Player Piano Quotes

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.

The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.

Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.

Don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player!

I'd swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.

Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go.

Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. [...] Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first.

If it weren't for the people, the god-damn people' said Finnerty, 'always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, the world would be an engineer's paradise.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. "You're still in touch. I guess that's the test." "Barely — barely." "A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany." Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.

That man's got a lot of get up and go," said Anita. "He fills me full of lie down and die," said Paul.

Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave," said Harrison thickly, and he left.

Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.

It isn't knowledge that's making trouble, but the uses it's put to.

Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.

I know a flute player is technically called a "flautist," but something about it sounds a little sketchy, as does "pianist," so I will refrain.

Zebras are piano horses. I think about that when I’m swinging a golf club, and it brings a musical cowboy element to my game that another player might not be able to buy in a vending machine.

Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

It's just that I'm curious, that's all. He usually walks alone" "Yeah, he's a loner, all right," the waitress murmured. "Even when he's with someone, he's alone.

He would make a good lamp post if he'd weather better and didn't have to eat.

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like: Player Piano B The Sirens of Titan A Mother Night A Cat’s Cradle A-plus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus Happy Birthday, Wanda June D Breakfast of Champions C Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C Slapstick D Jailbird A Palm Sunday C

Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.

My life has been guided by an unseen piano player, who is actually typing this now.

I took a sip from my second martini, feeling as decadent as one of those jazz piano players who smoke a lot and drink a lot and are found dead in a gutter at the end of every film.

Don't you see, Doctor?" said Lasher. "The machines are to practically everbody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.

Like the piano player, I have memory in my fingertips. I watch words spill out creating worlds, inventing colors, bridging generations.

He watched his brother find peace of mind through psychiatry. That’s why he won’t have anything to do with it. I don’t follow. Isn’t his brother happy? Utterly and always happy. And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there.

What do you expect?" he said. "For generations they've been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men-and boom! it's all yanked out from under them. They can't participate, can't be useful any more. Their whole culture's been shot to hell.

The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,

Not slaves,” said Halyard, chuckling patronizingly. “Citizens, employed by government.

Well, it just don’t seem like nobody feels he’s worth a crap to nobody no more, and it’s a hell of a screwy thing, people gettin’ buggered by things they made theirselves.

He took another drink, licked his lips and leaned back with his eyes closed for a minute, listening. Marion closed her eyes and just leaned against his chest, feeling the weight and security of his arm around her, moving her toes slightly in time to the music. That last hash and the chartreuse really did it. She felt fine. She felt warm. She felt at home. Trane had just finished a chorus and the piano player came in and Marion muttered a soft, Yeah.

They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn't funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things.

I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.

Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts.

Between a book's covers there may be passion, bile, mayhem, or murder, but in the quiet spaces where it awaits its fate (either acceptance of indifference) all is calm.

Everything you think you think because somebody promoted the ideas. Education—nothing but promotion.

But there’s two kinds of work, kid, work and hard work. If you want to stand out, have something to sell, you got to do hard work. Pick out something impossible and do it, or be a bum the rest of your life.

Oliver came up to me and asked me to play something on the piano. 'What would you like?' I asked. 'Anything.' This would be my thanks for the most beautiful evening of my life. I took a sip from my second martini, feeling as decadent as one of those jazz piano players who smoke a lot and drink a lot and are found dead in a gutter at the end of every film.

And the charming little cottage he'd taken as a symbol of the good life of a farmer was as irrelevant as a statue of Venus at the gate of a sewage-disposal plant.

And the lawyers! Of course, I say it’s a pretty good thing what happened to them, because it was a bad thing for them, which couldn’t help to be a good thing for everybody else.

For the sum of everything was a circle, and the circle was labelled Zero

...three thousand dream houses for three thousand families with presumably identical dreams.

Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it's sure to be a bloody business.

He said goodbye and good luck, and that some of the greatest prophets were crazy as bedbugs.

It was a beautifully simple picture these procession leaders had. It was as though a navigator, in order to free his mind of worries, had erased all the reefs from his maps." - Chapter 21

But, to Shepherd, life seemed to be laid out like a golf course, with a series of beginnings, hazards, and ends, and with a definite summing up—for comparison with others scores—after each hole.

Well, you know, in a way I wish I hadn't met you two. It's much more convenient to think of the opposition as a nice homogeneous, dead-wrong mass. Now I've got to muddy my thinking with exceptions.

He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn't see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.

11. I am inclined to say: I 'point' in different senses to this body, to its shape, to its colour, etc.--What does that mean? What does it mean to say I 'hear' in a different sense the piano, its sound, the piece, the player, his fluency? I 'marry', in one sense a woman, in another her money.

