The Sunday Musician

Improvising is mysterious to most people - even, I suspect, a lot of Sunday Musicians. Everyone admires a person who can just ‘wing it’, and let’s face it – it’s fun to be admired.

My uncle Bob, my mom’s second-oldest brother, was a great improviser, and he played the organ with a lot of style and high-handed flair. We’d go over there for coffee on a weekend night – not my favorite place to go, no cousins my age - and I always tagged along because I was my parent’s only child, and they couldn’t really afford a baby sitter. Aunt Polly would put on a pot of Maxwell House, and my dad, a big lover of organ music, would say, “Whatcha gonna play for us?” Uncle Bob didn’t need much coaxing; he was a big show-off.

He’d take his shoes off, slide onto the bench, and as the old tube amplifier warmed up somewhere inside the cabinet he’d start flipping switches, pulling some stops and pushing in others, all very mysterious. When the organ was warm he’d launch into ‘Just a Closer Walk’, or ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, laughing at his own mistakes, stopping half way through a song to make a joke, rolling his eyes to make me laugh.

And he could really play that thing. He’d lean left, then right as he added little flourishes and extra notes. He’d lift his hands high off the keys as he moved from one note to the next. My mom, who grew up with him, just sort of rolled her eyes, but it was magic to me the way he did that. How he knew which notes to add, I would not figure out until much later. One thing I knew right away, though: I wanted to do the same thing some day. Maybe not on the organ, but somehow. Because my Uncle Bob could do this, he rose up above my other uncles in my eyes. The other men in my life did things that were cool – my dad’s friend Pete had his own body shop – but I knew those things could be learned or figured out somewhere. But to just sit at the keys and make music come out…that was on a par with levitating a chair, or turning someone into a cat. And if I could do it, if I had it in me, then maybe other people would admire me the way I admired my uncle Bob. He also owned an early-70’s Pinto that he painted with a roller, but that’s a different story.

To be honest, I think the desire to be admired sometimes crept (creeps…sigh) into my church playing.