How to Start Something New—Without Fear of Failing (with Ron Drotos)

In this first full episode of Against the Norm, host Norman Calvo sits down with Ron Drotos—acclaimed pianist, musical director, and Norman’s collaborator on his one-man cabaret show—to talk about something most adults struggle with: starting something new without letting fear, perfectionism, or past mistakes stop us.

Ron shares powerful insights from decades of teaching musicians, singers, and performers of all levels—including stories from Carnegie Hall, Broadway, and his long-running cabaret workshops in Fairbanks, Alaska. Together, Norman and Ron explore why adults become so afraid of making mistakes, how early experiences can shape lifelong insecurities, and why learning anything new—singing, piano, fitness, or even a foreign language—is really about building new neural pathways, not instant success.

This conversation reframes learning as a joyful, process-driven experience rather than a performance test. Ron explains why progress is rarely linear, why perfection is a modern illusion, and how community, consistency, and curiosity matter far more than talent. Norman also shares personal stories from his own journey into singing and performance later in life—and how doing something creative at 70 has been one of the most energizing experiences of his life.

If you’ve ever thought “I’m too old,” “I’m not good at this,” or “I don’t want to embarrass myself,” this episode is a reminder that growth doesn’t come from staying on the path—it comes from going a little further than feels comfortable.

Contact us:   againstthenorm.net

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Welcome to Against the Norm. This is Norman Calvo, your host, and today I'm interviewing Ron Drotos, my pianist for my one-man, full-length cabaret show. Ron is an expert pianist, having played at Carnegie Hall, been nominated for a Tony Award for his performance at Smokey Joe's Cafe. He's been a pianist for a number of great cabaret performers. Also, he teaches a number of students across the world. Twice a year he travels to Fairbanks, Alaska, and has a one-week cabaret performance there, teaching students who are interested in cabaret and interested in learning all about singing. He's helped me on my one man cabaret show, and I'm glad that he's here. Please welcome Ron Drotos, my pianist and my musical director for the One Man Cabaret show, Against the Norm. Well, Ron, it's so great that you're here on the podcast Against the Norm. I'm so happy to be here with you. And of course, I've been with you over and over and over again at our rehearsals for my one-man show called Against the Norm. What I'd love to know is how did you deal with my insecurities and my inability to even sing at the very beginning?

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Well, that's a great question. But the actual truth of that is that your insecurities are about 0.5% of what most people's are, you know, when they're trying something new like this.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

You're kidding.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

So so you're easy. You're you've already got it all. That's why it's great you have this podcast, because you're the exact person who can help others who may have more insecurities. And it's not their fault that they have insecurities. If you're listening, it's not your fault that you have an insecurity, it's just our culture. You know, no little baby has insecurities about learning how to walk. You know, and they keep going. Even after they fall down, they fall down, they fall down. But as adults, we've been sort of conditioned, not sometimes taught, but mostly conditioned, that when we fall down once or twice, uh not to try it again.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

We're not good enough. We're not vulnerable.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Vulnerable and we're ashamed of what's going on. Exactly. When I was in first grade, I had this teacher, you know, uh I I just think, well, what whatever she was, I'm sure she had her reasons for being the way she was. Right. But the first day in class, we had these math books where it was perforated, each page was perforated, and we had to tear out the page for the day, the worksheet.

SPEAKER_03 2:58

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

And none of us had ever seen a perforated page before. You know, this is 1969, and they didn't have them in kindergarten when I was there. And so three of us out of the maybe 25 kids in the class, we ripped it. It ripped as I was perforating it. Right. She never gave us a second chance. She collected our books just for the three of us, and for the rest of the year, every single day, she ripped out our pages. So they were perfect. Put them on the front table, and the three of us had to walk up and get them.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Not allowing you to learn or to get away from the phone.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

And basically, you know, humiliating us for the rest of the year, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe well-intentioned, I'm not sure. But but in any case, we have to overcome that as adults because I think, you know, we we can all see as adults that that's ridiculous, right? Doing that to a first grader.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

We understand that it's ridiculous, especially if you're somebody young, of course, it's even worse. But when you're older, it gets very, very difficult to overcome the vulnerability of making a mistake, to overcome the it's not being ashamed of it, but you're afraid to make mistakes. How would you deal with somebody? Okay, maybe I'm not exactly the perfect example of that, but how would you deal with somebody who wants to do something new? Let's say learn how to sing, learn how to dance, or even learn how to play the piano. How would you work with somebody who is afraid of going ahead and doing it, but wants to do it badly?

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Yeah, okay, great question. So there's two separate aspects to this. Yeah. One is learning the thing itself, whether it's learning a language, exercising, learning, you know, just getting in shape or whatever it is. Doing the actual thing itself is one thing. Right. And then if there's a public component of this, like singing in public, that's a second one.

