Craig Taborn

pianist, composer (interview conducted on Zoom)

photo credit: Tim Berne

-You grew up in Minneapolis

Yes.

-How was that for you music wise? Are there musicians in your family?

No…A family of psychologists and educator types. But they knew how to get information etc.

Nobody in my family was a professional musician but dad played, sort of self taught. He played the piano just for himself and he was into a lot of blues and jazz. He was really into Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons; these kind of players and he had a pretty large collection of records. Hearing him play those tunes and then listening to the records was the real gateway for me in the beginning. It was Horace Silver in particular, Six Pieces of Silver and the trio album and some Cannonball records.

-Did you have a piano teacher?

I did. That all happened and came together when I was about 11. My brother started taking piano lessons from Mrs. Haynes who was in the neighborhood and so I just asked my mom if I could take lessons, too. I did that for about a year, just really basic piano, and then quickly kind of figured out that I really like playing piano and started figuring things out on my own and realized I wanted to learn something about jazz. I just knew that so I sought out another avenue, like a different teacher. To make a long story short I wanted to go to this music center because this guy Peter Murray was teaching there, but when I got there he had left. And so I studied with another classical teacher but mind you this is all first year, second year stuff.

-So you don’t have an extensive classical background?

No, not at all. That’s about the extent of it. I studied about a year with this other teacher when I was 13 or so. Then I found the guy I was looking for, Peter Murray, who incidentally now is a psychiatrist in Pittsburgh. He was going to medical school at the time and paying his way by earning money teaching. He was a prodigy, a classical player who had got into jazz in Minneapolis and he was really a great teacher. I started studying with him and that was more jazz related. I studied with him for a couple of years through high school and that was it in terms of studying with people directly. I learned a lot with Peter. It was really just gathering the tools to problem solve for myself and that was his teaching method…”here are these tools and how you negotiate key areas and chord changes, rhythms” and just giving a basic thing of how you would analyze and problem solve and figure out how to do things. I think he saw that I was pretty auto-didactic anyway. So you just take that stuff and roll with it.

I continued to study with him but there was a point when I was about 17 or 18 when he said that I didn’t need to come in every week anymore. Not that I was so great that I didn’t have much to learn, but he saw that I was self-directed enough and working on things on my own and he had gone through his materials that he could teach and he said that this was basically the stuff you need to start to build your own problem solving. So he said “I am available if you ever have questions or need to find something. You give me a call and we can get together and have a lesson”. After 18 I went to college to Michigan. So that’s the only direct studying I did with somebody regularly.

When I went to Detroit I was able to get together with a couple of people for one-offs. I took advantage of that kind of a thing. Getting together with people like Harold McKinney or Kenny Cox who were two of the greats in Detroit. They’ve both passed now but when I was there they were teaching. I wasn’t in the music school in college really. I took some combo classes when I first got there, which is where I met Gerald Cleaver.

-You didn’t go to college for music?

No. It was for Liberal Arts. I had a thought to be a music teacher…. I always had the thought that I might want to transfer to NEC actually. I had read about what’s now CI, jazz but also Third Stream. I had the same tendencies then, the sense of what I wanted to do musically, so I always thought I’ll go to Michigan for a year or two. Michigan had a great music school when I went there. I took some classes but I wasn’t enrolled. And I always thought if I go to music school I’ll go to somewhere like NEC. But I met Gerald right away when I was first auditioning for the jazz combo class. He introduced me to a lot of musicians in Detroit so within that year I quickly realized that for learning jazz kind of things I could pay to go to a school and go to Boston but there was such a community of younger players in Detroit, and such a nurturing community of older players. I realized this was a better jazz school for me than going to a school. Everybody was available, there were tons of people to play with and lots of people that if I needed to, I could study with. I also wasn’t sure that I wanted to go into music per se so Michigan was a good school to check out a lot of things. For a while I thought I might want to be a writer. I just had no idea.

-While in Detroit you met and played with Marcus Belgrave.

Detroit was really, and continues to be as I understand it, a real community, a sense of a tradition of mentorship and teaching in the jazz community is so strong there. The older jazz guys would make it a point to seek out younger musicians and hire them. Marcus wasn’t hiring me for major gigs but there were a lot of little things such as when he would teach at the schools. I remember JD Allen would do that too. You’d go to a school and play Louis Armstrong tunes. He’d explain jazz, stuff like that. We went to Mexico one time in a group with Rodney Whittaker. I did play with him in those things but that was really common in Detroit, especially with Marcus.

