My Story

I am the 6th child out of 8. Before me were Heidi, Darin, Erik, Ryan and Shaun; and after me were Rebekah and Heather. My mother had tried to get us to do piano lessons because she had failed to ever learn piano, and it was one her life’s greatest regrets. Well, if you are a mother of eight children you learn from you mistakes. Unfortunately, by the time I came around in 1977, my mother had learned from mistakes that her children were never going to learn piano. So she didn’t try very hard with me. Now that I think back, she had a neighbor try to teach me piano for a week or two, but the only think I remember from those lessons were that my fingernails were too long.

Later when I was fifteen and already dabbling with the guitar, I begged my mother again for lessons, and she found a lady who plays at a local church who started to teach me Mendelssohn’s “Song Without Words”. Unfortunately, it was inexplicable to me because the teacher had basically skipped three years worth of prelude before foisting too difficult a piece on me.

Those lessons also lasted a few weeks. But I was playing in rock bands and trying to write songs on the guitar. And I was an ambitious child. Of the eight kids in my family, I was the only one to go to an Ivy League school. Granted, my siblings are equally smart, but just not as ambitious.

At Yale, I began to take the music classes I should have taken as a child. I started to learn my key signatures and how to read music. I was 18 at the time.

One teacher at Yale in particular really caught my imagination with music. He was a visiting professor, David Kopp, and unfortunately was only there for one semester, but he met with each of us privately to teach piano theory – mostly drilling cadences. It was a nerve-wracking experience because I was way out of my league in the music classes there. But it got me going on the right path.

While at Yale I started singing in the a capella groups there, where the music was a whole new world of songs to me. Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. These songs when heard for the first time by someone like me – someone born the year Elvis died – these songs seemed so incredibly intricate and complex, yet so sweepingly lyrical and poetic. When the dining hall went on strike and we were sent a weekly check to spend on food, I spent it on Ella Fitzgerald CDs and Mel Torme CDs. Nat King Cole. Frank Sinatra.

Soon after I went and purchased my first fake book. I new enough about music to pick my way through my favorite tunes, but I knew I wanted to be able to play these songs with the style and grace I heard on the albums.

When funds would allow over the next few years, I would find nuggets of musical gold at the music stores and would study the pages trying to apply what I could to the task of reading fake books.

After I graduated from Yale, I moved to New York City and began teaching voice lessons. Here I had the biggest breakthrough when I started trading piano lessons for note reading lessons with a guy who played piano entirely by ear. He had taught himself piano by listening to recordings and then finding the chords note by note. After several years, he could listen to a recording once or twice, and know the whole song by heart.

I knew that my diligent “memorization” based method for understanding music was inadequate and I desperately wanted to know the secret of what this guy was doing. Over the next few months he explained how he got to know certain shapes on the piano and how he felt the different keys. I began to teach him how to read notes in exchange, although I think he did me the bigger favor.

My new approach to playing was to memorize shapes on the piano, rather than try to understand the chords theoretically. Although I must admit that I haven’t entirely divorced my mind from theory yet.

Soon after I had my breakthrough that would lead to my system that I teach in my book “How to Speed Read Piano Chord Symbols”.

Basically, I found that you could understand seventh chords (the most common brand of chord in jazz) from the root of the chord down as well as up.

Usually, chords are taught theoretically from the root. For example, if you take a C scale:


To create a simple C chord, you would take the Root, 3rd and 5th. To create a seventh chord, you would take the Root, 3rd, 5th and 7th.



The problem is that music is much more fluid that this and if you always play chords in large blocks, your music sounds blocky.

So I found that most seventh chords in jazz are often used in what are called “shell voicings” – that is only the 3rd and 7th. If you are playing solo piano and want to sound nice on standards you can basically play on the Root of the chord in the left hand, and then play the 3rd, seventh and melody note in the right.

It took me about six months to shift my playing from one style to another, but I’ve never looked back. The more I read music written by the great songwriters of the 1930s and 40s, the more I realize that what I discovered was no great discovery – it’s just how music is done. I don’t know why theory books don’t teach chord theory this way.

If you want to find out more about my method for playing from fake books, check out my books, especially "How to Speed Read Piano Chord Symbols" and "How to Play from a Fake Book without Gettin' the Blues".