SPEAKER_02 4:45

That's the biggest issue.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

So sure. So what I would say is you need to separate them because we we get confused with the learning process. And again, it's because we're taught it in a confusing way. You know, like all these thousands of little internet and YouTube clips saying, you know, learn how to do this in five minutes or blah, blah, blah. It's it's crazy, right? You know, because it's more of a process oriented. So we shouldn't really do anything in public like singing until we know that we're good enough to do it. And to do it in a safe place. Like you did your cabaret show, and there was your friends came. So even if you didn't really mess up, everybody messes up a little bit, right? And that's a whole nother thing. Yeah, sure. You know, we you know, we won't get into we we have a perfect uh everybody, all the media we consume, recordings, things like that, um they uh um uh they're edited uh to be perfect. Like you know, people fix that note that they didn't sing right, they auto-tune. Yes. And then we think that we have to perform like that. Whereas in the past, going back to especially before the 1950s, when overdubbing and recording was uh really popularized and invented, um, people uh put mistakes on recordings. You hear Frank Sinatra record, and there's a couple of maybe trumpet notes that aren't quite perfect, or this or that. They kept them on it. Even classical music in the 30s and 40s, lots of mistakes. Oh, wow. Lots of mistakes, because they knew that everybody made mistakes. Nowadays, yes, we're in a culture that doesn't accept that as readily.

SPEAKER_03 6:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

But our friends do. And if we make them feel comfortable, like you did with your stories and your cabaret, absolutely you know, and everybody knew it was your first show, so they were accepted. You know, it was much more like okay, uh, a student recital when we're kids. And even when somebody does make a mistake in public, if it doesn't, if it doesn't bother us, if we just keep going and maybe give it a little chuckle or something, hey, let's let's start that song over again. Right, right, right. As soon as it starts, people totally go with it.

SPEAKER_03 6:32

They do.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

They totally go with it because they're glad it wasn't them. And also they say, Oh, he doesn't mind, so we don't mind.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

And they feel for the performer as well. I think they understand exactly what he's got he or she is going through, and they kind of sympathize with the issue. So there's a big, big difference there. But what I wanted to find out, it it's interesting. When I first sang in public, I made it was the song was, of course, Let It Be by the Beatles. I had a solo for the very first line. There were about 150 people in the audience. I practiced the line maybe a thousand times. I had it totally, totally in my head. When it came time for the performance, I screwed up so royally, so badly, that the rest of the performers who came after me, each singing their own line, also screwed up. Yet afterwards, this is the interesting thing. After the performance, all of my friends and family members, everybody from the choir came to me and said, Oh, you were great, Norman. You were great, you were phenomenal. But that's what people need to go forward even after their multiple mistakes, even after their multiple problems.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah, so so join the club, welcome aboard. Well, you've made those types of mistakes. Everybody's made those mistakes. I've played Broadway shows where somebody was playing the wrong song at the wrong time. It was a disaster. Yeah, because you're doing two shows on a matinee day and you get confused, where are we? You know, things like that. Right. Everybody's made those. Wow. You know, it's how you recover from them.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

If you recover them. If you can. But if you can. I'll tell you, on that performance, I was about ready to say, okay, this just isn't for me. I mean, uh, listening to Let It Be a thousand times and knowing exactly how it goes, yet at the time of the performance, screwing it up royally.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

But but you have to make a thousand mistakes to become a master at something. I saw Paul McCartney at Madison Square Garden uh once, and they were doing uh Can't Buy Me Love, which starts a cappella, Can't Buy Me Love, and then the band comes out in love, right? Right. So, and the whole band was singing harmony on that. Right. And they started a little low, like a like a quarter tone flat. And they went, Can't buy me love, and they all adjusted.

SPEAKER_02 8:45

Something like I would do. It's great McCartney, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:47

They have the experience to do that. Right. But your first cab ratio, you don't have time to, you don't have the experience. So we all so it's it's a it's recovering in the long term, not just in the moment. But I but my other point I really want to make here, which is more relevant to most people, right? Their psyche when they're learning something as adults, right, is that the process, we we have the public aspect we talked about. Right. But the process of learning something uh is re is it reaps it gives us benefits that aren't always obvious. So when in the 1980s, I got to study with a legendary jazz piano uh player and teacher named Billy Taylor, who had played with Charlie Parker at Burland in the 50s, and just a legend and um a wonderful person, very nice to me. Studied with him for a few years, and he always used to tell me and others, he said, Ron, we learn this was piano improvisation we were learning, jazz. He says we learn improvisation the way we learn language. And he would just say it a lot, and he thought it through, but he didn't always explain it further. And so I've really taken that to heart over the years, and I realized that if we look how we learn language and we study it, we can apply that to pretty much any learning process. So for instance, and it it's learning language when we were a kid by osmosis. Sure. Because actually, we all did the impossible, we learned our native language fluently with no instruction.

SPEAKER_02 10:01

No instruction at all.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Nobody said, Okay, little uh toddler, here's the theory of adverbs we're gonna learn today, right? Nobody's teaching us.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Nobody's taught us, but somebody said it's not runned. I run away.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Uh I you know somebody's but that's that's correcting the little mistakes we make. Right. Most people, you know, you don't really need too much of that.