-He mentored a lot of people, right? Geri Allen was also mentored by Marcus…

   
Exactly. The mentorship was strong there with everybody. Even if you weren’t great. It wasn’t like “this is the hot young guy so I’m going to call him”. It wasn’t so much about what I was gonna give to him. It was just mentorship.

-There’s a sense of pride and community and connection when you meet people from Detroit. They are all of a family or something…

It really was a community. Like I said that not going to NEC was really (because of in particular at that time)?in the orb of my age group were really heavy cats. The first gig I did in Detroit was with James Carter and Rodney Whittaker and Gerald. It was a weekly at this restaurant. And may be 3 or 4 years younger than me were (I was 18 or 19), there were these kids who were 13, 14 and it was like Kareem Riggins, JD Allen, Ali Jackson and we all played the scene. And we were all at the same level relatively and going for the same thing. There were other people in Ann Arbor and around. There were a lot of musicians. It was a good scene there and we all came up together and it really had that quality of community and nurture. It wasn’t competitive really. It wasn’t that vibe. It was inclusive and really a broad aesthetic and people had awareness and access to a lot of different ways of playing.

Other people like Jacob Sacks, he was about 45 minutes to an hour south in southeast Michigan. Just thinking of other people I met at that time. You just reminded me when you mentioned Geri Allen, because with Jacob Sacks, his dad would drive him up to play the jam session that we had in Ann Arbor. I met Jacob when he was 13 and I was 18.

-What do you think of the term Jazz? Some people really have a negative response to the term while others fully embrace it, and some want to define their response further.

For me I have all of those responses because for me language and vocabulary are largely contextual and it’s about how it’s wielded and to what purpose. I don’t really approach that concept worrying about my own definition for jazz. I don’t really have one. I know what it roughly means and I know what the definition would be. Improvised music of a Black American tradition and specifically around what developed early to mid 20thcentury kind of thing but outside of that it just depends upon what people mean. Like what the context is. In terms of what I play it may not fit a more rigid definition of jazz at times and that’s not a problem to me. It’s not a problem to fit it or not because you’ll get that person who says “Oh”! But then if you’re playing music and you improvise, it’s still jazz … then you’re still a jazz musician and it’s great whatever you do. it’s still jazz but that’s an inclusive term and I’ll accept that. Other people use it, want to defend a certain kind of terrain and not have a more specific type of cultural perspective that engendered a process erased, so they tend to defend the territory around the term more energetically and I understand that. That’s a totally plausible thing. And then other people will use it derisively, if you get into this real contemporary improviser noise. They might say: “I don’t just want to do jazz” because they think it’s too idiomatic and it’s tainted by that and then they don’t want to follow these ways that it’s used. Or it could be used as an insult or the ultimate compliment and you could be included or excluded from either of those and it’s just too complicated a world for me to worry about it. I make the music I make. I’m definitely formulated in a traditional jazz sense. That is the place that I speak from but I do a lot of music that isn’t necessarily jazz and incorporate it freely. So I don’t mean to be evasive of the question but I really usually say it just depends. I allow the fluidity of the term but it really depends upon who I am speaking to and what the context is. I mean I would answer very differently. I feel like it’s being used to try to pin something down or if I feel like it’s used to chain me to some sort of identity and if it’s restrictive and collapsing of my world then I tend to reject it in that sense or if it’s specifically descriptive of a certain thing then I….not everything I do fits the text book definition from a certain sense. But I tend to engage in jazz freely…but the word itself it can be useful. I have a pride in the tradition of that. That’s all I would say about it.

A lot of the older people who are jazz musicians, Max Roach specifically, told me that he didn’t call anything jazz ….. He said “We don’t play jazz! We play the music of Duke Ellington and we play the music of Thelonious Monk”, so I’m down with that, too.

If I’m encountering somebody who is anti-jazz, then I’ll use jazz just to be polemical. Just to make it a point. If they’re being really stuck up about it saying “well what you’re doing isn’t really jazz, it’s actually good and more interesting than jazz” then I bristle a little.

There’s that crew: “That just sounds like jazz!” (Laughs) There’s that! I really don’t like that.

-When you actually try to define something it becomes obvious how that definition is actually not correct most of the time because you can point to something that shows a contradiction immediately. Even when people talk about improvisation and jazz there can be a lot of different things but also something that by some definition is definitely jazz might not include any improvisation. So it’s like all the definitions for a term like jazz are incomplete to say the least.

