Smitty: (Laughs.)
CB: But the point is that they’re very good to work with and Wayne Shorter wrote a piece with them that they premiered in Montreal.
Smitty: Yeah.
CB: Recorded for Paquito de Rivera. So they’re really what the future of music, I think, is about, is dropping these barriers and integrating more in the same way that string quartet did it for the string quartet world and San Francisco Quartet and some other great groups. Yeah, it’s like “Let’s break down these walls.” Or Yo Yo Ma and Silk Road. Let’s go on there and have the musicians get together and create this new kind of music that’s both jazz and classical working together.
Smitty: Yeah, man, and it’s just fantastic. I mean, it just opens up your mind and your heart when you’re listening to it. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful movement.
CB: Oh yeah, well, thank you. And I hope that there are jazz listeners like yourself that will allow themselves to get sort of sucked into that world where there’s parts where it really is just classical for a couple of minutes, then it starts turning you on and integrating again to being a jazz experience too. But they’re great players and they can bring off the emotions of those sections.
Smitty: Yeah, well, I tell ya, it just rounds out this project. And, of course, “Blue Rondo,” I mean, what can you say about “Blue Rondo”?
CB: Yeah, well, I’ll tell ya, that whenever we play “Vignette,” it was so popular that we had to have an encore and so that’s how that came to be. We had to give the people a button on this whole experience, so I’m glad that worked out good.
Smitty: Now, you’ve been called a 21st Century Leonard Bernstein. How did you feel when you first heard that?
CB: I felt like that’s a good thing. (Both laugh.) I liked it, especially when it came from a very respected and tough reviewer and critic from the Chicago Tribune.
Smitty: The Trib.
CB: So anyhow, I was very excited. How people react to your music can happen on a whim. I was really excited because Taylor just got a great thing in Downbeat Magazine about his new record.
Smitty: Oh yeah.
CB: And he was comparing him to a lot of other young pianists and he said basically words to the effect that he was the cream of the crop there with his new effort. So anyhow, anytime anyone says anything nice about you, believe me, you’re thanking your lucky stars.
Smitty: Well, speaking of great compliments, Taylor, Dave Brubeck himself, the legend, says that you’re the most amazing talent he’d ever come across.
TE: Well, that theoretically happened, I think, when I was 12 and sat in with him for the first time. I think that might’ve been—who knows when? Maybe that was where I met Chris. (All laugh.) It’s highly possible, actually. But I can’t remember. Someone remembered that he said that or something like that, and I couldn’t remember it either way. I was just really cold and kinda nervous, so that’s all I was really thinking about at the time, but someone somehow came out of that concert with that quote.
CB: When you said “cold,” you were meaning that the weather was cold?
TE: Oh, we were both freezing. Yeah, we had two heaters out there. It was a big outdoor—it was at the winery, the Paul Masson Winery.
CB: I didn’t want anyone to think out of context that he was just like “Oh yeah, I was dissing Dave. I was cold.” (All laugh.)
TE: Oh yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, no, of course, no, I was freezing cold. I was turning navy blue, but yeah, that was what was on my brain, I think, was “Why aren’t these hand warmers working?”
Smitty: Well, there are some fantastic quotes on your Web site, Taylor, in the quote section where there are some seriously notable musicians that speak very highly of your musicianship, so it just stands to reason that you have created such great music and it is recognized by those that truly know what great music and great musicians are.
TE: Well, thanks, man. I’ve been really fortunate, especially with this new album. It’s luckily gotten like a whole lot of really good reviews and people have been so supportive, which is cool. This particular record, too, I think there’s a lot of stuff, I mean, I feel like this particular music was a lot more in tune with kind of the direction that I’m going musically and personally and that kind of thing, and I hope to kind of continue in that direction, but to do so, I’m not necessarily going out and playing “Stomping at the Savoy” at every concert and things like that, and it breaks away from a certain thing to try some different things and take some risks, but I’ve been really fortunate that people are supportive enough to at least let me record, for the most part, stuff that I want to record and all that, so I’m just thrilled that people like it—because it’s almost like two records, really, this particular project. It was so hard to sequence because we have all this straight ahead stuff and then, you know, it’s like the stuff that we do live and then the suite is kind of its own other thing. We kind of thought of it as like two albums in a certain sense, but the suite is a lot more kind of the direction that I’m going.
