Jay Rayner on his passion for the piano, at 5x15

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Jay Rayner on his passion for the piano, at 5x15

11 Feb 2011

Speakers: Jay Rayner

Jay Rayner talks about his passion for the piano, and about the “sweetness of failure”. Happier as an amateur than as a professional, he thinks we should talk more about the things that we do for decade after decade, out of love (or passion), even though we’re basically only okay at them. For Rayner, the piano was always special: “there’s something about it that insists on being touched...” Even the realisation that it wasn’t a chick-magnet like the guitar or the saxophone (“the piano is a desk for doing double-entry book-keeping on”) couldn’t turn him away from it. And in the number he played for the audience after his talk, there wasn’t much evidence of failure.