Boogiein'

After right at a month of formal music instruction I decided to attempt to learn the bass-line to one of my target pieces, a smoking-hot number called Bumble Boogie. Believe it or not, if you've never heard this, it's Rimsky-Korsakov's (he of the cool name) Flight of the Bumble Bee set against a boogie-Woogie backbeat. I found this clip of Liberace playing it, killing two birds with one stone, as he fits both the theme of this blog and makes a nice callback to my running obsession with Great Fops in History:



As you can see, it is a very cool piece of music, and somehow Liberace also somehow managed to conjure up a string quartet from thin air while his hands never leaves our sight.

So I worked out the bass line, as I said, but I play it very slowly. In fact, it sounds like a slow waltz more than a boogie-woogie. But I was very pleased I could interpret the music in the first place, much less convert it into finger-to-key movements. Speed will come with time. This is just something I intend to work on now and then anyway as my lessons progress. It's far more advanced than my current skill level. Do I imagine I'll be able to play it someday? Sure. I'm shooting for a year from now.