Where does art happen?
At around 9:45 pm on Tuesday, March 31, 2026, the spirit moved me. The musical spirit, that is, even if the circumstances were decidedly mundane.
I was sitting on the couch watching the Knicks with my wife. The Rockets were trashing New York, so she decided to go to bed after halftime so as not to suffer the indignity of seeing the final score.
Just then I was drawn to the piano. I don’t know why — yet, compelled, I got up and went to the other side of our living room and sat in front of the keyboard.
A gorgeous black lacquer Schimmel upright, the piano is so simple and unassuming in its craftsmanship that I often forget in my day-to-day life what a magnificent instrument I possess. How warm and strong and beautiful it sounds in the room, not a plank or bevel or screw or sympathetic wire out of place.
When I say play, I do mean play — like a kid would play. I am not a pianist by any measure though I have spent more than two decades tinkering with the instrument as an outgrowth of my natural love for music and my role as a drummer and percussionist. Just as I recognized not too long ago that, although I am not a painter, I find meaningful pleasure in the act of painting, I am equally not a pianist but am endlessly fascinated by what I don’t know of the instrument, or about harmony, melody, pianistic coordination and artistry. I am curious about what can and will happen when I go to a keyboard despite those supposed shortcomings, and nonetheless play.
I did formally study piano briefly with a radically gifted and transcendent musical artist and teacher, Kathleen Supove, and a talented, but somewhat impatient, jazz pianist at a community center on the Lower East Side. I felt through all those lessons that I was struggling — that as a drummer or a poet, I could not naturally grasp or embody what my teachers were saying or playing. Maybe, I was, as Wayne and Garth might proclaim, not worthy. Eventually, though, I came away from those lessons not only with slightly improved piano skills but with a number of insights that come up again and again in my daily life, years after the lessons ended.
Sometimes those insights are as straightforward as understanding the intricacies of the harmonic math behind a chord sequence or cadence I was given to practice. Other times they are broader and more conceptually and spiritually useful — insights concerning the meaning and value of a musical gesture, what “performance” means or what the possibilities for embracing my work as an artist may be outside publishing houses, record labels, galleries and concert halls. Often there is the melting away of notional boundaries that were preventing me from fully being the artist that I was capable of being, no matter where I stood in that discipline’s hierarchy at the time. Usually, I was on a very low rung if I was even on a rung at all. The idea that one couldn’t simultaneously be a regular sort of guy or gal with a job and a legitimate artist — whatever that means — was a myth that had always dogged me. It was only when I ceased to believe that myth, or that I was subject to the limitations it suggested, that I began doing the work that was truly my own.
These are all little bits of embodied knowledge that don’t just serve me as a musician but that I carry around with me. Maybe I wasn’t a very good piano student and never learned what I was supposed to in a conventional sense. But what I learned in the process of seeking out these teachers and truly listening to what they were trying to convey, and of paying attention to the experience of trying to learn something new in both mind and body, has become part of who I am.
Today, when I go to the piano, I go not to pursue an artistic goal, but rather in pursuit of exploration, curiosity, sensual pleasure, mental stimulation and joy. I don’t go with anything to achieve. The piano is an instrument to me not just in the sense that I can produce “music” on it but in the sense that it facilitates a connection to pleasure and sometimes to the divine — that place of transcendence beyond the material circumstances we find ourselves in.
So I go to the piano to have some fun. You can listen here. You can read the rest as it plays.
It is, you’ll hear, a lo-fi recording. Not edited or polished for polite consumption. The beautiful tone of the Schimmel is perhaps not evident. I set it up by placing my phone haphazardly on the piano and hitting record. Behind it all, the clock of domesticity ticks on. The Knicks game remains on in the background, muted now. My wife picks up her tissues and caps her nightly potions, oils and tinctures. We converse a bit — I’m still playing, I never stop — and before going to bed she walks over and gives me a kiss — because we’ve had a good week together, supporting each other and talking as we went separately about our workdays. I play through that, too (“Thank you for the nocturne, Huckleberry,” she says before planting one on my cheek, a lovely film-specific thing to say). All those incidentals are present on the recording. I did not edit them out. They are part of the music. Part of the condition of its birth.
