to hardwire that importance into his/her brain, and will forever have to go through the laborious mental process of noticing that the bow isn't straight and telling the arm to fix it. It's like the difference between Googling something and looking it up in an old-school library card catalog. Both approaches will eventually succeed, but one is a helluva lot less work.

None of this is to say that you shouldn't start taking jazz piano lessons, of course. You don't have to be Dave Brubeck or Thelonius Monk to enjoy the act of playing, and if you're willing to put in some serious (and I do mean serious - a couple a day, and there are no days off) hours of practice, there's no reason that you couldn't become a pretty decent player eventually. I studied jazz for a couple of years in college (yes, there is such a thing as jazz viola,) and despite the fact that I am a profoundly mediocre jazz musician, I still like playing it. You could definitely shave some of the edge off the learning curve if you decided to learn jazz guitar instead of piano, but like I say, if you're willing to put in the work to learn a new instrument, there's no reason not to find a good teacher and go for it. (This is, of course, assuming that you already own a piano. Those suckers are expensive.)