Exactly. So that’s what I always say. I’ll use Jazz as a term when it serves my purposes and I’ll abandon it when it doesn’t.

-Who is your greatest personal influence?

I usually… I have a standard, which is someone like Cecil Taylor just in terms of … not even stylistically …although that as well, but mostly just an example of a life in music and a dedication to what he was doing. A lifelong dedication to a really specific perspective and approach to music making. Especially when somebody like that passes you really see that they really never abandoned the ship. It is so focused. With Cecil it really is like a focused language and very, very intensely personal. Nothing else sounds like that. I find something inspiring and positive about that and I have since I was young. That’s the first music that really, really challenged me. I couldn’t get to it when I was 13 or 14. I was really fascinated by it and repulsed by it at that age in a way because I just couldn’t deal with it and then I grew into it. There are other people that I’ve met or worked with I could say about more specifically, but I still say Cecil Taylor. He was a big part in terms of the whole musical picture.

-The greatest artist of the 20thcentury?

Huh….I don’t even ?????

-Do you like these “light” questions? (laughter)

Once you say artist…that just opens it up. That’s anxiety of all these evaluations. It’s a very shifting space the kind of criteria that I’m already thinking about. Like how would I even begin to answer that? It’s very slippery and shifting. Three dimensional watery space. You know like there are always drifting out of trying to organize things in my mind, but yeah there’s that perspective so I really don’t know if I could answer that. That’s just too huge. I can’t even call the mind …it’s like space floating in my head… Monk floating around Stravinsky and you know, what am I doing? Or like Kubrick …..

-And I’m asking you to pass judgement on all of them…like right now! (laughter)

I really don’t know if I could ever answer that. That’s too hard.

-You kind of answered it already….in a smart way so that you will never be held accountable for your answer (laughter).

-Can you talk about your experience with Roscoe Mitchell?

Happy Birthday to him. He turned 80 yesterday (interview conducted on August 4th, 2020). That was definitely the most influential concept changing or concept reaffirming person I’ve worked with for sure. And I’ve worked with a lot of really inspirational people so that’s no judgement on them but there’s just a lot of aspects of how he approaches or organizes his music ensembles. There was really a different way I played or there was the way I thought about music that I had before I played with Roscoe. I had played with him on James Carter’s tour with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. We would do these double tours and so I got to play music with them, we’d play a tune together at the end of the concert. I didn’t play with Roscoe until about ’97 or ’98 really, when he asked me to play in his group and then we did the ECM record Nine to Get Ready. We hadn’t done any gigs before that and that was it. He just called me to do that recording. That was the Baptism of Fire. And then after that we started touring and it was during that period that I had my concept of music completely challenged and reworked in a lot of ways. And it really influenced how I approached everything from playing bebop to playing jazz and it really set me up in a way to play with a lot of the people I’ve played with after that. I had a way of approaching playing the piano and in particular comping but also solo that really came from my jazz studying. A more traditional jazz place that had a different way of accompaniment. That really changed when I played with Roscoe and it influenced me and I understood accompaniment in a different way. Even using the term “accompaniment” I earlier understood it differently. I understood, for instance, much more how Herbie Hancock comps than I had before. Not that I always loved Herbie but all of a sudden I really understood how Herbie works, which is a much more interactive flowing contrapuntal involved way of accompanying as opposed to this kind of call and response way of comping which is what I was doing before. That’s just one of many things I developed with Roscoe but there were a lot of things I was challenged to really think about in terms of how improvised music works. And it really did change my playing and as I was saying before he really set up the condition so that when I started playing with Tim Berne and I think I was able to fit – Tim at the time didn’t really use pianists or keyboardists because I think he was really worried of that kind of way of comping imposed on him. If he had called me maybe a year before, that’s what he would’ve gotten. (laughs) I would’ve been trying to do some call and response and that wouldn’t have worked but when he called me I had had the Roscoe experience so I had a more evolved understanding of how to interact in that environment. I just understood how to flow into that improvisational environment and not dictate too much. So many of those things came from working with Roscoe specifically.

