Cyrus Chestnut Rocks and Rolls

Sunday night, after a long afternoon of intense work in the garden (digging holes and improving soil for planting new budlea plants, standing on the tall ladder for trimming one of the tall palm trees, and more) I went to the Jazz Bakery to see the second set of pianist Cyrus Chestnut with his trio (Dezron Douglas on bass and Neal Smith on drums):

They were excellent. As usual, there was hardly any audience for this extremely talented pianist (20 of us max?) – the triple whammy of (1) Los Angeles – people just seldom seem to make the effort, in great numbers (2) after 10:00pm in LA – see (1), and (3) Sunday night – see (1) again. The club would have been packed, were this taking place in New York, or London. Anyway, not my loss, I suppose, although it does take away a bit from such an event if the crowd is depleted like that. Musicians often feed off the crowd’s responses. In any case, it was an excellent show, as I said. Unexpectedly, they interspersed various standards with some recently reharmonized Elvis songs! (Some worked out on paper only today, he said.) They’re going to record a new album entirely devoted to the Elvis songs, apparently, and so they were trying out lots of the new pieces on us. This made for some interesting listening and observing, as you could sense them feeling their way into the pieces, and listening to each other’s explorations as well, to better shape their own. This is part of the essence of a live Jazz performance, and was great to see.

Interestingly, in trying to make sure I sat in a good spot to see Cyrus’ hands in action (as I always try to do when watching pianists), I ended up sitting next to a delightful young woman who was – it turned out – attending only her second ever Jazz performance. She’s doing a Jazz appreciation course, and a requirement is that she goes to five performances and write a report on it! This was great… and certainly a first such meeting for me. She asked me the names of some of the pieces (for her report, I presume) and I was a bit embarrassed since normally I can usually be replied upon to come up rapidly with the names of most of the standards that would come up in such a concert, but I was stumped by a number of the pieces since they were Elvis songs/tunes (or tunes made famous by him). I figured them all out eventually, but there were some annoying moments of recognizing a catchy tune, even remember some of the words, and not being able to name it (e.g. I found myself wondering: “is `It’s Now or Never’ really the name of this song?”… the answer was indeed yes, but I was not sure… same with `Heartbreak Hotel’… was not sure if that was the name, or if it was `I get so lonely I could die’. Turned out -as you know- that the former was indeed correct).

Elvis tunes? You’re wondering what that has to do with Jazz? Well, you might be surprised how well they served as platforms for improvisation, and in fact I can well imagine some of them being absorbed into the standard canon one day. There was a fair amount of tinkering with them to add more harmonic depth, and also make them more interesting here and there in terms of various rhythmic choices, but I think it will make for an interesting and enjoyable album. If still doubtful, for an excellent example (from a great master) of how to reharmonize and reinvigorate tunes/songs from the pop genre for use as Jazz pieces, see Herbie Hancock’s album “The New Standard”. It is truly wonderful. Listen to how he transforms the (already wonderful) Beatle song “Norwegian Wood”, or Sade’s “Love is Stronger Than Pride”, or the (excellent) Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair”. That’s a brilliant album.

Anyway, I hope the woman enjoyed the jazz. After she’d mentioned that she was new to the whole business, I found myself remembering with fondness that first period of listening to excellent musicians play Jazz live when I was a student in London. I can’t begin to describe how transforming it all was for me. I felt the music so deeply and rapidly and increasingly understood what they were doing and thinking right down to the core, and it made so much sense on so many more levels than you witness if you just listen to a recording. Patterns and phrases come together and regularly click (in just the way I described in this post) inside you, and it excites you with just how much they make sense in the place they were put. Then you want more of this great feeling which is manifested in equal parts in your gut and in your head – you get addicted to it. …and there was just so much to see (I lived in Bloomsbury, with ready access to many great venues), so much going on, and I seemed to have so much time back then. It was a wonderful time.

-cvj