It's All About The Music: Noah Baerman, Dorothy Taubman and Edna Golandsky

Noah Baerman 

The Medicated Hum 

The first I ever heard of Noah Baerman was when he was on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz program.  I really liked his playing especially his harmonic language and voicing.   Perhaps I remembered them discussing the genetic disease that made it remarkable that he could play at all but the thing I remember the most was his playing, the warm to hot harmonies and the great improvising.

I bought his jazz piano method and went through the first volume of it, though other things intervened and I have yet to finish going through it.  Now that I'm trying to rebuild my playing from a bad, though far less damaging injury, I'm going back to looking at his strategies for handling problems and am thinking of trying a bit more improvising.  Baerman shows that no matter what else is happening, it's the music that is the point.

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Also, I'm looking at the work of Dorothy Taubman, who was famous for helping pianists correct even decades standing problems with their playing and working around physical problems without resorting to surgery (which has such a bad record of not working).   I regretted never being able to work with Taubman or one of her students - if I won the lottery, you now know what I'd be doing - but am finding the online work of one of them, Edna Golandsky, to be inspiring.  I'm listening to her many videos and will be applying them to appropriate material, starting with five-finger pieces and exercises.  Here are two of those that can help anyone from absolute beginners to the most accomplished musicians.

Playing Scales 

All About the Thumb

When I first read about Dorothy Taubman I was also impressed at how she always emphasized how her technical studies were developed to serve the music, not to come up with The Taubman Technique.   That was what led me to think she was probably on to something.  Another thing was that she discouraged people from having surgery for physical problems, advocating trying to analyze problems and solving them without cutting.  I've known too many people who had bad results from surgery for those kinds of things.