-Your playing lies in this free flowing fluid sensibility but also at the same time with a great amount of control on every level whether it has to do with harmonic things even when harmony is not there. I wonder if this is something that really has changed in our music (improvised music, jazz) in the last 30 or some years. It has coalesced maybe into one place rather than being free music and then music that is not free music. That’s how I am hearing much of your music too that there isn’t that need to define it actually as a listener. As you are describing your musical upbringing and then encountering Roscoe Mitchell’s music, may be that has helped that fusion happen …

Yeah that’s absolutely what happened and I would say for me I always listen to all instruments I never really was that piano-centric. But just in terms of talking about this I’ve always identified with a line of players who dealt with that orchestrational approach or like what you’re talking about, a freer approach but also just how the role of the piano in ensembles change and I always think of Duke Ellington because it’s so orchestrational. Sometimes playing one note going down a descending pattern as accompaniment or playing a full chord. Coz there was obviously a hard bopping tradition that went into some other things but I’m thinking of things going through that into an Andrew Hill kind of thing but I also think of Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett and then someone like GeriAllen who was a big influence on me. I identify a tradition that I definitely am coming out in terms of those kind of players in particular. How they work in group contexts. Not just how they solo. And I include Herbie in that too because he had that kind of thing. It’s never just one way, never just comping chords, it’s always some other sonic element, some other weight in the music – it could be a line, it could be one note, it could be a lot of laying out and then just a big block chord and then a line and just finding other ways to orchestrate but saying all that I think once I played with Roscoe all those pianists made sense to me in a different way. Like Paul Bley made sense to me completely because he fully had that thing. And Herbie, I understand this way of accompanying that allows that kind of fluidity and integration and those people like Geri coming from everything. In one way she was such a strong bebop player, such a strong harmonic player but also had a free language and all these things and Paul Bley defined that too, and Keith; these people do all of this. So I really do identify that Bley, Keith Jarrett and Andrew Hill and all those kind of players exemplifying that. And then through Geri, Mulgrew had a language for that too, for sure. But Geri was coming out of so many places when she first hit the scene. Oliver Lake’s band andSteve Coleman and that kind of MBase scene. Geri Allen set that template up for me anyway. It is this sort of multimetric involved music that’s going on there. There’s free stuff going on, there’s hard bop going on all at once and definitely the world I come from.

-Anything that irritates you?

I’m going to keep it to music otherwise it gets too deeply personal. I like a strong point of view from band leaders, I respond to that, but one thing about improvising that irritates me is when somebody is trying to exert too much control over the space and not allowing equal weight for everybody’s perspective in that space. That definitely is my biggest annoyance when I’ve encountered it. I come from a compositional improvisational perspective. I’m of the mind that compositional technique is really valued so whatever you want performed a certain way you can put that into the writing of the piece and convey that information. We play enough music that is fully scored. “Yeah just tell me what you’d like me to do and I’ll do that” but if you’re leaving the space open for interpretation and improvisation then I like to engage in that process truly. What really does annoy me in those situations is when somebody then is trying to micromanage the flow of the improvisation in real time. That’s a real drag. Like I said, I like a strong leader and if there’s something you want to happen even in the improvisation you can put it on the chart or you could tell us before the gig to make sure it’s this kind of rhythm or whatever. I don’t have a problem with that. It’s just somebody’s waving at my face if you say we’re going to improvise now and the next thing you know they’re trying to control it and tell you what to do. That does really freak me out! That’s not my vibe.

-What irritates one musically is not unrelated to what irritates one in life in general because you can see the parallels to that in other sections of life too.

Yeah It’s true!

-Dinner with someone from the other side?

That’s a really good question. I went through so many different people just then. Hmmmmmm… Right now my inclination is to say James Baldwin. I think that would be really interesting. I only say that because I watched that documentary and there’s enough evidence of that personality and that mind that I’m reasonably assured that it would be interesting. I could throw some names out there. I was thinking Beethoven was a big one because based on everything but sometimes people aren’t that interesting to have dinner with. There may be geniuses, but….

-With Baldwin, even if you don’t say anything it’s going to be interesting

Exactly! I was going through this whole range of possibilities...like Stravinsky or even Jelly Roll Morton but then I don’t really know what JRM was like. It could be a drag!

-Jelly Roll could be interesting company though…

Yes for sure. There’s a lot of people who you could say that would be interesting to see what they’re like but then when you’re really committing time to the exchange…. Who would you really want to sit down and engage in that way. Cause I’ve met some heroes and they’re not that interesting (laughs). Even if what they do is incredibly interesting.

So James Baldwin, that’s my answer!

-The meaning of tradition for you?

In the broadest sense it’s just the continuation of an ethics of practice. It’s something more than just the habituated set way of doing things. I think it almost has to be. That certainly is a part of it. I think that there are things that have been done that continue to be done. That were done by ancestors. But I think that what sets it up as a tradition is also understanding what purpose that served at the time and understanding ethics of the period .

