Playing With Abandon
By Carli Muñoz
For 20 years, I’ve been going to the same old place to dip my fingers into a plank of wood divided by almost uniformly black and white segments. With each section, this contraption is individually controlled by a counter-weighted mechanism that has remained the same for at least 300 years, hitting a set of steel strings stretched at a total of 16 tons of pressure... It is called a piano. It might be easy to assume that my fingers must know their way around this ancient contraption and navigate the ‘keys’ (short for keyboard), effortlessly like a stroll in the park? Yes and no. The process is fascinating. If it was merely a habitual response, I might have been a candidate for suicide long ago or worse yet suffer the fate of Sisyphus for habitually torturing his guests. But I’m happy to say that it is certainly more than that. A significant motivator to do this seeming routine with total abandon for almost every day of the last 20 (now 23) years of my life at Carli’s, is just the opposite of habit. Habit always has its little ways of creeping in when not in check, but awareness, surrendering to the moment, and adapting to the environment certainly gives me the edge. Could it be that constant battle between succumbing to or freeing myself from habit makes it exciting and unpredictable? There you go—a strange loop!
In the end result, I do feel, at least most of the time, that I’m actually ‘giving’ something unique to the audience and to myself when I play with abandon. It is in those moments of diving into the unexpected—the untried, that I get the most pleasure from playing. I simply refuse to have a premeditated beginning before I start playing. It is a way of allowing or absorbing the moment. And that moment is the sum of the people in the room and the vibe they carry. Sometimes it is a particular person in the audience that sparks on what comes next, and the general vibe becomes the periphery. It is a process I look forward to, which is the most important thing to me—never a dull moment!
