Music by Jean King
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As a young girl, I quit piano lessons time and again, frustrated by having to read notes. To me, notation “got in the way” of hearing the music. Then one day my father was whistling a tune, and I ran over to the piano and played it. (The title song in my cd Jimmie K on Broadway tells this story.) Delighted that I could play by ear, my father arranged that I take lessons from a local musician who taught me how to play popular music by applying chords to the melody in the treble notes – the only notes I had to learn to read. I remember the great satisfaction I felt upon hearing the change in sound of a C Major chord to a C7. Once I understood the basic song structure of melody, bridge, and coda, music, for the first time, made sense to me. Further, I could evendetour on my own through improvisation. Soon I was having the time of my life playing gigs with my tutor’s jazz band. But my euphoria ended abruptly upon the unexpected death of my father when I was 16 years old. (Listen to “Where Has My Daddy Gone?” in Jimmie K on Broadway .) Instead of playing in St. Louis on New Year’s Eve, I attended his wake. From then on I stopped playing publicly, and to this day, resist doing gigs.
Although I played piano since early age, it never occurred to me that I had a gift to compose music. This discovery came later quite by accident. I had suffered severe eye strain while working for a publisher as a technical copywriter, which cost me my job. While convalescing, I attended a concert at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox, Massachusetts. Whether it was the grandeur of Tanglewood, the suffering I was going through with my eyes, or both, I’ll never know. But something inside me opened up at Tanglewood. During a piano concerto (the performer I do not recall nor the title of the piece), I suddenly heard the beauty and depth of classical music. I felt riveted to my seat, spellbound really. When I returned home, I wanted nothing more than to play the classics. Further, I wanted to play them as they were written, not by ear as I had done with pop music. Realizing that to achieve this goal I had to read notation, I once again took piano lessons using the sight reading method. But the strain on my eyes forced me to stop. Frustrated and angry, I sat at the piano one day, and over a couple hours’ time, vented my feelings all over that keyboard! At one point, I turned on my cassette recorder, having a vague sense that something was happening. Weeks later, I listened to the tape, and was amazed at what I heard. “I think I did something there,” I told my former teacher, who, upon listening to the tape, confirmed my suspicion. Since then, I have always composed music.
Jean King
Alton, Illinois
jking@ezl.com
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