SPEAKER_03 10:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

You know what I mean? Got it. You know?

SPEAKER_03 10:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

And um uh but but also how we learn languages adults. So I have never successfully learned a foreign language, for instance. I'm 61 years old. Right. And I thought, you know, I I I took two years of high school Spanish and got C's in it. I it just didn't click. Yeah. I'd never learned another language earlier and never even heard too much Spanish before that. So it didn't click. And I've tried to learn uh French over the years, which is probably one of the harder languages uh for someone from the New York area. Clearly harder. It's just absolutely very different. Spanish, at least you can hear it.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

You hear it every once in a while.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Yeah, and you can pronounce the words, you know, constantly.

SPEAKER_02 10:57

And you have Univision on TV as well. You can see it right.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Exactly. So I've been to France about six times, could never pick up the language there. Sure. But I was there for a few days a couple of years ago, and I said, okay, I'm gonna learn French now. So I'm spending a half hour a day, I've been doing it for an hour uh a year and a half with uh you know apps, and I have some friends who speak, and I'll try to speak to them a little bit, and uh and a listening thing where I listen for a half hour a day.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

And um it's uh if I was if I was purely goal-oriented, I would have been frustrated and given it up a long time ago. Really? Like even today on the subway, um, I I had a I had my French book open and I saw L E, which is pronounced le and I pronounced it le, le, le, like in Spanish. Because that's my sense memory of your default from when I was a kid, and that's what it looks like, right? This is after a year and a half. I pronounced the word the wrong.

SPEAKER_03 11:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Okay. Think about that. But you know what? My first instinct, because I've been teaching so long and also have gotten more um uh sort of uh more of a healthy attitude myself for this, is that that's okay because you know it's fun remembering. Oh no, it's right. That was fun.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

I didn't care that I messed it up for the thousandth time after you know a year and a half. The simplest word in the language, you know. Yeah, so so so the point is that the benefits from this out uh they they they they're bigger than the immediate goal. The book is called Learn French Easily, like easy stuff. And not so easy at all. And I'm on page five after a year. Right, not easy. But basically, um my musical memory has gotten better since I've started learning since I've started forgetting French on a daily basis. My musical memory has gotten better. My memory, like when you uh log into a website and it says we're sending you a six-digit code.

unknown 12:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

I used to always have to look back at it.

SPEAKER_02 12:49

Or write it down so write it down.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

I'm like, oh, 563-100. Oh, boom. And uh, and I just I just got it. Right. And it's from this this effort because every time I look at L E and I pronounce it wrong, I'm still creating new neural connections in my brain. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 13:07

Absolutely. That's the goal. That's what singing or learning how to sing or learning how to play a piano or learning any instrument or even exercise, learning how to do squats or whatever it is, it's all new neural pathways, connecting new pathways in your brain so that you can finally become better at whatever you're trying to do. But people don't understand this. People think, oh, I can't do it, so they give up. I can't do it once or twice or three times, they just give up. It's interesting. Recently I I'm in a class about learning how to become a personal coach. And one of the things that we're learning is that with meditation, I've tried it a thousand times. Honestly, not a thousand, but ten, fifteen times, and it lasts for maybe two weeks or three weeks, and it's so challenging that I just give up. And then in the class that I'm taking, the teacher said, Well, yes, of course, because it takes so long to create the new neural pathways that at the beginning, learning something new is going to be very difficult. And you have to kind of struggle through that process. Just like I struggled through the process of learning how to sing the first few times that I did it. You remember in my show, I couldn't tell the difference between a C note or G or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Well, that was a bit we did in the show because you do know the difference now. Now I know the difference. That was recreating your first lesson. Yeah, but that do you know about meditation? Do you know that saying? It says, don't just do something, sit there. And I hate just sitting there. It's great. It's great. Yeah, we we need to develop habits, but you know, it's the same thing like with learning French. I found that I could listen to a half-hour French lesson and repeat everything and and and and and not get anything, really, not any of the questions they ask me. Yeah, correct. But then the next day I wake up and the correct answers are going through my brain. It's not always immediate gratification unless you make it immediate gratification by enjoying it. So, so with piano, for instance, or it could be language or anything we're learning, I have a thing where I I um encourage my students to reverse sort of the uh positive feedback loop. So usually we say, okay, if I three things. If I practice hard, I will improve. Right. And if I improve, I'll want to practice more, it'll be more fun. Right. Right. So you practice hard in order to improve, and if I improve, it'll be more fun. Right. And that's kind of what society is selling us, and there is an aspect to that, absolutely. Yeah, you wrote a nice blog post all about that, though. Yes, thank you. So what once you learn how to um uh uh uh play let it be and really rock out on it, or a Chopin Etude, or a uh Bebop song, or whatever it is, um it it it does become it or not become, it is fun to do that. It's a different level or a different aspect of fun. However, that's not a good feedback loop to depend on. That's like a baseball set player saying, I'm only gonna keep playing if I hit a home run every game. Right. Because we all know it's not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_02 16:14

Not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

So improvement is more like you know, what the stock market is supposed to be. It goes up and it goes down a little. Then it goes a little higher, then it goes down a little. So over time, it actually improves, but it's not every moment or every day. Right. So if we're only relying on the enjoyment coming from improvement, we're sunk.