Engaging in your time with the same intentions, solving the same problems of the same purposes. That really defines it more to me so that it just doesn’t become this empty or cold or habituated performance. as in “This is what we do because this is how I learned to do it”. I think that that aspect of it can be enriching if it’s understood what it actually serves. I guess I’m really interested in living traditions. Like cultures are lived and the reenactment of those traditions has to be a part of a living purpose rather than just empty ritual. Understanding what it meant and what it means and how it serves some sort of purpose. Then you can understand how it would serve the purposes now. Some aspects may need to change but that’s tradition to me. In that sense the tradition is how those things are serving you and that’s what I meant by the ethics of practice.

-The Detroit scene you described with cross generational interaction and mentorship is one way of tradition manifesting itself.

Yes, absolutely! You could see that really clearly in Marcus with the younger people. But Geri was very much about that, she continued to do that and seeking the younger musicians doing their thing. Getting Kassa Overall is an example of that. He played drums in the group but also having him do his things with the sampler and mpc and making sure that hip hop was represented in her music along with somebody tap dancing. That very sense of things. Very Detroit to me! All of that ethos is about understanding tradition as a constantly evolving, changing and purposeful thing which was definitely in evidence in that scene there. Not just doing something the way it used to be done …otherwise you get stuck in things.

-Anyone underrated?

I can think of a lot of people who are underrated. Where do I start? Well, underrated and “underknown” interact in a very complex way. In my mind now because I do enough teaching and workshops the musicians that people don’t know are someone like John Carter, the clarinetist, Horace Tapscott, people like that. To that you can add Herbie Nichols for sure and I know Geri was doing a lot to promote Herbie Nichols’ music but speaking of people who are alive, there’s so many. There’s some of my peers, they’re not known enough. I don’t know where to begin. It’s interesting the flow of that information.

I think there is a feeding frenzy around certain personalities. I understand how that works but it creates this context in which there is just a couple of people talked about and there’s a terrain of all these very competent good musicians. Because there’s a lot of people who are unknown and they are in this same terrain but then there are people even on the outer edge of that who I think are way above most and then that gets very interesting. How can nobody know who that is? There are quite a few of those. As you know, as we get older we see people we used to play with just great and they have settled into a certain kind of obscurity.

-Life takes its toll…

Yeah! It does!

-On the flip side…. overrated? People or things…

That’s a trickier one. That gets mean.

I think the aesthetic terrain shifts, in terms of overrated. All I’d say about that is I think that to a certain extent the critical body and largely, I’m speaking more specifically of the jazz world here, there’s an ability to critique or assess musicianship and contributions in a certain way and a lot of times there will be a fervor around people more related to their arriving at a certain place when they capture the imagination. Sometimes a lot can be foisted on them because the language, the discourse around the positive evaluation around that musician usually comes with this package: “ They’re great at everything because they’ve achieved some success in this way so they must feel the best”. It’s that kind of language. Who’s the best or this is probably one of the best players in the world right now and then after that it’s like they can do everything. They must become some kind of exemplar of some sort of complete musicianship and that’s rarely the case for anybody. The greatest people we know have, if you throw them in the wrong context, major holes and I’m talking about great musicians and that doesn’t denigrate them at all. We all have our things we are good at so I would say that that kind of overrating really is kind of less than having anything to do with them. It comes from this outside estimation where all of a sudden they are written about in certain terms and presented with certain opportunities ….”They don’t really know what they’re doing” or they’re doing the best they can but then “They don’t do THAT!” They can even receive some kind of backlash from the musical community and later on from the critical community because they were good at the things they had together and that could be great but it’s not this ultra-completist view. I definitely see that among peers who receive these accolades and there’s this assumption that they’re able to do everything and sort of unimpeachable and it’s unfair to everyone involved in that sense. That’s what I’d say about overrating. It’s overrated because there’s a false evaluation in the first place of what they’re even capable of. It establishes itself in the imagination of the listening audience too. So they’ll go see somebody and say “So this is the person who’s the best pianist in the world, or the best saxophonist in the world or they can do everything” and it’s like aaahhhhh. They sound great doing the thing they do.

-And that is enough, right?

Yes! The overrating comes from this hyperbole.

-Your musical career. I think of you as someone not milking the opportunities. As an example of that I’m thinking of the trio. As the group was really having a moment and getting a lot of attention you decided to move on to other thing, and not “cashing in” on that momentum.