But wether I am faking on a player piano, or striking the chords with the power of my own mind and hands, the song of my life is equally suspenseful and full of surprises as it rolls off the pulsating sounding board of destiny - a barcarole that either way will leave, I hope, happy echoes behind

You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. "You're still in touch. I Guess that's the test." "Barely-barely." "A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany." Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out there on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first.

Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness.

I love people who play guitars on roofs!" said Rose, hopping along the pavement in one of her sudden happy moods. "Don't you?" "Never knew anyone else who did it!" "Don't you like Tom?" "Of course I do. But I don't know about all the other guitar-on-roof players! They might be really awful people, with just that one good thing about them. Playing guitars on roofs... or bagpipes... Or drums... Sarah would like that, and Saffy could have the bagpipes! Caddy could have a harp.... What about Mum?" "One of those gourds filled with beans!" said Rose at once. "And Daddy could have a grand piano. On a flat roof. With a balcony and pink flowers in pots around the edge! And I'll have a very loud trumpet! What about you?" "I'll just listen," said Indigo.

Piano player's gone," Scarlett said. "That's always a bad sign.

the bureaucracy gets ridiculous and the legal implications of opening your mouth has you more concerned about losing your job than actually solving the problem.

It’s just a hell of a time to be alive,

On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about jazz.

It was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second.

They had been the rioters, the smashers of machines.

There's nothing fragile about this one. That ain't a fragile nose or mouth or chin, and yet it's female, more female than them fragile-pretty types who look more like ornaments than girls.

If Checker Charley was out to make chumps out of men, he could damn well fix his own connections. Paul looks after his own circuits; let Charley do the same. Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.” He gathered up the bills from the table. “Good night.

I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things.

The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.

To the people who were going to be replaced by machines, maybe. A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.

Of course you’re right. It’s just a hell of a time to be alive, is all—just this goddamn messy business of people having to get used to new ideas. And people just don’t, that’s all. I wish this were a hundred years from now, with everybody used to the change.

The Sovereignty of the United States resides in the people, not in the machines, and it's the people's to take back, if they so wish. The machines," said Paul, "have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for the good government. Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

When we'd gone to Disneyland, the tree house had been my favorite thing in the whole park. If only I'd had no parents watching my every move, if only I'd been a happy, carefree orphan, I'd have hidden under the player piano until everything closed, and then taken up residence there

Ted has a friend that owns a club. They’re looking for a piano player on Thursday nights. I was thinking about it…” Blake trailed off. “I think that sounds wonderful,” Livia said immediately. “You’ll be terrific, and I’ll be front and center, every Thursday night.” She smiled again, wondering if he could feel it.

But you find out quick enough that old friends are old friends, and nothing more—no wiser, no more help than anyone else.

Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave,” said Harrison thickly, and he left.

He remembered his cry of the night before: We must meet in the middle of the Bridge!

the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated.

When he was with Finnerty he liked to pretend that he shared the man’s fantastic and alternately brilliant or black inner thoughts—almost as though he were discontent with his own relative tranquility.

Sooner or later someone's going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being neede on earth - hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws. But sooner or later someone's going keep out of thei site long enough to organize a following.

At this point in history, 1952 A.D., our lives and freedom depend largely upon the skill and imagination and courage of our managers and engineers, and I hope that God will help them to help us all stay alive and free.

He hadn't had the satisfaction of telling someone he'd quit, of being believed; but he'd quit. Goodbye. None of this had anything to do with him anymore. Better to be nothing than a blind doorman at the head of civilization's parade.

This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon.

I’m not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes though I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet. Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony—I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don’t even think he knows any more when he’s playing right or not. It isn’t all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off—they’d foul up anybody, if you gave them a chance.

I'm not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should've heard the crowd, though, when he was finished... They went mad... I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me.

And another nice thing about war—not that anything about war is nice, I guess—is that while it’s going on and you’re in it, you never worry about doing the right thing. See? Up there, fighting and all, you couldn’t be righter. You could of been a heller at home and made a lot of people unhappy and all, and been a dumb, mean bastard, but you’re king over there—king to everybody, and especially to yourself. This above all, be true to yourself, and you can’t be false to anybody else, and that’s it—in a hole, being shot at and shooting back.

Three ancient musicians hunched there— piano, guitar, accordion. None of them looked less than seventy years old, the accordion player so frail each time he swayed his shoulders around a corner of the melody Geryon feared the accordion would crush him flat. It gradually became clear that nothing could crush this man. Hardly glancing at one another the three of them played as one person, in a state of pure discovery. They tore clear and clicked and locked and unlocked, they shot their eyebrows up and down. They leaned together and wove apart, they rose and cut away and stalked one another and flew up in a cloud and sank back down on waves.

