Ethan Iverson (US): the Interview, June 2019!

even I was thank you very much for accepting my request for this interview you are a pianist composer arranger and educator a critic a writer and a husband and what else are you that probably covers it okay and you were born in Wisconsin in 1973 and you moved to New York in 1991 where you live still in Brooklyn how is it in Brooklyn for you I Love New York I love the people still probably got the greatest number of master jazz musicians sort of nearby so I'm happy to be there okay well please tell me how and when you realize that music will become a serious professional activity in your life I think I always like the music that I heard on the television if it was Henry Mancini like the Pink Panther or the John Berry scores so the James Bond films and it wasn't jazz but it was the echo of jazz and that's what I always responded to and that's why I sort of figured out how to play it a bit myself and did you have musicians in your family did you at the piano and your home place or there weren't musicians in my family or at least my maybe immediate family my mother got me a piano when I was banging on a piano at the preschool so thanks mom and then you started to play at home on the piano yeah okay well there were early years in New York for you before you started with the bad class you played in dance classes and comedy Sparks and theater sports and you started to play in the New York tango tree and then you became also the musical director at the Mark Morris dance group please tell me a little bit about your early experiences and influences well there are so many and you know so many musicians I admire and I got to play with some of my favorite musicians but Mark Morris you just mentioned Mark Morris that was extremely important he's one of the great choreographers of all time and I was became intimate with his work and got to see it on the road every night for five years and I think really exposed me to the idea of art outside of jazz I was very much just inside being a jazz pianist and then with market opened me up in a different way so that was particularly crucial I managed somehow in my early sort of jazz years I got to play with Dewey Redman a little bit but that was very important later on I started writing about the music partially because of Dewey when I met Dewey as a teenager still and made this little record with him we did a couple of gigs Dewey told such incredible stories story about about jazz and I thought this is amazing I had everything I read everything I thought is wrong but listening to do we actually tell these stories this is right and after the Bad Plus had a success I sort of thought you know maybe I should go find Dooley and talk to him and try to get some of those stories for the record because I knew they weren't on the record and I was thinking that and then he died and I thought oh geez I blew it I didn't get to do it so the next week I took my tape recorder out to Billy Hart's house and began the long series of do the math interviews are there are over 40 at this point you know mostly people that are jazz masters also in the manatees there was a little bit of a scene I got to see mark Turner and Curt Rosa little playoff time with Ben Street and Jeff Ballard that was very influential I've gone on to play with all those guys a fair amount especially Larkin Ben and Jorge rocks it was very important Jorge and read then read moved to New York there was a tip there is still a great tennis player Bill McHenry I played a lot with an elder drummer Jeff Williams it was a kind of for me a very powerful scene all these great musicians and they're all very influential to me in terms of setting some sort of aesthetic guidelines in terms of jazz practice yeah well you studied with Fred Hirsch with Sophia Rose off and this john bloomfield explained this your choice to study with them and what did you learn can you also describe them a little bit in the personality and how they were teaching a record I got when I was very young was Sarabande by Fred Hurst with Charlie Haden and Joey Barron I really like this record and the read the way the piano fret or is played on it in retrospect I also moved likes hearing Charlie Haden in a tree of context sort of like a conventional tree Oh Fred sounds great the drummer joy banner also sounds great great record when I got to New York I saw Fred Hirsch play and I enjoyed it and someone somewhere said something about him being a good teacher and I knew I needed to keep drawing so I hit him up for lessons and they were great he was the first person to really talk to me about piano technique in my younger years I didn't have anybody that helped me with technique in I really had almost no PM technique so Fred was so it took me about half pad and said okay kids here let me show you some things about how you touch the piano how you relate to the piano with your whole body I would say that those names you just mentioned fresh horse by Rocephin John Bloomfield the point is to really be that whole body engaged while playing with piano you don't want to play the pound just like a typist just the periphery you need to be in the swing of it with your whole body that's the point of the teaching after I got to a certain point with Fred who sent me to Sofia Rosa who was the disciple of Abbie Whiteside Abbie Whiteside was a mid-century piano guru who had really advanced concepts about holistic ways to find the piano a lot of it is I think pretty conventional wisdom at this point but at the time of