SPEAKER_03 16:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

We're sunk. So we have to reverse that kind of. We have to say, okay, I'm gonna sit down at the piano or whatever and do it because I enjoy it. No matter what happens. I enjoy the process of making these sounds, playing very slowly if I need to. I enjoy all this, like I'm like I'm eating lunch every day. Nobody eats lunch, you know, tries to become better at eating lunch every day, right?

SPEAKER_03 16:54

Right, right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

I said that to someone once and they said, but I do. And I said, okay, we'll use another analogy. But so you sit down, that's the first one now. You do it because you enjoy it. You go out for a walk or a jog every day because you enjoy it. You meditate because you enjoy it, and you try to enjoy it. You try to find things that are not dependent on success. Right. All right. So we do that. That's step one. By sitting down or walking or doing it every day, we get better.

SPEAKER_02 17:21

Absolutely. Usually get better, yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Well, over time we'll get better. Yeah, over time, yeah. If you're consistent, absolutely. I don't know anybody who hasn't gotten better, you know, unless you hurt your knee by jogging, right? Then you walk or something. But but basically, we get better over time by doing something. Right. Right? Even if it's a year and a half for French, I'm a little better than I was before. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 17:39

And you now you can say l' instead of le. Yeah, exactly. Whatever.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yeah. And then because we're enjoying it, the the we'll practice more, and then the enjoyment, then the oh sorry, the three steps. I wasn't clear. The first step is enjoying it every time, no matter what. Right. The second one is because we're enjoying it, we will spend more time in it. And practicing it. And then the third one is we become better, we improve. Right. So learning French, learning the piano, lifting that certain goal weight you have is a byproduct of enjoying the process.

SPEAKER_03 18:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

We're not so goal-oriented every second. We still have it there, that's our North Star. But on a day-to-day basis, we actually um uh enjoy the process. And for most adults, that's much better because we don't have 12 hours a day to practice the piano, right? Like a like a university student would. We can't climb straight up the mountain. We have to go around the other way, and it's much more fun this way, too.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

It's interesting in one of your blog posts, you talk about this, but also there's an added element of doing it with people, of having fun like in a band, in a band, or in a show, or something where you're in a group of people enjoying each other's company and enjoying the fact that you're making music together. That's well, that's why I really love doing cabaret, because the enjoyment of just being with you in the rehearsal room or being with Lena or any of the other people that, you know, my cabaret singers that I sing with sometimes, it's actually a lot of fun. And people who are just learning have to get over the fact that sometimes it's hard work to practice the piano or practice the scales or practice a song or memorize the words to a song. But once you start doing the extra practice and then start doing it with people and enjoy it and have fun doing it, it's a whole new world. It's totally, totally different.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Exactly. I think there's even two aspects to that. One is just getting out of our house sometimes. Yeah. Like even today, I live in the North Bronx, and this is in Brooklyn, which is almost the opposite of the boroughs. And I hadn't I haven't been in Brooklyn in 10 years. And so, and I, you know, I had arranged uh rearranged my teaching schedule today and everything. And I'm on email last. Night saying, Oh, you know, gotta go out to Brooklyn, whatever, and it'll be fun once I get. And I just had a great time. I walked down a block. I've never been on this block before. I'm seeing these wooden houses nestled among. I mean, it's just new things, right? Keeps you fresh. The other aspect is people. Right. You make new friends, you get energy from people. Yeah, you see new places and doing things. And that's one of the more, you know, the most amazing things you're doing. You know, that again, the performance is kind of a byproduct of you making these new neural connections, yes, getting new energy, learning about music. I'll say, Hey, Norman, you know, you're doing this song. Why don't you listen to these recordings of it? Or get some ideas from listening to such and such a vocalist.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

And you really run with it. And it's it's like being a kid again.

SPEAKER_02 20:45

It's like being a kid, it's enjoying life all over again. That's what Against the Norm is all about. I'm 70 years old. People may not know that yet, but I'm 70 years old, and learning new things is the key to staying young because it is like being a kid again. You get to do things that perhaps you never had the opportunity to do when you were younger, or circumstances were beyond your control. You couldn't play the piano because your family couldn't afford a piano, or you couldn't afford lessons. But now at 70, I can afford this, I can afford that, I can do basically anything that I really want to do or that I set my mind to doing. So it's a fantastic thing, a really, really great thing. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

And even if people don't, you know, don't have the funds for something they'd love to do, their pie in the sky thing, you can find things to do. Anybody can go out for a walk for 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_02 21:36

Absolutely. Absolutely. Anybody can exercise. It's the same thing. You don't have to have a trainer. You can exercise. There's tons of YouTube videos and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Exactly. But one of the things And find a friend to exercise.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

Oh, yeah. And then that's even better. Go for a walk for a friend, all right, or go for a jog or things like that. One of the things that I find so fascinating about you, Ron, is I don't know, maybe uh six months to seven months after we first met, you told me about your experience in Fairbanks, Alaska. Now, that is unusual. That is against the norm. Can you tell us a little bit about what happens in Fairbanks, Alaska when you're there? It's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Thank you. Yeah, I'm not sure if there was a specific experience because I've been I've been there for probably over a year total, about a year and a half.

