My own music developed from hours and hours and hours of playing piano in the dark with eyes closed, whether on an old beat-up upright in my rented room at college, or on the piano in my hometown church (the pastor always let me know how to get in if I needed to). My piano teacher, Helen, initially tried to get me to adhere to the scales, arpeggios and exercises that are known to groom responsible pianists, but it never worked. She eventually let me bring in popular music and work on that because my energy and passion would only come alive there. Yes, I play classical music, but mostly just to practice, to improve my fingerwork, to build trust in the keyboard. My true love is the music I hear in my soul and try to replicate in real time, working down through the layers of the day, the month, the year, the tensions of my work, my insecurities and distractions, and find aboriginal dream-time – the ethereal portal where the music is alive, seething, like an eternal flame or endless waterfall, and then, to merge with that essential and living sound as best I can. Black Elk wrote in his book about the Ghost Dance that the ceremony was replicating a vision he saw/sensed in another realm, thus linking the two worlds by celebrating the ritual, honoring the portal between this world and another, perhaps spiritual world. But it draws me, I want to get closer to it. I love the way I feel as I draw closer, as the sounds and shape of this unknown thing or being begins to form all around me. I use every fiber of my being and ability to join that sound, enter that world, cross that threshold and swim in those magic waters. When I play, the piano is like two instruments – the wall of sound it produces, the complexity of overtones and resonances, is like an instrument of its own, something I can play into and around, reminding me of what I learned about Flamenco – that you don’t necessarily dance directly on the rhythm or beat, but around the rhythm, in the spaces between beats -- that a universe can exist in what others might consider an emptiness, that where the beat is isn’t necessarily where the music is. T.S.Eliot riddled in The Four Quarters: “where you are is where you are not, and, what you are is what you are not.” The real music isn’t where the music usually is – the ears must listen where they’re not used to listening, the listener must close their eyes and see the music and its movement and texture rather than watch the pianist display his confidence or passion, let the music enter one’s being, get intimate, make love to one’s soul.