Abby's writing in it and when she books and stuff she died in the 50s terribly young it was still quite revolutionary I think to be thinking of the piano in those terms around the same time Whiteside was finishing her career the woman Dorothy Todman was starting hers and I think Abby Whiteside and Dorothy Haagen actually have a lot in common although disciples of one or the other don't think so but I've been exposed to both and after staff I've stopped teaching she passed away a couple years ago but before that she was elderly and she stopped teaching I decided I needed a new coach I had heard about John Bloomfield and the gillaspie technique that's a version of the Dorothy Todman technique and I guess I would say like very quickly that Abby Whiteside went they cheer so much but Abby Whiteside goes a little deeper into emotional connection rhythm as a player and Todman and her disciples go further into the really the raw technique of the peon flame and between them I feel like I can if I keep working at it I'll eventually be able to play anything I want okay yeah thank you you worked 17 years with the Bad Plus and that was between two thousand and two thousand seventeen how bad were you really I mean how did you create that name Dave the drummer dead King came up with the name it didn't mean anything other than that hopefully it was memorable well it is okay for sure but you recorded at least 14 albums so far I could see please describe your time inside the Bad Plus what did you wanted to do especially in the spanned at the beginning maybe and what were your expectations at how did it went well I think I always wanted to play some music that I'd never heard before when I was in my 20s I was very concerned that I play in a personal fashion that I not play like anybody else and I remember the first time we played a little reefer rehearsal was with Reed and Dave Reed Addison a Dave King I was already playing with Reed a bit in New York then we went back and played a gig with Dave and I just remember his first rehearsal like wow this is a sound I never heard this before Dave had been doing projects where instead of the someone's quartet or someones trio there was a band name which I think makes a lot of sense in that most of the music we really loved in a small group jazz edition is quite Democrat it says I'm an album John Coltrane quartet but without McCoy Tyner and Jimmy garrison and Elvin Jones it's not the same sound so Dave said well instead of eflags the trio let's call them bad plus and I thought that was a great idea and I think I think we played one gig aceton I was in trio and felt really good and then they proposed that band name and we made a little album I mean I could tell that the audience's were responding strongly but still I was surprised when we were broke through the way we did in 2003 with the Columbia Records release these are the vistas which sold a hundred thousand copies this was right before file-sharing the second album give I remember people coming up to me and saying oh yeah I burned your CD for my friend so that was that it was the end of the record industry but we've got the last last gasp of the old record industry and they poured money into us as an expensive record to make and we were on the covers of jazz magazines and you know quite controversial I guess and I found the controversy really kind of thrilling because all my heroes were controversial or so many of them were and so I thought wow this is amazing that I'm getting to be controversial as well then for many years we toured a tour de lot we on the road almost half the year every year for 17 years and was a great living and a great thing to be out there at some point you know it's hard to stay on the same page with people you know and I ended up feeling like I was in a marriage that wasn't fun you know just like you sometimes gotta have a divorce because it's just not working interpersonally so I left I wanted to just quit the have a band quit I thought we should just play maybe make one more record do a final bit - or say hey and call it quits they came back and said they really wanted to protect the Bad Plus name and keep using it to keep playing I felt like I couldn't tell tell them no no okay well inside the bath plus you record recorded an album called The Rite of Spring with music arranged for the pet class of course from I go Stravinsky can you please explain me a little bit about the work process and are you happy with the result the booking agent we were working with tallest at Duke University was interested in commissioning a big project - big cover because we were known for our rock covers by Iron Man by Black Sabbath and smells like teen spirit by Nirvana and the sort of thing and on our album for aaalac here we did a couple of class two musical covers we played a small piece of servants key a small piece of milton babbitt and a small piece of a Aurelia T so Duke look sky is wonderful for some Aaron Greenwald at Duke University said to our booking agent I like the Bad Plus I like them playing this classical music could do University commissioned them to do a big project and booking agent reported that in and we said well yeah maybe and booking agent then suggested well what about the Rite of Spring and that was the good idea because it's sort of the most famous piece of modernist classical composition there's nothing more famous I would say in terms of you know 20th century classical music that has a an edge to it probably grassy and blue is more famous I don't know but that we