Smitty: Yes, and you know what I love about the suite is the integration of the piano and the Rhodes.
TE: Oh yeah, I love just the texture the Rhodes provides because I always think of Rhodes as an acoustic instrument just because it’s got its own authentic sound in and of itself. It is technically an acoustic amplified instrument. There’s metal being hit as opposed to just a sampled sound being signals. I can’t understand that stuff. I feel like I was better suited to live in like the 1920s, which is really funny. I don’t understand anything about that stuff. I can barely get through that music notation software. It kills me. There have been so many different times where I’ve nearly thrown my computer out the window.
Smitty: (Laughs) But it’s such a cool integration of sounds that it’s just really like I go back to the word “emotions” because it just piques the emotions. It really does.
TE: Well, thank you. Yeah, there were some fun textures. Also I messed around with some flutes. I wanted there to be kind of three or four-part flute harmony throughout. It’s kind of like I never wanted them to break up into individual like one flute taking the melody for a second, that kind of thing. I wanted them to be kind of like the sirens, the three-headed singer that’s always singing in harmony kind of.
Smitty: Yeah, and let me tell ya, the tenor saxophone works very well. Wow, I really love that on “Brick Steps.”
TE: Thanks, yeah, that’s BenWendel. He’s incredible. He’s the lead—he kind of started this band called Kneebody, which has a gigantic, gigantic cult following, and Dayna Stephens is the other saxophonist and sounds great, and Joshua Redman on the other on “Timeline.”
Smitty: Yeah.
TE: I’m a big fan of the tenor sax. I think it’s a very human sound. I haven’t been as into, I mean, there are so many greats of alto sax, but I guess for my own sound I tend to hear tenor a little bit more.
Smitty: Yeah, do we want to talk about your snowboarding?
TE: Well, that was just at the beginning of 2006, I tried it out for the first time. My friend didn’t really inform me on how to stop. (All laugh.) He said something about falling, so I did fall and I fell forward, then I just picked Door No. 2 and that wasn’t it and, I mean, it sounds like I’m exaggerating, but there actually were little kids that were zipping by me. It was really embarrassing. But yeah, no, I’m actually a really, really—I will just say that I am a really good football player and good basketball player, but yeah, anything that you could put in some kind of sporting event with like the X whatever.
Smitty: The X Games?
TE: You know, I mean, I can’t do it. No boarding. I can’t do it.
Smitty: Well, basketball is one of my favorite sports, so one of these times we’re gonna have to get together and shoot some ball, man.
TE: Oh, man, it’s on, it’s on. Consider it done.
Smitty: Oh!
TE: I’m down any time. I always tell people, you know, I’ll cancel out of anything if there’s a good game going on.
Smitty: Oh, very cool.
TE: Okay. Hey, it’s all good, man. I’m gonna let it rain.
CB: I’ve always said philosophically that basketball is the most like jazz because it’s five different cats with different individual skill sets and, believe me, they’re improvising. I mean, there are some set plays.
TE: Oh, totally.
CB: A lot of the teams—like it always struck me that the guy that used to—I think it was Frank Layton or something, he used to coach the Utah Jazz?
Smitty: Yeah.
CB: And they were saying “So tell me about your playbook when you’re going in against this team” and they were interviewing the other coach like “How do you defense them?” And he said “You can’t defense a team that has no set plays.” He just had these five guys that were great and he’d say like “Okay, go up there, man, and do it.”
TE: Yeah, kinda like the Suns and the Warriors of the last few years, just where you go down and just kinda figure it out based on whatever defense they set up in.
Smitty: Yeah, I’ve never heard that before, but you’re so right. Wow, I’ll have to remember that.
TE: I think that’s a much better comparison than—I did a TV interview in Luxembourg a few weeks ago and the only two guests on the show, or three guests, were myself and these two cyclists who had won some important race, something in Europe, but I was going on about zero sleep and about 48 hours straight of being awake, bunch of train transfers, everything, get in there, and everyone’s speaking German and I had no idea what was going on, and they asked me about “Well, Taylor, what do you think of cycling?” and so I made some awkward comparison of cycling to improvisation that didn’t work half as well as what Chris just said about basketball. (All laugh.) I said “Well, yeah, you gotta steer and in music I guess it’s just like a bicycle” and blah-blah-blah-blah, you know.
Smitty: Laughs
TE: But that’s actually a really good analogy, basketball and music. Football too, I think.