SPEAKER_02 22:24

You go there every year from what I understand.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Yeah, so there's a Fairbanks Summer Fairbanks Summer uh Arts Festival. Uh-huh. Uh happens every July for two weeks, the end of July. And I've been teaching uh piano improvisation and vocal performance, like uh uh jazz, pop, uh rock, whatever we call it a singer's song cabaret class. Right, right. Um I've been teaching that for uh since 1999. Wow. Every year.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Uh only took one year off uh during the the first year of the pandemic, 2020. And I've been there four times in the winter, which is like going to Mars if you're from New York.

SPEAKER_02 23:00

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

And again, you know, it's funny, it's against the norm for us, but it's not against the norm if you live in Fairbanks. Oh, for them, I guess it's normal, but still. Yeah, exactly. So so um it it's kind of a I feel just at home there as I do here now, and I stay with the family, and it's wonderful. Um, but it it's it's just a wonderful festival where um it takes me out of my element. Um I find that in Fairbanks, the uh people who live there don't get a lot of outside uh like uh people coming in, you know, or big celebrities.

SPEAKER_02 23:31

Sure, who goes there on vacation? Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Yeah. Elton John performed there about uh uh 10 years ago once. And and uh it was it was the biggest star, I think, that's ever come through town. Wow and he just he performed in basically what's sort of like a high school gym. High school gym, sure. I can imagine they don't have an arena or anything like that. Madison Square Garden in Fairbanks. And he stayed in stayed on stage and signed autographs afterwards. He doesn't do that at Madison Square Garden. Right, right, right, right. He was an Anchorage and decided to fly up and apologize. It was great, it was a great story. He's he apparently came out on stage unannounced and said, Um, hi, I'm Elton John, and I apologize. It's taken me 40 years to get to Fairbanks or something like that. Wow. It was it was it was very sweet. They didn't know who Elton John was. No, they no, they do. He he just came out. He was humble by saying he wasn't saying I'm a big star. He's saying, hey, it's nice to meet you. Um let me introduce myself, basically. No big announcement or anything. Sure. But but basically the people um are uh uh uh e uh now in New York people are very receptive and uh uh willing to learn, but they're also very busy.

SPEAKER_03 24:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

And in Fairbanks, they're they're the the the way of life is a little slower. And probably a lot of other places too, small towns. And um uh the the like uh like nobody's on their cell phone during my class. Whereas in New York, people take as you know, people take out the cell phones.

SPEAKER_02 24:52

In my cabaret class, everybody's gonna be able to do it. Never seen a cell phone.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

And in and I taught some three hour classes this winter. Right, right. No, no cell phones. They're just soaking up every word, which is so rewarding. And then I see in one week they make like a year's progress with their saying. Right, right, right. It's unbelievable. And then I get to do things like go to the hot springs and 20 below zero. So cool.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

And the dog sleds and I did dog sledding, and I've gone dog munching myself.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

I've been to Denali National Park uh about 10 times and you know, saw grizzlies in the wild on foot, which I don't recommend. They were pretty far away. We were with a group of people.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

Right. And somebody must have had some sort of no, nothing.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Nothing, nothing, because they they don't interfere with the animals in in in uh the national park. Wow in that national park. Oh, wow, wow. No, but they they they they basically I've been told stay away from groups of people, if you're more than three people, it's very rare, you know. But they were they were grazing about maybe 300 yards away. Wow. Blueberry classic.

SPEAKER_02 25:50

Oh, it's fantastic. Fantastic. No, that's so cool. And it's so different than what normal pianists or musicians do. They don't normally go to Fairbanks. I mean, they might go to Seattle, they might go to Anchorage, but Fairbanks, yeah, yeah, who's gonna go there?