couldn't we couldn't cover wraps it and blue and feel comfortable but riot spring felt like okay we can get give it a try and I'm a big Stravinsky fan in my 20s I went through everything I listen to all servant sakuya and have a lot of scores I went to see Garrity of Conduct serve in ski one time actually the double bill Oedipus Rex and the Rite of Spring and I remember feeling I much prefer that of his Rex even though the Rite of Spring is more famous so it was fun to work on the Bad Plus Rite of Spring because I really learned the piece and I really learned how great it was - it holds up it's definitely a masterpiece but it was not my favorite sierpinski piece when I started okay okay well you are attracted to many different styles of music you mentioned already pop and rock bands I want to mention Radiohead Nick Drake Pink Floyd Stravinsky Charles Ives but Powell Schoenberg the people's just to mention a few also Thelonious Monk and honored Coleman of course and you integrate many different influences in your music which says you have to be enormous flexible in your way how do you work with all these influences what is the magic for you to work with all this material what my favorite RS is the director writer filmmaker and TV person Joss Whedon and particularly I love him for the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and he said something in an interview he said there's no new ideas there's just fresh ways to put old ideas together and when I first heard that I said that's not true come on those new ideas all the time and then as I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that he's right I mean maybe once in a while there's a new idea but of all those names you just said if I know those any of those artists I can tell you who they're made of you know felonious monk is made of certain elements yeah he's made of Duke Ellington James P Johnson sentimental parlor love songs classical music like Debussy he's made of these elements that he put together to be monk even though he's the most idiosyncratic jazz pianist in a way at the same time he is just like everybody a fresh way of combining old ideas Ornette Coleman boy no one's more avant-garde than I or in Poland the truth of the matter is he's a Texas blues man he placed the Texas blues I'm the alto saxophone inspired by Charlie Parker but he's got this kind of modernist ethos that really connects to 50s and when he got to New York in the 60s he heard classical music and so he immediately started playing violin noise smiling to make it more like classical music then the 70s happened and he put rock music in there with prime time he was always grabbing whatever there was and putting it together in a new way so okay here we are essentially the postmodern age now and all of us in this art game have to figure out how what's left what's to combine what hasn't been done how can we still sound fresh and in the bad plus I would say there is really two elements two or three elements that felt notably fresh there was indie rock we were like we're an acoustic period we're not gonna have any synthesizers where I can have any guitars no electric bass but we're gonna play like indie rock musicians sometimes we're gonna use minimalism Steve rice and Philip Glass we're gonna take that in put that in our music and then there's that Keith Jarrett music with Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden and Paul motion that we really loved that was something we could agree on so I when I think you listen for these are the vistas and you think about those three references minimalism indie rock and Keith Jarrett with Charlie Haden Paul motion do Redman that's kind of the sound and ease of the missus it is fresh I think I heard that not too long ago I'm like man this this is fresh but it was a mixture of those things yeah you got to try to go deep in any of these things it can be too easy to put stuff together under the rubric of something like the diversity for example a good example is if you ask a string quartet to play a hip-hop number we all sort of know that's not gonna work unless the string quartet really works hard unless it really goes deep you know which it hardly ever does so I guess in my own little practice you know I appropriate or in a Coleman but I really thought about Lynette I appropriate Charles Ives but I definitely thought about Saul's eyes you know anybody else I'm checking out I've tried to go deep on any of them and so that when I assemble the pieces that it has some solidity and I actually think that's why it can be still fresh do you go on any of these references yeah well I'm coming back to some other influences but you mentioned Thelonius Monk as an influence for you and somehow we can hear this in you're often also percussive way of playing the piano especially in the Bad Plus please explain your influence why does it attract you so much to play so much percussive well the piano is a percussion instrument and a lot of a lot of jazz pianists seem to wanna pretend they're classical pianists they like I want to create an envelope of sound that's like a classical pianist I'm interested in that too to some extent but if you're up there with a drum set I'd rather try to meet the drums on the stage more than the classical musicians so I think that's the reason to be percussive okay well do you rehearse a lot and how do you rehearse why practice a fair amount well you know the best by a spring we had to rehearse that you know other things varies but jazz musicians can also get together and play