Jazzy Time with Mark

I've always said, "It's lonely to play saxophone by yourself." My favorite musical memories are jamming it up with the Jazzinators, my traditional jazz band (AKA New Orleans jazz), especially Emma, Aditya, and Lauren. However, due to the realities of life including all of us moving away from each other and COVID, I haven't been able to play with my old band as much.

During COVID, I had plenty of time to play music but I didn't have anyone to play with in my social bubble, so I decided to pick up both singing and piano to accompany myself. I learned very basic two hand stride piano for backing and started taking singing lessons, eventually investing in a microphone and a DAC to transmit my voice and piano over a zoom call to my singing teacher in Brazil. I arranged jazz songs on my website in keys that I could comfortably sing, and I did a small performance at my speakeasy party before I started traveling. However, I always realized there was a limit with what I could accomplish without really dedicating myself to practicing. My tone and musicality on my tenor saxophone drastically surpassed anything I could do with my voice or piano, which always made me feel like I missing something.

One way I could improve was to focus on just singing without playing piano, but that brought me back to the original problem of being a lonely solo musician. The possibility of singing with a recording exists, but to me, it's stale and inflexible after a couple of hours of practice. I wanted the fun, energy, and musical conversation I had with my friends back in the Jazzinators. From stage right, enters my mom.

I've been playing classical music with my mom since junior high school, but I've personally never had the passion for classical music or big band pre-arranged jazz as I have for free form traditional jazz with just only a lead sheet. I slowly got my mom into playing jazz style piano, first starting with fully written out piano sheet music, then building a chord training website, and finally culminating with practicing ukelele and piano simply with chords with her. I'm really happy with how she's grown in skills and comfort without written music as well as how excited she is to learn a new way to play piano. Most recently, we played "Can't Help Falling in Love" together after only looking at the guitar chords and practicing together maybe 45 minutes on this particular song. I'm very proud of how we both are able to flow together flexibly and how we much we complement each other's strengths.

All of this is basically just giving context and hyping up our recording, which again isn't perfect, but to me was perfectly fun. I'm hoping we have many more songs to come!