He walked into the room with his ego draped around him like a large winter coat. He was truly impressed with himself, and he had an utter disdain for all of us. He set up a drum machine on a table, and the string players sat in chairs directly in front of him. Pate was off to the right, and he placed me facing the rest of the musicians immediately next to the drum machine. His ego-coat brushed up against me throughout the rehearsal. Rehearsing without a rhythm section to provide context for your part is like an unattractive person hitting on you at a party. You can tell that there is a way to handle the whole thing gracefully, but the words just don’t seem to come out right.For non-musicians, it is like someone giving you the words “go … and … spread … out … on … a … table” with a stopwatch. After handing you a piece of paper that read, “You need to say these words at 3.5, 4.1, 4.2, 5.7, 6.0, and 6.1 seconds.” He would say, “It will all make sense later.” Next, he would proceed to yell at you for two hours about your pronunciation and timing problems. Finally, you would be brought together with another person with a corresponding list of words and times. When you put the two lists together it would say, “Let us go then, you and I/when the evening is spread out against the sky/like a patient etherized on a table.” “Aha!,” you say. “It all makes sense now. That seemed to mean something totally different when I practiced by myself for two hours.”
Rehearsing with Smokey’s music director was just like that. The first thing he said to me was, “I don’t want you to use your left hand at all. It gets too muddy with the bass player.” At the time he said that to me, I had just finished twenty years of practicing several hours a day to learn to play the piano with both hands. None of my teachers had ever emphasized the “leave out the left hand technique” or the stile senza mano sinestra as we would say in classical circles. Out of twenty years habit, I occasionally reached up and played a note with my left hand. The director had, what musicians call, “huge ears.” He could hear everything. A single note played with the left hand would result in stoppage of the rehearsal.
“How many times do I have to tell you not to play with your left hand? I’ve told you several times already! Don’t do it!” he would scream.
Rehearsal from hell
More here by composer/musician Kurt Knecht, who really did play with Smokey, according to his biography.
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