wonderful concerts with no herzl whatsoever so it really depends mm-hmm what do you like to practice how do you work with your fingers and your hands to stay flexible probably all jazz pianists play some Bach they we have forever probably all Jasper has placed some Chopin we have forever they're been far more jazz pianist that played some Bach and Chopin than those that didn't so I try to keep those in rotation okay then you know I practiced the blues or rhythm changes and that sort of stuff just like most jazz people so I have had these teachers I keep on working this there's hardly anything I play that is just a technical exercise I know some pianists like to play a bunch of charity and Hanan and stuff I never did any of that and I sort of don't believe it but frankly there's too much good music to play that'll give you the same yeah focus okay and do you still shake hands with people or do you have to be careful with your hands and fingers I shake hands okay okay we talked about that in 20 years again yeah well how is the first moment you touch the piano just be in your inner performance like that how is that for you well I'm not sure how to answer that exactly depends on so many factors but I will say I'm not fussy about the piano I try not to be because my heroes include as you say but Powell and Lawrence monk and they made such great music on any old piano so I try to just accept the instruments and you know I'm sure any jazz pianist can say they've had great gigs on a terrible piano and bad gigs on a perfect piano you know there's so many other factors okay well when you meet a person for the first time do you feel this person is maybe a musician can you feel this and if how is this possible yes sometimes I ask fans of their musician and I can't guess whether they are not usually so so it stays a mystery for you I think so okay well when did you went to a concert just for fun for the last time and what was that for a concept I go out to see music when I can I think the last thing I saw was just maybe we could go in New York I went to the New York City Ballet and there was live music including of Bach's cello suite and orchestral music of Glinka and bartók's fifth string quartet and a pretty mediocre piece of a famous balance sheet ballet by Hershey cave of traditional American songs so that was the most recent live music I heard okay and was it a beautiful successful evening for you it's a great show yeah okay well you are here in south horn in the Netherlands at the moment our festival is called jazz trust and you are an artist and residents please explain what you do here for some reason we take over the town every two years a bunch of jazz musicians and do a whole bunch of intermingling amongst each other in norther that we perform all day long in people's gardens they built little stages for us and we have I don't know fifteen or sixteen great holiday musicians playing in different groups all afternoon Wow and then a couple of student groups and then in the evening is service highlight concert with an orchestra full orchestra and full jazz band of which there are original compositions four by one by me and my my coke curator is Mariko Van Dyke and she's a wonderful alpha player composer and arranger and she's she's doing a lot on the concept as an original piece of furs and an arrangement she did for this one singer and one other arrangements so and we'll be playing as well on that final concert so it's one day but it's a action-packed fun-filled day here jazz to cast okay or you arrange also music and compose music for small ensembles inside and also for string quartet I think can you tell me a little bit more about that and Saturday I'm the only real piece I'm doing with my name on it is this orchestral piece called solve for X but I'm in a trio with Josephine bode and do little kiss the two great avant-garde recorder players from the Netherlands we played before every sort of we have this piece of music that we've arranged from very old sources posing as Bernardi and we actually had sort of great gig at the Morris Festival last year with it and I was pleased when I could invite them back to do at least part of it and we each that the small group of sets are just half an hour so we had an hour at more so I've had to cut a little bit of it I guess but it'll still be really fun okay well I'm looking very much cooler to see you saturday I've to hear you saturday well you are very successful in your work with many projects concerts clinics and so on how is it for you to be embraced with open arms and hearts through people you actually don't know at first sight do you feel like being in love somehow or how is that for you I'm very grateful that I don't have to work for a living you know I to it I bought somehow for a long time now but you know I don't you know you play a lot of gigs and you just hope that the audience digs it you know I don't know if I can say more about a relationship with an audience more than you do it you do what you do as well as you can and hope they dig it really okay well you also travel a lot what are you doing most of the time why are you sitting many hours and planes that's when I started writing about the music was all the travel time all the time that's dead unless you're doing something I think everybody that goes on the road a lot starts having a hobby or some kind of personal project and my personal project became the writing okay can you tell me a little bit about how you compose is there a ritual you are following when you start on the