When my wife goes to bed I am able to concentrate again on the musical scale that wove its way into my head and sent me to the piano in the first place and I go after it, into it, and see what I can find (If I have it right, it’s called a Romanian Minor scale). How can I make it sing? Not hard, really. The grouping of notes is naturally plaintive and evocative. Why is this so? Listening to it now, I think there is some beauty there. I spend another moment marveling at how just slightly altering a sequence of notes (adding two flats and one sharp to a C major scale) can so radically change what almost every human can perceive as a distinct mood shift, from bright and orderly to dark and brooding.
Throughout the recording you’ll hear incidental sounds. It’s New York so police sirens wail off in the distance. My wife chatters. At around 1:40 you’ll hear the roar of a modified track car blowing across Grand Street outside my window. The rest is me pursuing my line of melodic and tonal inquiry. At around 2:35 a little Satie creeps into one of the phrases and spooks me. I lose my flow and stumble into a few dissonant notes.
I leave it all there. To document rather than produce and polish. The street sounds add a sort of texture not traditionally associated with formal music, which mostly seeks to achieve a separation from all other sonic activity to isolate its character. This is not something I discovered. In 20th century responses to commercial music like sound art, field recording and so on — or in plain old live recordings for that matter — incidentals are indeed part of the fabric of sound. There is cheering and applause in live concert recordings, of course, but that is least interesting to me, because it is in a sense planned, part of the acknowledged dialog between artist and listener. On the other hand, the background murmuring and conversation and glasses clinking in the background of Bill Evans’s performance of “My Man Is Gone Now” from Sunday at the Village Vanguard puts me in the club that day in 1961 in a way that the music itself, or the applause that follows it, does not. It plants me and the work together in a place and moment in time.
I am not comparing this experience — listening to a digital recording of a dude improvising on a piano in his living room — to what we commonly understand as performance: a concert, with an audience, a communal group seeking to experience and amplify or make sacred in their unity the performance of the artist, and I would not argue for a concept of art that didn’t include this type public participation. Art is for people; the more who hear it or see it, and the more moved, the better.
Still, there is something compelling in the quotidian, the nonperformance, the act of creation as it is woven into the fabric of daily life, equally compelling. All that happens and accumulates before showtime, in the practice and incidentals: the character of whatever instrument is nearby, background details, room conditions and temperature, conversations, chatter, physical and emotional states, weather, ambient sounds and noises and so on. I zoom in and focus on that little space where all that happens. What is it? What is to be found there? I don’t know but I often find it just as interesting as the art or performance it eventually leads to.
To me, having an artistic expression emerge in the normal fluid passage of time is a unifying experience. It removes, temporarily at least, the limits and formalities that we impose on the creation or presentation of art in society. It removes the barrier between art and life. It is an unmediated, unadorned and primitive experience of art. Or art in in its embryonic or nascent form. The seed of art. Or it is art as intimacy. Or, maybe: art is intimacy.
If this idea — and this recording and my musing on it — holds anything valuable, I hope it is a note of encouragement. I’ve seen and known many people who have squashed their creative spirits and energies over time (and I’ve even been one of them) because they absorbed the view that what they were doing by fiddling or stumbling through a poem or a painting or a song in the privacy of their own room wasn’t really worth anything to anyone besides themselves. They didn’t think they were “good enough.” So many others were better. Even if they practiced their whole lives they would never be worthy of this musical or artistic task.
So they quit or approach their work furtively, or with a sense of mild embarrassment. Why bother?
One of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, gave a stark and memorable answer to that question that I try to keep in mind. In a 2006 letter to a group of New York City high school students, the 84-year-old Vonnegut wrote: “Practice any art … no matter how well or badly, not to get money or fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
Maybe I’m kidding myself — and you, for that matter. Maybe all this is the rationalization of a dilettante. That’s not for me to decide. The fact is that this little blissful encounter — with the Knicks, the piano, the street sounds and the kiss on the cheek from my wife — was a small act of becoming. So on this day, at least, I’m willing to believe that the art of domesticity is where it’s at.
Image adapted from Frantisek Kupka’s 1905 painting “Piano Keys.”
