Saturday Sounds: Songs With Piano and a "Jazz" Playlist

I grew up in a “kids get piano lessons” family. The same chestnut-colored upright piano I first mashed my little fingers on is the same one that’s in my parent’s home in North Carolina today. I always liked that one exercise where you had to go from C to E-F-G-A and back down to D, then skipping to F-G-A-B and so on. It felt like playing with two magnets between your fingers.

I recalled the strained fingers and missed notes of practicing fondly while listening to “Stay”, the title track to Chad Lawson’s new EP. The 5-song composite of solo piano work is a testament to the importance of negative space and pacing as essential tools for songs written and performed by one. I’m particularly drawn to whatever sadness hides within “Across The Distance”.

Masego’s “Veg Out (Wasting Tyme)” builds itself on a piano loop set perfectly for your daydreaming. Lyrics like “I want you to see me as the seasons like the Winter and the Fall” flow in a disarming, poetic brilliance that would make a laureate check their register. “We can do whatever” feels apropos of our desire to fill our downtime with something, anything, but if it’s special or with someone special, it’s time well spent.

Drake’s “So Far Gone” turned 10 this year, an album I listened to in high school with the same curious new interest that my classmates had when we saw the Degrassi kid start to make music that actually sounded like our experiences. There’s endless ego, careless handling of emotions for the sake of lust, and realizing the dawn of adulthood is nearer than we’d like it to be. There’s also track 16, “Outro”, which samples piano from Chilly Gonzales’ “The Tourist” off his first of three solo piano albums. In Drake’s hands, “The Tourist” is a quiet look of contemplation out the window of Air Drake. With Gonzales, it marvels at the priceless wonder experiences bring us.

As Thursday was International Jazz Day, I updated my Get High Hear Jazz playlist with more tracks that are A: definitely not jazz and B: definitely not jazz but will feel like they make sense in the context of jazz. It was an honest attempt to stay faithful to the genre, but I ended up rejecting the puritan misery of uniformity in favor of a vibe. Call it improvisation, if you’d like.