white piece of paper do you always start with zero just with a blank idea and how do you decide what is good and what is not it's very hard for me to imagine composing without a piano I'd like to play it something on the piano if I can come up with a one fresh idea then the rest is sort of easy that first fresh idea is the hard part something charismatic something that you know you've never heard it before not like that mm-hmm so far when I've needed to compose it was never difficult just piece for orchestra I wrote it very quickly and I know it's successful it's got a nice tune and everything people like it so yeah well see that keeps happening but so far you know a deadline if you've got a deadline and a commission I can do it so far no problem yeah and do you also make mistakes or wrong decisions which went maybe into even into a composition can you see that or feel that on are you happy with that or I was that going there's always stuff that could be better I can't say I'm a composer of the level of like the great composers Mozart Beethoven and so forth but some performers really worried about these logged and compose while they're performing and I have to say I feel get enough experience to know hey they were working fast they voted at this one time they'd be happy you're playing it do what you want you know that's more my experience of the real world of music making and if you get to two or something if you write something you get to tour it then you get to hear it for a while and then maybe it will make some changes I heard two days the first time my piece solve for X and as one effect of it I'm not sure if it's working all the way after I hear it in performance but performance energy I'll know whether I want change it for the next time I get to do it okay well there's so much music on this planet it seems even to be increasing somehow what do you think is music and why is music such a big connector unless you're have lyrics music is abstract it's possibly the most abstract of the arts you know we tend to relate to everything through our eyes first and foremost anyway but music it's impossible for it to have a message really you know so I think because of that there's room for people to discover themselves and listening to it you know so I think that's why it can connect is that there's so much room for the listener to put themselves in in the piece somehow yeah interesting is also that music is also invisible right I mean it's unbelievable right yeah well at the moment you are writing a book about how you understand jazz house how do you understand jazz yeah I've been thinking about this book I don't know I'm writing all the time I've written so much already I'm gonna write a lot more I was really thinking about a proper history book but I don't know if I'll actually do that because I need to get really all the way in there but you have to you have a lot of people to satisfy if you're trying to be a historian you know there's nothing I've written ever that someone didn't complain about you know what I'm trying to be sort of objective so I'm sort of tiring of being objective and maybe I'll actually like write something really subjective about it you know more like a memoir about my history in the music because I think it'd be funnier and more scandalous you know but for the time and I'm still producing articles about jazz and I've certainly learned a lot working on these pieces but addition to all the interviews I've done I've done major overviews of Powell Onias monk Lesley young or Anna Coleman James P Johnson Herbie Nichols there's a lot of people I've looked at in a fairly in-depth way on my website and it's pretty unprecedented as far as I know for performing artists to actually be that interested in showing their work and as I'm showing my work like a paper like paper in school here's my paper on my pal something very corny about it some musicians think I'm ridiculous to do it you know but for me it seems to work out and then if it helps or some people or you know and then it's cool okay well can you tell me a little bit about your idea of time and staying in time and rhythm in all your compositions for example it's time in music mathematical puzzle how does it work actually well I've heard that the first rhythm was the heartbeat or are always surrounded by rhythm because there's no way you can not hear your heartbeat if everything went to total silence you know you'd hear your heartbeat a pulse pulse seems very important in jazz we're dealing with the African tradition black music sometimes they call it and that they're the specialists in in rhythm that's that's like the highest version of the stuff at least from what I know of course there's music India there's music from other places but on the slave ships in Middle Passage they came over forced over to America Africans and they came they brought with them all the secrets of rhythm and America benefited immeasurably from this injection of this hardcore rhythmic science or whatever it is art mystical who knows I can't tell you what it is and I think it's why in the 20th century American music dominated the world is because we had our old world European harmony we didn't forget it at least we didn't forget it entirely but it was all powered by this African rhythm it's not my best thing rhythm is something I'm still working on I'll always be working on it I can tell I'm more naturally gifted at harmony from the time I was 12 or 13 harming had no mysteries Romania show me a piece of paper with harmony I know what this