No, I don’t really spend time thinking of my career. Not in those terms. I guess I do think about it in the sense I’m cognizant that I want to create the terrain so that I can always have access to do the thing that’s compelling to me at that time. And sometimes a career consideration or a career path or the thing that keeps you working the most, that feeds that kind of beast, will take you off the timeline of inspiration. For me, a lot of things work at the speed of inspiration and the career path works in a much slower way and as you mentioned the trio, and I love that trio it’s no commentary on that, but the thing with that trio was we were working since about 2008 I think, pretty consistently. I did a bunch of tours so by the time the recording came out we had already been doing it for a while and that was a document of a certain peak moment in that trio. And at that stage in a way it was just time to seek some other avenues so that I could in the future come back to it with a fresh sense of what it could be. That recording came out at the end of an arc more than in the beginning. And so it was just time to try some other things and come back, Which I’ve always intended to return to it. I know what you mean it could be the kind of thing you could ride out and just keep going and that could yield some interesting music but I had a lot of other things I wanted to do. It’s a trap. You can get yourself into it. It’s a self made trap working that angle because that’s the easiest thing. So it’s not that I’m not thinking about career but I’m thinking about career in a long game strategy where I want to make sure before I get pinned in by this outside body of critics and this expectation of “this is the thing that Craig does” I have a lot more avenues that I’d like to express. I just want to make sure that I stake out a broader terrain to work through so people don’t get too comfortable. Because otherwise you can end up not doing things. So I think about career in that sense. I just think about it in a way where I’m trying to defy that thing and keep it moving in a different way.

-Not to be defined by outside sources but rather be defined by yourself.

Yeah, yeah! I definitely have a lot of other areas musically that I’d like to explore ..like electronic music or different kinds of groups or writing for larger ensembles. All these things that I definitely want to explore but I work in the way that I’d like to develop things and it takes me a long time to develop them before I present them so it’s this pacing thing that’s hard to slam out all these projects and see how that’s going to develop. Like with the trio it developed over time. I got that from Dave Holland a long time ago just about documenting. When I first met him on a James Carter date in late ’95 and he was playing bass and I was talking to him and he talked about how he liked to document/ work with a group and then document when they hit a certain stride rather than the old game plan which is to call a bunch of people, make a record and then work and then let the group develop after the fact, and maybe make another one later which could be great but I always thought it makes sense to try to develop some music and then spend the money. I still work that way. I like to get a group identity happening and a vibe from the music before documenting. To the best of my ability I try to do it that way.

-Your greatest artistic triumph?

Maybe the album Junk Magic that came out in 2004. That has a lot of electronics with Dave King and Matt Maneri. I’m saying that, because I just finished another Junk Magic thing. It’s being finished as we speak. I would point that out also because that was the first thing I did that was really self-produced. It was really just me under my own steam. It was for Thirsty Ear Records but it was completely my own thing. In a way the trio before that Light Made Lighter was a bit like that also. Matt Shipp produced that technically, but he was pretty hands off. Junk Magic was really my musical decisions all the way through. It’s not like it is the greatest thing in the world but I am proud of it because it is something I did, kind of like making a table…. it might not be the most amazing table but you made it yourself.

-The Piano…. what does the piano mean to you?

I do so many things with electronics and keyboards, but at the end of the day I have a really specific relationship with the piano. That said, things I hear in my head are often beyond the piano. I am not conceptualizing my music pianistically but I am using pianism to get to the sounds that I am imagining. I am trying to get to an orchestrational thing, in a Duke Ellington kind of a way. However, my relationship to the instrument is such a long and comfortable and constant element in my life. Much more so than with electronics because that is such a constantly changing environment. In a way I am much more comfortable at the piano than doing anything else anywhere in life!

Do you practice a lot?

Yes, I practice all the time. However, I’ve actually been practicing guitar lately. Just a quarantine thing. I’ve always somewhat tinkered. In the last couple of years I got a guitar but during the quarantine I got into a thing where I had time to sit down and so over the last month or two I started just playing it. I’m actually making some headway for the first time in my life on guitar. I’m no good at guitar but it’s fun to have that new experience to try to get deep into something. So I practice some piano things too, but guitar took over for the last couple of months. In theory there are some things I have to do pianistically coming up soon, so I was actually thinking that later today I’m gonna start my piano thing again. There were a couple of things I was looking at that really made me want to practice piano again. I got inspired….oh right…the piano is great!!!!!