The eclectic pianist\u2019s main mission: only connect<\/p>\n
From JazzTimes<\/a><\/p>\n By Ted Panken<\/p>\n \u201cMy overall goal is trying to figure out how to connect the languages of jazz and classical to make an interesting and engaging performance, and also develop my own voice,\u201d Aaron Diehl told me when I first wrote about him in 2010. \u201cWhy limit yourself to just playing something here and something there? It\u2019s all gold.\u201d Joined on The Vagabond by bassist Paul Sikivie and drummer Greg Hutchinson, Diehl opens the recital with seven originals that refract and interrogate raw materials harvested from an expansive field of influence: a Bach-to-Ravel notion of the Euro-canon, church hymns, stride, bebop, the blues. He ends it with idiomatically apropos interpretations of repertoire by role models John Lewis and Roland Hanna, and\u2014foreshadowing his engagement with Sorey\u2014a frisky deconstruction of Prokofiev\u2019s \u201cMarch from Ten Pieces for Piano, Op. 12,\u201d followed by a meditative turn through Philip Glass\u2019 minimalist \u201cPiano Etude No. 16.\u201d<\/p>\n Diehl entered Glass\u2019 musical world in 2014, when the composer invited him to participate in a Brooklyn Academy of Music concert comprising all 20 of his piano etudes. \u201cMany times I had doubts about whether my interest in this music was valid,\u201d Diehl says of this early foray into transidiomatic expression. \u201cA mentor even asked why I\u2019m trying to play classical music, why I\u2019m not with the soldiers of jazz. Well, I love jazz. But everything that I do is influenced by and incorporates all of my interests in music; it doesn\u2019t have to be restricted to a specific approach or style or genre or idiom.\u201d<\/p>\n He adds that interacting with Sorey has \u201csolidified\u201d this predisposition. \u201cTyshawn has been a revelation,\u201d Diehl says. \u201cHe does so many different things on an extremely high level: serial music, 12-tone. His capacity for music, the things he understands and knows, is endless. His mind works in unique ways. For me, the goal is to play any written material and impart such an organic feeling that it sounds improvised, and to improvise music with a structure, a form, and a sense of direction that it sounds written. When I hear Tyshawn play\u2014when I hear all of his pieces\u2014I hear that. I feel the greatest musicians, whether Bach or Charlie Parker, did that at the highest level.\u201d<\/p>\n Something close to what Diehl describes transpires on Mesmerism, an in-studio trio date with Matt Brewer recorded in spring 2021. \u201cTyshawn called and said, \u2018I want to do a trio record with you and Matt,\u2019\u201d Diehl recalls. \u201cCan we rehearse a day before the recording?\u2019 I said, \u2018I want to be prepared.\u2019 He said, \u2018That\u2019s okay. We\u2019ll just play tunes.\u2019 He came by my place with Matt, and started to dictate arrangements of \u2018Autumn Leaves\u2019 and tunes by Paul Motian and Muhal Richard Abrams: \u2018We\u2019ll play the first eight twice and then the B is half time, and then the last eight is double time,\u2019 and so on. I spent half the night trying to make sure I had the right roadmap for the recording next morning. I thought Tyshawn did that on purpose. He knows me well enough now to know that I like to have a handle on things, and his whole approach was, \u2018No, we\u2019re just going to listen to each other. We have our structure, and we\u2019ll see what happens.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cMany musicians have varied interests, but people tend to want to pigeonhole them into doing a certain thing and that\u2019s it. The key\u2014and the hard part\u2014is how you incorporate all your interests into an organic entity.\u201d<\/p>\n Listen to a Spotify playlist featuring most of the songs in this Before & After:<\/a><\/p>\n Read the full story.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The eclectic pianist\u2019s main mission: only connect From JazzTimes By Ted Panken \u201cMy overall goal is trying to figure out how to connect the languages of jazz and classical to make an interesting and engaging performance, and also develop my own voice,\u201d Aaron Diehl told me when I first wrote about him in 2010. \u201cWhy … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5070,3656,3610,7239],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11535,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11534\/revisions\/11535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/11298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThat the 37-year-old pianist has refined and expanded that statement of purpose is evident on three recent albums\u2014as leader on The Vagabond, from 2020 (Diehl\u2019s third for Mack Avenue), and as sideman on fellow pan-genre explorer Tyshawn Sorey\u2019s expansively abstract-to-consonant 2022 releases Mesmerism (Yeros7) and The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism (Pi). As Diehl remarked on Zoom from his Harlem apartment before listening to the 11 selections that comprise his first Before & After: \u201cI\u2019m interested the jazz language as a continuum\u2014threading together its evolution as a continual, interrelated stream of development to create a sound that\u2019s neither old or new, but simply a landscape where we can all communicate.\u201d<\/p>\n