is rhythm that's not the case I've been working on it and I'm still gonna be working on it good well you work also with Billy Hart the drama at least since three albums you recorded together on ECM records what did you learn from him the most can you tell me about that well he's my most important teacher I would say and it's in his way more important than that piano teachers it's certainly a lot about rhythm but just about whatever this is we call jazz every side of it but when the Bad Plus had a surprise breakout I want to keep connections to the New York jazz musicians because I could already tell this was going to be a dividing line like I was going to be taken out of the New York scene because of the power of the Bad Plus and the career and I met him played with Billy Hart and loved him I thought this is my man I've got to do - anything for Billy Hart and the other two people were in that Curt Rosa Winkle group that I loved so I put together that first gig with essentially my two favorite peers they're little older than me but essentially my peers Mark Turner the best three with the massive drummer that I knew Billy Hart and we played and it was good but then Billy had a gig of his own in his town sort of like a welcome to Montclair New Jersey Billy Hart thank you for living here and he said well yeah I really enjoyed this week with you guys will you come play gig for me and we played his tunes and she was on the microphone announcing the ban and it immediately felt much better that the strongest musician was then the leader and so we took a internal vote and we voted to give Billy Hart this band if he wanted and he said yes and that was yeah that's been together almost as lots of that plus now yeah okay well you recently recorded an album with Mark Turner on saxophone my congratulations for this Gaudreau album it's called temporary kings and it's also recording on ECM records did you had to change your style of playing and composing to fit into the AES ECM takes and how was the contact was put you sir Manfred I shall well you're raising a very important point because there is the ECM sound and Manfred does what he does I get along really well with Manfred and I think he's a genius I've always loved all my ECM records but he's been sort of asking me to do a record for a while and I knew there are plenty of things I was doing that wouldn't be right for him for example I was in a trio with 2d Heath and I'm playing swinging jazz I this wouldn't work I didn't even even mention to it came ever but in the Billy hardcore chat with Mark that sometimes be these duo spaces over these years or like these Roboto saxophone piano spaces and they were always really enjoyable and I thought well maybe this could work for easy Animas duo chamber jazz and we recorded at this beautiful studio of McDonald at the radio Center there we've got a lot of reverb to do that and it's about 11 seconds later it finally dies down so it really works out for this record because there's no drums on temporary kings we can have a sort of space and I play something on the piano extraordinary piano and so well we could play the set a sound and it has this resonance and then the saxophone has a sound and it has the resonance and I think it really kind of worked out for a nice ECM album mattre dissipated and one of the funny moments of this session is I wrote a kind of something that to me sad like classical music for the duo I thought he was going to love it it's very melodic I was very proud of this piece and we did a take and I went to go in and look at him and he had his head down like this he loved substances puts us on a record he's choked up it's like he can't believe that we were dare playing those fees I just started laughing I was pretty I thought you're gonna love this piece why don't you like it and I think it had something to do with appropriating classical music in a way he thought was really corny you know so I said okay fine let's not put it on the record so I miss I really misread him in this moment cuz I thought he was really gonna dig it I still thought I was like a piece and used that movement as the middle portion of a piano concerto I wrote and it was very successful and then the review of the paper incited it is the highlight of the piece this middle woman so I think it was really right yeah but it was it was cool not to use it for the duo that was fine okay what can you tell me a little bit about the titles of this album how did you create temporary kings what yeah I borrowed it from someplace else I borrowed it from a British writer called Anthony Poole who wrote a sequence of 12 books a dance to the music of time and I really love these books I've read them many times and my wife loves them too we have it's almost part of the fabric of our marriage at this point this love of these books it's very hard to explain unless you've read these books live is so great but if you if you read them and love them and they're in a certain team and you understand each other temporary kings is actually an old myth about being left in charge of the kingdom while the king goes away and when he comes back he probably has to kill you to reclaim the throne but was it maybe it's worth it to be actually king during this time you know it's so great to be king it has something to do with that especially in relationship with being in this beautiful studio with math and Iker and this beautiful piano and maybe the end of the record industry I mean I know we are making records that much longer not CDs you know we thought 