let's talk musicanship

If were Ben Folds I'd be endlessly entertained by the ability to play my own songs and anything else I wanted to play. This shouldn't be construed as the start of a fantasy posting; it is rather a segway into how I can improve as a musician. I'm not trying to be a professional or even a live performer. I would like to be someone who gets better at playing the type of music I love so that when I belt out a tune at a party I am satisfied with my twenty five years of playing the piano.

Without analyzing my skills, let's just say that I'm a level 2 musician, somewhere beyond a beginner, and I want to improve over the years by a level above 2. 2 is the answer to everything, by the way. I recently spent two years learning jazz piano with a private instructor. I probably learned a lot from it, but I have difficulty applying the acquired skills to improve playing, which is what I do the most. I should be composing music and making arrangements of songs I want to play, since that's what we worked on it the lessons. But I don't do either of those things. Thus the taught type of playing didn't match what I do now, and also the genre didn't match what I do. I'm not a jazzer, I'm a pop "artist." We did work on pop a bit towards the end but it was exclusively arranging pop pieces. I need two things, I need to get better at improv and I need to find motivation to arrange and compose.

I can get help from either instructional material or a teacher. Perhaps I can find a hybrid, such as online videos of instructors that you pay to watch. These exist for guitar and for piano. They tend to be targeted to beginners, but I'll keep my eyes open for a suitable one.