SPEAKER_00 26:04

Yeah, it's so you know what I've realized too. So I was hiking in uh this is against the norm. Yeah, excuse me. So about uh five years ago, I was hiking. There's there's there's one trail. There's only a couple trails in this national park, Denali National Park. It's big about as big as the size of Massachusetts. I think there's three, three or four trails. That's it. Wow. That's it. There's mountain ranges and it's off-grid. Tundra. Yeah. So anyway, I was there's there's one, it's called the Savage River Loop. And you you just it's as far as you can drive, it's about 14 miles in. You park there, and then you walk this maybe uh two-mile loop around this river, and there's a really nice wooden bridge that goes over it. So I get to the the end of the loop, you know, and I I'd been up there, I'd been hiking off trail up there, up to the the 2,000-foot ridge before. But I said, yeah, I only had about an hour, and I said, Let me just go over this next little hill, you know. So I'm I'm walking over the grass and the still a path? No path. No, no path. No path. So the path ended, and you go over the river on the bridge, and then you go back. So it's the end of the loop. So I walk off the path. There's no trees, it's just tundra. So I walk over the over this little rocky ridge, and I see a big rock, and it was pretty windy. So I decide to sit down on the other side on the grass next to the rock. About it's only about maybe 40 yards from the trail. But you can't see the trail because of this hill.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

So I'm just about 40 yards off grid at the trail.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

Still relatively safe.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

Yeah, relatively safe, right? So um I sit down to get out of the wind with my back against this rock. And um, I noticed a little like three-inch hole near near where I was sitting that maybe an animal would go down or something like that. So but I'm not on the hole, I'm about two feet away from it. But the animals know when you're around. So there must have been a little so I'm I'm sitting there for about 10 seconds, and I hear this high-pitched like like from the hole. Right. It was some little like Arctic squirrel or something just basically telling me, hey buddy, this is my turf.

SPEAKER_03 27:59

Wow. You know, he must be out of here, buddy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:03

And I thought it was a you know, I was safe. You know, it wasn't coming out and like attacking me or anything. But basically, I thought all the people who stayed on the path never didn't have that experience. Now, I don't recommend you just stupidly go off paths because I've done that too, and then I, you know, and you can't get back down the hill. Yeah, yeah. But basically, but when it's safe, you just go a little further. Whether that means, okay, I'm gonna carve out 20 minutes a day for a walk.

unknown 28:32

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

Don't have to do two hours.

SPEAKER_03 28:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

20 minutes a day, or I just call up that one friend every week and go out and get coffee. Absolutely. Whatever it is, just go a little farther. The rewards are great and unexpected sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 28:46

They're unbelievable. And as a matter of fact, just a tiny little change in your behavior, a tiny new habit every day, five minutes, ten minutes, whatever it is, at the end of the year, if you continue it on a daily basis, the change in your behavior, the change in your outlook is just beyond phenomenal. Beyond. When I first started singing, I mean, basically, the the singing teacher played a note, uh, this note or that note for an hour. It was nauseous, nauseous. I don't know how I survived it. But after six months, I was finally able to repeat one note and then two notes and then three, and it just kept on going and going and going. If you apply yourself rigorously to developing a new habit, things will definitely change.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Yeah, what one thing that's great, it just occurred to me about um taking lessons like that or following a prescribed path too, is that we don't become overwhelmed. I think one of the bigger barrier that uh probably listeners to this program will say will realize for themselves is that you get overwhelmed when you're just surfing the internet. Yeah. There's wonderful material out there, but you get overwhelmed. And and the more choices you have, the less you actually are satisfied with your choices.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

Right. Oh, absolutely. And it's so funny you mentioned this. There's um I I enjoy when I'm when I'm overwhelmed and just at too much work or too many things going on in my life. I love just sitting down and watching these YouTube short videos, and there's these dancers, these twin twin guys who are maybe 30, 35 years old, they dance incredibly well. Incredibly well. And I I said during COVID, I was uh doing online dance instruction with my daughter and things like that. And I I told my my dance teacher, I said, Lexi, can you teach me how to do that? And she said, Norman, you want to spend the next 10 years trying to try to learn how to do that? Go for it. But you're not gonna look like that. I said, Oh, okay. But you're right. These things are just so orchestrated that they're perfect, and you can't do that. You will get overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Yeah, and a little kid doesn't care if they look like it or no. Yeah, not at all. Just having fun, right. And and and by failing, sometimes this is uh this is another great point. So um I I saw an interview with this very famous bass player, it's Marcus Miller, who played with Miles Davis. Okay. And they asked him, like back in the day before the internet, they used to have these things called uh I think it was homespun tapes or something. They were they were instructional videos that famous musicians. Oh, interesting. Chick Korea made one of them. Okay, I forget what I forget which brand it was that. So they asked him if he'd make an instructional video, and he said no. Really? He didn't need the money, didn't need the fame. Right, right, right. He said no. He goes, the reason I'm not gonna do it though is because he said when he was younger, he tried to uh emulate this other famous bass player named Stanley Clark, who played with Chick Korea. Okay, and uh and he failed at it. Uh he couldn't he couldn't figure out exactly how to play like Stanley Clark.

SPEAKER_03 31:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

But by failing, he developed his own style. Ah, interesting. That's the opposite of what most the internet is telling us these days. Right. You've got to do it. It's the opposite. They're saying you have to learn how to do this in order to sound good.