30 years ago we're making you're making CDs forever now we know what's not going to be true so the title reflects all of that I guess and how did you decide which song will be the first which woman will be the second and so on manfred likes the sequences records and I think he likes moody records and it begins with the two moodiest pieces I think if it was up to marker I wouldn't necessarily start that way but it works I'd have to say it works kudos to Manfred once again so you're happy with the result oh yeah okay you agree with that oh yeah okay well when you play do you sing the same moment in your mind are you a mind hammer I don't think so no okay do you think people in different countries listen differently to music it's a great question I don't really know but cultures are different so it makes sense the listening would be different too okay well New York is a very expensive place why is it interesting to live in New York absolute gem use ition traditionally it's just because of the jazz greats that are right there you know I get to play with Billy Hart we simply have played a trio gate with Ron Carter and al fossa and they both just drove to the gate from where they lived you know couldn't do that here I'm not gonna get Ron and Al to show up play with me in the Netherlands anytime soon you know so and he's not in his own home so yeah less so about playing with them really didn't also just be able to go see them when I went to New York in 91 there was still a lot of jazz great alive that have since died and I got to see a lot of incredible musicians and drinking some of you know what do you like all the real deal in terms of people who played jazz live in New York so that's traditionally the reason why New York is so important good well after this weekend and this our tone here the Netherlands you will face some performances this piece called peple and please explain this work and what is English in the Beatles right yeah pep band is awfully hard to explain because it's a Mark Morris reductionists and back with my old boss mark he's one of the great choreographers and the city of Liverpool asked him to trade a piece in response to 50 years of Sergeant Pepper Sgt pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and he said yes and he asked me to write the dance score for it so bad plus was occasionally asked to do a Beatles number and we always said no because we thought it'd be too corny to do it in fact one of the things I like to say still is that there's nothing worse than a Beatles covers project it seems very it's right cliche so I took the job very seriously and created this big score with 6 Beatles songs that are sort of deconstructed sort of like the Bad Plus actually early Bad Plus style and six original pieces that are based on my Rhino of dance and of Mark and they all reflect in some little way they're inspired by a Beatles element there are some through lines in the music to make it go here and then of course my marks costumes marks choreography the costumes like those all of us thing pepper lenses things a solid object it's an artwork that has its own logic and I think it's very successful and it's been a hit with audiences mark likes to say it's for people who both love and hate the Beatles you know and I think the only negative reviews we get are from people who just think the music isn't enough like the Beatles and to that my response is it's sort of like seeing a modern theater group do Hamlet if you're going to see a contemporary reduction of Hamlet they're not going to do it straight up they're going to do something different with it you're going to see I saw the Wooster group do Hamlet they're modernist New York City playgroup I mean it was incredible it had almost nothing to do with Shakespeare but it was one of the greatest things I've ever seen they can do with talent because haven't so familiar I guess my conceit with the music of pepper lad is that the Beatles is so familiar that there's really room to do something different with it I mean pepper land sounds so beautiful you know and I heard about that did you ever met Paul McCartney or another people it's not for them they wouldn't like it I guarantee you don't know I don't know can you please hum your favorite pepper lentil melody for me [Music] [Music] beautiful next song please well can you tell me what is sound what do you understand about sound the sound related to where we come from may be and how does New York sound I don't have a good answer about either of those things except that New York is it's pretty chaotic you know it's actually love too lovely to be here in this village enjoying some relatively peaceful interlude okay well just silence exists in your life and how important is silence for you I don't think silence per se is that important to me but I I'm not that much of a social animal I don't like to hang out with a lot of people all the time so I mean I'm a loner in a certain way although I'm happy to married and I do have some friends a few here there hi two friends of mine out there if you're watching but no I I like to be alone and think about music and so to do my own thing silence not so important but a long time it is okay well do you transport the general message in your work I think our music must have some kind of extra musical message but one of the great things about especially instrumental music is that it's up for the listener to decide I would say that there's very few things I've written that have an explicit message you know I made it I like it I hope you