Call yourself a doctor, too, do you?” said Mr. Haycox. “I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I earned that degree,” said Doctor Pond coolly. “My thesis was the third longest in any field in the country that year—eight hundred and ninety-six pages, double-spaced, with narrow margins.” “Real-estate salesman,” said Mr. Haycox. He looked back and forth between Paul and Doctor Pond, waiting for them to say something worth his attention. When they’d failed to rally after twenty seconds, he turned to go. “I’m doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit,” he said. “When you doctors figure out what you want, you’ll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.

Dr. Lecter toyed with his food while he wrote and drew and doodled on his pad with a felt-tipped pen. He flipped over the cassette in the tape player chained to the table leg and punched the play button. Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the piano. The music, beautiful beyond plight and time, filled the bright cage and the room where the warders sat.

I think the way to stop it is to shrug it off. Or take it with your tongue in your cheek. Sure, that's the system. At any rate, it's the system that works for you. It's the automatic control board that keeps you out there where nothing matters, where it's only you and the keyboard and nothing else. Because it's gotta be that way. You gotta stay clear of anything serious.

I don’t think power stops you from getting hurt. I think power makes it so more people want to hurt you.” “How do you figure that?” “Because, when you have power, you have something other people crave, and when others want it, there are some that won’t sit idly by while you have it. They take it for themselves. Isn’t that what history has taught us? Where there is a thirst for power there is war?

Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker’s gray pinstripes, all separated here. Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn’t—no matter when, no matter what. Kroner cleared his throat. “I said, ‘who’s their leader, Paul?’ ” “I am,” said Paul. “And I wish to God I were a better one.

Basically we want to be the piano, he said, not human beings but the piano, all our lives we want to be the piano and not a human being, flee from the human beings we are in order to completely become the piano, an effort which must fail, although we don't want to believe it, he said. The ideal piano player (he never said pianist!) is the one who wants to be the piano, and I say to myself every day when I wake up, I want to be the Steinway, not the person playing the Steinway, I want to be the Steinway itself.

Even Europe joined in. With the most modest friendliness, explaining that they wished not to intrude on American domestic politics but only to express personal admiration for that great Western advocate of peace and prosperity, Berzelius Windrip, there came representatives of certain foreign powers, lecturing throughout the land: General Balbo, so popular here because of his leadership of the flight from Italy to Chicago in 1933; a scholar who, though he now lived in Germany and was an inspiration to all patriotic leaders of German Recovery, yet had graduated from Harvard University and had been the most popular piano-player in his class—namely, Dr. Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstängl; and Great Britain's lion of diplomacy, the Gladstone of the 1930's, the handsome and gracious Lord Lossiemouth who, as Prime Minister, had been known as the Rt. Hon. Ramsay MacDonald, P.C. All three of them were expensively entertained by the wives of manufacturers, and they persuaded many millionaires who, in the refinement of wealth, had considered Buzz vulgar, that actually he was the world's one hope of efficient international commerce.

His performance was also intensely visual, with his volatile movements in front of the piano, and his cries and wild vocal accompaniment to his playing, all of which spoke eloquently of his extraordinary passion for the instrument and the music he coaxed, tickled and sometimes pounded out of him. Many critics were put off by all this, thinking it was a mere outward show- and therefore insincere. In fact it is an essential part of music-making for Jarrett, his way of achieving his state of grace… the ecstasy of inspiration. Miles Davis understood that immediately, and so did most other musicians. Jack DeJohonette says: “The one thing that struck me about Keith, that made him stand out from other players, was that he really has a love affair with the piano, it’s a relationship with that instrument… Keith’s hands are actually quire small but because of that he can do things that a person like myself, or other pianists with normal hand spans, can’t do… it enables him to overlap certain chord sequences and do rhythmic things and contrapuntal lines and get these effects of like, four people playing the piano… But I’ve never seen anybody just have such a rapport with their instrument and know its limitations but also push them to the limits, transcend the instrument – which is what I try and do with the drums as well.

#WIPBehindtheFan People wonder how she can do this; the truth of it was she feels alone on stage. She never sees them, the men that pay to see her. Never sees their faces behind the glare of the lights. She tunes out the catcalls, the whistles and the call of her stage name. She ignores everything with the exception of the piano. She allows the keyboard access to her body and soul. She escapes into the music that capture her with notes as airy as a feather or powerful with chords drum on her like a storm. Dottie throws back her head disappearing into the music as it wraps around her, spinning her with its notes. Smiling as she loses herself in her surrender. Giving herself to the piano notes as she would the piano player: Nick Denham.