SPEAKER_03 32:01

Right.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

And he's saying, if I really try over an extended period of time, jam with my friends, learn, take bass lesson, the whole thing, and I try to play like this guy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna I I failed. Right. But I found something even better.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

Yeah, you fa he found it himself. He found that he was able to do something of his own.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Yeah, exactly. So so you go out and you try to jog, right? You're 60 years old, you try to jog every day. After a week, your knee starts really hurting. Yeah, you go to the doctor, he says, sorry, you can't jog anymore. You gotta walk every day. And then so you say, Okay, I gotta walk. It's not jogging. I really wanted to jog. I wanted to burn so many calories in a minute and the whole thing. Not gonna do that, right? But I'm gonna go walk. And then you realize, you know what? I could form a walking group. Why not? Right. And and then you you you come up with a you have this whole social life that you wouldn't have gotten if you were succeeding at jogging because you would have kept doing it by yourself.

SPEAKER_02 32:55

Doing it by yourself, absolutely, yeah. And it's so important this whole aspect of being social and going out with people and doing things. Even something like this is better than being at home, listening to the radio, doing something. It's it's really, really a great thing. Um, one of the things that I want to ask also, Ron, and we will probably wrap it up soon with regards to this, is if somebody is very, very interested, let's say, in and he's never doesn't have any experience in playing the piano or singing or something like that, what would you recommend that he start with? Does he just start with simple piano lessons online? Does he start with getting a a good piano teacher? Does he start with getting a singing instructor? How does somebody start if they're mildly interested or if they kind of have a couple of things in mind that maybe they want to do? How do you get started? And then how do you prevent somebody from falling off the wagon and just saying, ah, this is not for me? Where do you find the encouragement? How do you provide the encouragement to keep on going?

SPEAKER_00 33:59

Interesting. You specifically about piano.

SPEAKER_02 34:01

Piano, yeah, or singing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:03

Okay. Well, if it's piano, I would say the first thing is get a copy of my book on Amazon. Oh, there you go.

SPEAKER_02 34:09

The inner world of the show links will be in the end. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

The inner world of piano improvisation, but it applies to all uh piano learning in some ways. And one thing I talk about in there, again, using this anal analogy with how we learn language that I got from my teacher Billy Taylor.

SPEAKER_03 34:26

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Like, for instance, when I was uh decided to quote learn French a year and a half ago, I don't have any real timeline. It's it's different if you have to become fluent at a certain point, but this is for my own benefit. So I said, you know what? For the first year, I'm not even gonna try to quote learn French. I'm just gonna spend 15 minutes to 30 minutes a day with an app, Duolingo, or listening to a French podcast. I'm just spending time with French. I'm planting the seeds for learning. Oh, interesting. The child, right? Nobody corrects the child on how to say a word, like you were saying before, until they've been hearing the language in utero and hearing it as a child, a little baby. Right. And then trying to speak it for about two years. Nobody's gonna really correct a one-year-old's pronunciation.

SPEAKER_02 35:11

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

No, it's not dad, it's daddy. You know what I mean? That would thwart the process. And we sometimes have to, depending on our goal and our timeline, we have to give ourselves that same process. So, for instance, you might say, okay, I want to learn how to play piano. Um, but you know what? I'm not gonna start by playing piano. I'm gonna take three months and I'm gonna make some playlists of music in the genre I want to learn. Interesting. And I'm gonna start listening for you know, while I'm in the car or cooking dinner or just relaxing at home. I'm gonna just start listening or doing email. I'm just gonna have it on. So if I want to learn rock piano, I might make a playlist. Uh it could be chronological if you're a person who likes methodical stuff. It could, I'm gonna start with, you know, um uh Johnny Johnson or even pre-rock RB music or little jazz from the 40s, which is really where rock came from, that kind of stuff. Johnny Johnson with Chuck Berry and then Little Richard, uh up to Elton John and Billy Joel, and then Nora Jones, and even how someone like Taylor Swift might play piano, because it's very simple and it gives us permission to be simple in our own playing when we do something like that. So so you just start absorbing it, like like we're in utero listening to um the language, right? You know, in inside our mother, right? Right, you know, it and and that that's what enabled us to learn it quickly because our brain is already processing it somehow. And then you start listening, okay. Oh, you know, I never noticed before noticed before, but Elton John and Billy Joel actually sound really different because I've just listened to 20 Elton John songs and 20 Billy Joel songs. You can even play air piano without knowing any of the notes. Right. Ying, the sense memory. Do that for three w three months. You don't have anything to lose, right? And it and it takes sort of that compulsion of forward momentum out of the picture. Right. Hey, I'm just enjoying it, you know. Um the great story, Keith Richards says, you know, when when he was a little kid, he used to visit his grandfather who had an acoustic guitar.