like it too maybe you'll find a message in it for you but I'm not going to tell you what that message is and when does your solo album come I don't know I'm working on solo piano quite a lot actually and it's going well I'm playing more and more solo and I'm happy in the direction it's going I'm playing more and more stride piano and something like older styles of jazz are coming back in I stuff I learned first I've never forgotten and now it's starting to sound pretty good to me something that's happening with the solo piano I sort of like like people like Jackie Byard and Earl Hines and they sort of Loutre stride cafes I like that stuff and I was playing more and more like that these days well yeah no solo offers you a lot of freedom yes it does but it's also very difficult because you have to all the time yourself it's much in a way it's easy to feel much more free playing with good bass and drums because they take so much of the load you know know if you're playing with a good basis system grounded by one chord and go for a cigarette break the music's still great solo piano well you're also a critic what kind of critic are you you're writing for The New Yorker yeah well it's that it's mostly just that the old music I like I really write about what's happening now for plenty of reasons but I think if you asked people in the scene they would say you know Ethan writes about that historical to ask stuff and that's sort of the repetition I want to have I don't really want to have a reputation of I might review your album recorded now you know for The New Yorker I wrote a little bit about some more contemporary things a great album by a classical pianist Vicky Chou and her recording of Michael Cordes Sinatra which I thought was one of the greatest things in recent memory I want to shine some light on it and then I wrote about this Don Shurley movie and green book and I wrote about the new Doctor Who but I can't really imagine taking on writing like a lot of contemporary criticism of what's happening my criticism is mostly about figuring out what happened in the past because I don't think it's figured out that well yet if I may say yes that's why there's room for me to do but what there is to be done in my opinion is because if you're looking at all the text books about jazz and if you read the criticism from years past I think there are things that are missing and things that they did getting right at the time like like what me mainly the musicians perspective I'll just toss a name out there martinwilliams acclaim by some is one of the all-time greatest jazz critics when I read Marvin Williams I know he's getting a lot of it wrong because he's not one of the cats who actually played and he has a bunch of theories about what he thinks is good in the music that isn't borne out by reality so he's someone that my work as a writer I'm in reaction against I don't want to be with Marvin Williams and those guys I want to be actually more like I mentioned Billy Hart okay I be more like what is really hard to say about their music you know let me think about that when you like what I think about the music informed by my experiences having that doing Redmond having been in the Bad Plus with meaning Dave different things are sort of real-world musician experiences that then I can maybe address these historical critical issues with the kind of fresh I yeah can you also tell me a very short what interests you to interview other musicians because on your website there is a huge bunch of material about ya interviews with other musicians like Keith Jarrett Billy Hart and many others what does interest you to do that well in almost every case I really learned something I'm going in as a student first and foremost so sometimes I go when I'm practicing or composing I actually go back to my own interviews and see what they said about it you know it's the black jazz musicians I think they're underrepresented in terms of what their perspective is and the way they talk to each other as a young white guy I can't get all the way in there but I can get in there a lot more than Martin Williams did he also met Carla Bley yeah they say together with her yes of course I wrote about her in The New Yorker too well Carlos always been one of my favorites and specifically that album the Battle of the fall and her arrangements for Charlie Haden that's one of my top albums of all time I also love the table trio records where he plays Carla Bley pieces and I think at one point I thought it was more collaborative than I now know that Carla really loaded up the scores accurately and Paul played them accurately she's really she gave him what to play at one point I think I thought she that it wasn't so clearly notated but it is you know I really asked that sound inside me those early Carla Bley tunes that probably played okay well thank you very much Ethan okay I'm very happy we did one hour and one minute and 22 seconds all right great thank you interest okay you're relieved yes you

Channel: Bernd Eilts

Views: 2,783

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Ethan Iverson, The Bad Plus, Jazz Te Gast Zuidhorn, Bernd Ihno Eilts, The Groningen Report, Mark Turner, Manfred Eicher, Pepperland, The Pink Panther, Jazz Piano Interview, Ron Carter, Dewey Redman, Billy Hart, Temporary Kings, Lugano, Prins Claus Conservatorium, The Rite of Spring, Brooklyn, Fred Hersh, Sophia Rosoff, Mark Morris Dance Group, Do the Math

Id: AyxY78hsGWI

Length: 62min 14sec (3734 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2019