I'm Back, with the Blues

I've been off playing the tin whistle for the past 6 months (Irish traditional dance music), but I seem to have recently wrapped up a phase of significant musical growth there. I had a sense of things coming to a natural resting point, perhaps a back-door intuition that I need to set my whistle aside for a bit, so I can forget some of the bad habits I had found myself struggling against.

It was an odd sensation -- I lost interest in music completely for a few weeks, while my brain spontaneously burped up a really nice plot arc for a fiction idea I had abandoned years ago (for lack of a coherent plot). So I worked on getting that outlined to the degree that my burst of inspiration had elucidated, clarified some logistical issues I needed to put on the back burner for my imagination to simmer up good scenes for, and looked around for my next project.

And that was when the piano started calling. It told me it was time for us to learn some basic blues piano, which was unexpected, but it makes a certain intuitive sense to me now that I think about it. I want to learn to improvise, and it seems appropriate to do so within the boundaries of a traditional structure. And there's something earthy and primal about keeping a driving rhythm with the left hand, which I feel I'm over-ripe to learn.