We have some great museums. You'd love the lake." "I don't know that I can enjoy any kind of water anymore." "Why not?" I already knew. "After that little girl, little Ann Nash, was left in the creek to drown." She paused to take a sip of her iced tea. "I knew her, you know." Amma whined and began fidgeting in her seat. "She wasn't drowned though," I said, knowing my correction would annoy her. "She was strangled. She just ended up in the creek." "And then the Keene girl. I was fond of both of them. Very fond." She stared away wistfully, and Alan put his hand over hers. Amma stood up, released a little scream the way an excited puppy might suddenly bark, and ran upstairs. "Poor thing," my mother said. "She's having nearly as hard a time as I am." "She actually saw the girls every day, so I'm sure she is," I said peevishly in spite of myself. "How did you know them?" "Wind Gap, I need not remind you, is a small town. They were sweet, beautiful little girls. Just beautiful." "But you didn't really know them." "I did know them. I knew them well." "How?" "Camille, please try not to do this. I've just told you that I am upset and unnerved, and instead of being comforting, you attack me." "So. You've sworn off all bodies of water in the future, then?" My mother emitted a quick, creaky sound. "You need to shut up now, Camille." She folded the napkin around the remains of her pear like a swaddling and left the room. Alan followed her with his manic whistling, like an old-time piano player lending drama to a silent movie.

Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Ah, I understand", murmured the imperial scapegrace. Turning to the room: "When Franz Ferdinand drinks", he cried, "everybody drinks!" Which helped restore a level of civility in the room, and soon even of cheer, as smart neckties were soaked in suds, the piano player came back from under the bar, and people in the room resumed dancing syncopated two-steps. After a while someone started singing "All Pimps Look Alike to Me", and half the room joined in. Lew, however, noticing the way the Archduke seemed to keep inching stealthily but unmistakably toward the street door, thought it wise to do the same. Sure enough, just before sliding out the door, Der F. F., with a demonic grin, screamed: "And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!" whereupon he disappeared, and it was a near thing that Lew got out with his keester intact.

The afternoon was wet: a walk the party had proposed to take to see a gipsy camp, lately pitched on a common beyond Hay, was consequently deferred. Some of the gentlemen were gone to the stables: the younger ones, together with the younger ladies, were playing billiards in the billiard-room. The dowagers Ingram and Lynn sought solace in a quiet game at cards. Blanche Ingram, after having repelled, by supercilious taciturnity, some efforts of Mrs. Dent and Mrs. Eshton to draw her into conversation, had first murmured over some sentimental tunes and airs on the piano, and then, having fetched a novel from the library, had flung herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and prepared to beguile, by the spell of fiction, the tedious hours of absence. The room and the house were silent: only now and then the merriment of the billiard-players was heard from above.

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either differential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marveling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never. . . . She was no dazzling executante; her runs were not at all like strings of pearls, and she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation. Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer's evening with the window open . . . And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what - that is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy decided that they should triumph.

Fifteen years had passed since I first learned to improvise by copying George Shearing records. From the beginning, the goal was to move beyond imitation and find my own voice, and I felt that that was finally happening. Miles had been the guiding light to my growth, encouraging all of us in the band to develop our own styles of playing, and during my five and a half years in the quintet I did start to develop my own sound. But it wasn’t until I got out on my own that I felt I could really explore it. Now that I had my own sextet, I started thinking analytically about what actually goes on within a jazz group. At every moment onstage players are making choices, and each choice affects every other member of the group. So each player has to be prepared to change directions at any given moment—just as Miles did when I played that “wrong” chord onstage a few years earlier. Everybody in a jazz ensemble has learned the basic framework of harmony and scales and how they fit. They know the basic song structure of having the rhythm section—piano, bass, and drums—playing together while the horns carry the melody. But apart from those basics, jazz is incredibly broad. There are really uncountable ways of playing it. For the pianist alone there are so many choices to make: what pitch, how many notes, whether to play a chord or a line. I have ten fingers, and they’re in motion almost all the time, so all of those decisions must happen in an instant. I’m reacting to what the rest of the band is playing, but if I’m only reacting, then I’m not really making a choice; I’m just getting hit and being pushed along. Acting is making a choice, so all the players must be ready to act as well as react. The players have to be talented enough, and confident enough, to do both. I had watched Miles surround himself with amazing musicians and then give them the freedom to act.