SPEAKER_01 37:13

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

And every time um Keith Richards went to the house, the guitar was on the top shelf of a uh um a bookcase out of his reach. Right. And Keith would always he had never played guitar, but he's like, Oh, can I play that guitar? And the grandfather would be like, No, no, no, no, when you're older. And he later found out and he kept wanting to play it, wanting to play it. So when he finally got a guitar after a year, maybe his grandfather took it down, after a year, it was like, Wow, now I get it. Um, and he later found out later in life that his grandfather usually kept it down on the floor, but he only put it up there so that Keith would would uh be chomping at the bit. Oh, interesting. He only did that to to make him want it more, not just give it to him the first time, the kid gets bored, you know? Right, right, right. So so we have to think about all these things. Not, you know, uh if we just sit down and try five online lessons right away, it's not gonna work. You know, we get overwhelmed. Which course do I take? Blah, blah, blah. I'm not even starting. Right, right, right. So whet your appetite a little bit, you know, that's one way. I would say if you're a beginner, um it's it's ideal really to find somebody to teach you, whether it's online or in person.

SPEAKER_03 38:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

For a very beginner, I would actually recommend in person because you see their physicality better. They can see yours. You know, when I teach online, I'm teaching almost everybody I teach who has already been playing for a while. And I teach them how to improvise within that.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

With okay, beginners.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Now, maybe there are some teachers out there who are great at beginners. I've never really found a way to do it so that I can really see their posture incredibly well. I know if you have a different camera setup, so it can work. But especially if you're in a more remote remote area or you can't find the teacher you like. But if possible, find a local teacher, at least to get you started.

SPEAKER_03 38:58

Yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 39:00

And then um, I would say just um, you know, have fun. And and again, go wide. I call it move laterally. Don't feel you have to learn a harder piece every week. Right. If you learn a little simple folk song or something on piano and you're plunking out the melody, learn ten folk songs at that same level. And when the book gets a little hard, because they all do, don't feel you have to plow through that that that barrier. You don't have to climb straight up the mountain. Find another book and start at the beginning of that book and get to what you know?

SPEAKER_02 39:29

So move laterally. It it it's so interesting what you're saying because my very, very first class, cabaret class that I ever took, this is about eight years ago at the 92nd Street Y. So the very first class, she says, Okay, here's a book. I want you all to choose a couple of songs that you really want to sing. And I don't remember the songs that I that I chose at the time, but I I chose a song and she knew how that I was just a beginner, a total, total beginner, uh Norman. No. You can't do that. Okay, so we'll do this one. No. That's too hard. That's too hard. That's too hard. Finally, finally, I said, okay, here's one. Burt backrack, what do you get when you fall in love? That's the very first song I ever sang in public, right? And she said, okay, let's let's give that a try. It's an easier song, a simpler song, and it worked. And because it was simple enough for me to basically get the right notes, I was able to sing that song and then another and another. And now, as you know, I I sing a little bit more. I sing the songs that are a little bit more difficult, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Exactly. Now now I will say that I think you you obviously learned. You you did it with the lessons and these classes and stuff. Since your difficulty was matching pitch, I think you would have learned quicker in retrospect. And I didn't know you at the time to tell you this.

SPEAKER_03 40:56

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

Um uh if you had joined a community chorus. Yes. And and because you would have had other people singing those notes around you, yeah. And you used to you would have gotten better matching tips.

SPEAKER_02 41:07

Actually, I did join a chorus. I joined the Gotham.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

So maybe that's why you got good.

SPEAKER_02 41:10

The Gotham Rock choir.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 41:12

And sang We Are the Champions? Yeah, you my five-year-old granddaughter loved We Are the Champions, right?

unknown 41:22

That's funny.

SPEAKER_02 41:23

We did. We sang that. What's that other song that goes right with it? Um We Will Rock You We Will Rock You. So they go together. So, so anyway, my five-year-old granddaughter loved those songs because I was resinging them over and over again. But maybe that helped.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

That did help. That absolutely did help. Yeah, so you didn't need me at that time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:45

Definitely. Uh I want to say thank you so much for being here, Ron. It was just a pleasure speaking to you as always here and during rehearsals and everywhere. Where can people find you if they want to either take lessons or maybe they're interested? Maybe somebody listening to the podcast wants to do cabaret. Where can they find you? What should they do?

SPEAKER_00 42:04

Uh, my website, keyboardimprov.com. Beautiful. Improv, like short for improvisation. Keyboardimprov.com. They can uh there's a contact form, they can fill it out and email me at any time. Um, I've got a whole video course there with almost 400 videos with downloadable sheet music. Um it's reasonably priced, and they can stay with it at their own pace and email me um uh uh uh audios of them playing on occasion if they want some feedback or just questions. I'm available for that. Beautiful. It's it's uh it's in all different styles of uh improvisation from jazz, rock, blues, starting at the very beginning, uh, even some classical improvisation.

SPEAKER_02 42:42

I see that you also do Broadway there too. Broadway, yeah, yeah, there's yeah, there's some Great American songbooks. Yes, exactly right. Wonderful, wonderful. Right. Well, so great having you here. Thank you very, very much for being my guest, and uh we'll continue our rehearsals on and on and on. See the next show as well. So it's gonna be. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

Thank you, Norman, for having me here and uh keep going against the normal.