The idea was to eliminate the mistakes.

But when Danko heard a piano player at a school assembly, he came to realize there is more to playing music than following sheet music.

"He came into my elementary school and, to my ears, he made no mistakes," Danko told a group of students at Westminster College, New Wilmington, in an October improvisation master class.

"I guess I got inspired by that. 'He's got to be making some mistakes. He's got to be making some of that up as he goes along.' That was good enough for me to really try to make something more than what's there, than just taking it literally."

In some ways, Danko's approach to improvisation hasn't changed much.

"I kind of created something that wasn't a mistake," the Brookfield native said of some childhood noodling. "That's still kind of where it is for me now: too lazy to learn how to really get the stuff down, so I make a variation. If I'm fairly smart about it, it sounds good to some people. There's enough people (that) I can make a living off it."

Variations can be used not only for improvising, but for playing parts that he is having difficulty with.

Referring to Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer," he said: "I could never play that cleanly. So I found another way to do it. I just invent other little things to get me there. That's cheesy, but that's really what it is for me."

As he has received more training and his approach to playing the piano has become more sophisticated, Danko has developed some tips for improvising.

A basic start on improvising is to play the chords with the left hand and pick out the melody in single notes with the right, so the player can "get your hands on" the tune.

"With the chord chart in front of you, you limit your left hand to just the single note in the left hand," he said of the next step. "It's, of course, the root progression. And then, with the right hand, you play the melody, but where the chord changes are, you put chord notes underneath your melody. You're educating your right hand in the chordal aspects."

Danko said the next jump into serious improvisation takes a lot of hard work: learning how to play chords all over the piano.

To help the process, he suggested learning simple arpeggios, which he also called "terrorist arpeggios" and "parent-pleasers" because a young student can generally be taught them early on. They don't even require the player to cross hands.

"It sounds like cocktail piano," he said, and helps get the chords away from the left hand.

"If you have that as a platform as a pianist, then you have a lot you can play around with."

Any genre of music can be improvised on, but you have to know much more about theory and chords to jam on jazz than pop, rock or blues, which tend to center on a few scales.

It may sound simplistic, but Danko said it's often best to pick a melody that the player likes to start with. He said he probably learned that from his horn-playing brothers, Joe and John, both of Youngstown.

Because they're playing single notes, horn players, who have the added complication of finding time to breathe, have to know what the melody is and are generally more interested in getting a good tone.

"You've got to know what your melody is, and then play around with it, but have it there as an anchor," Danko said. "I think, if you're doing that, even if you didn't bother to know anything about theory, you could become a good player."