Full immersion with Jarrett, Copland and Trotignon
Three important pianists join forces
Keith Jarrett did not invent the freewheeling solo piano recital that has become a sort of rite of passage for aspiring pianists. In the 1950s, Art Tatum delivered ultrafast roller-coaster rides of brilliance and Thelonious Monk surprised listeners with unpredictable dissonances and silences. In the ’60s, Cecil Taylor launched into cascading, crashing assaults of the avant-garde. In 1971, Montreal-born Paul Bley issued the overwhelmingly lovely study in quietism with Open, To Love.
But when Jarrett, now 69 and still the “enfant terrible” of jazz, released Facing You in 1971, Solo Concerts: Bremen, Lausanne (1973) and, particularly The Koln Concert (1975), the floodgates opened for a new generation of jazz pianists unbridled by form. (Jarrett even had the audacity to issue a 10-disc set, The Sun Bear Concerts.)
Coming of age in Charles Lloyd’s enormously popular mid-1960s quartet, he later anchored Miles Davis’s breakthrough electrified band, despite his ambivalence toward electricity, with brilliant — and intensely funky — Fender Rhodes sorties. In the ’70s, he inaugurated two superb quartets, one American, the other European. In the ’80s came his “Standard Trio” with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette (his partner since the Lloyd and Davis years) that’s running strong to this day.
Of course, Jarrett is also known for what detractors might call self-absorbed onstage peccadillos: grunts and groans of ecstasy, complaints about the sound system, harangues at the audience for fits of coughing and for taking photos with cellphones, sometimes leading him to walk off the stage. Why be so bugged by cameras? Because Jarrett is surrendering himself to the moment in his playing, and he expects audiences to do the same, especially at his debut at the Maison symphonique on Saturday.
There’s such little doubt that Jarrett is the most important pianist to rise in the last 45 years that other “worthy constituents” (as Charlie Parker famously dubbed his competition) inevitably have worked in his shadow, not receiving their due appreciation.
Enter Marc Copland who, at 66, is finally being appreciated for a lyrical style rife with inventiveness. He says he was “a little late getting started,” because his first in- strument was amplified alto saxophone that he experimented with into the mid-’70s before becoming dissatisfied with its expressiveness. He switched to piano and the next 10 years were filled with “woodshedding” while he discovered his own style. The work paid off: during this millennium he has released two to four albums each year, with a variety of formats and collaborators (guitarist John Abercrombie and alto saxophonist Greg Osby are notables).
Copland, sometimes dubbed The Piano Whisperer, is playing at the Gesù on Saturday in a trio, called Now This, with bassist Peacock (of Jarrett’s trio) and drummer Joey Baron, known for a rambunctious style playing with John Zorn but whose subtle side is evidenced by his work with Italian great Enrico Pieranunzi.
“The two things you want in any band, but especially a trio, is guys who really listen and are willing to check their egos at the door to try to make music together,” Copland maintains. “You want musicians who each have their own distinctive voice so it sounds like the meshing together of three very independent souls rather than copies of somebody else. When Gary and I first played together in 1983, the first couple of chords and bass notes we hit together at the sound check caused us to look up and say ‘Whoa,’ because the radar antennae were really up. I was ready to go his way and he was ready to go mine. The analogy I always use is a basketball team: you need two or three really top players and you’ve got to be willing to share the ball.”
Copland’s use of the piano pedal to give tremendous nuance to his sound is legendary in jazz circles: “The way I hear music is as a collage of colours and textures, much the same way that French Impressionism treated visual images. I kind of use the pedal to blend them all together. A lot of it involves things going on with the overtone structures, the notes and the chords, and when I get them blended in right then it feels like I’ve created this tonal picture. That’s when I know I’m in the zone.”
His handling of romantic songs is deeply lyrical but ohso-slightly off-centre.
“If a tune grabs me, then there’s usually something very personal going on within me that relates to the tune. Then it become part of me and it just tends to come out in a little bit of a different way. I just go with that. When the relationship to the tune is that deep, it just sort of takes care of itself.”
Baptiste Trotignon, 39, has rapidly become France’s leading pianist during the past decade and is known for duos in jazz and classical music with the likes of Brad Mehldau, Tom Harrell and Nicholas Angelich.
His partner on Sunday at L’Astral is the intense but beautifully subtle saxophonist Mark Turner, 48.
“He’s really a master to me,” Trotignon says. “The great thing is that in terms of sophistication and skill, he’s at a very high level and yet he offers a simplicity that’s very direct and natural, a mélange of the two. It’s very easy to play with him, but at the same time he’s very inventive, not to be intellectual or complicated, but rather, very peaceful.
“Duet situations permit a direct dialogue between two musicians. It lends itself to getting down to the essentials. And, importantly, most of the time playing duets allows us to think and play acoustic, so you work with the real sound of the instrument, unamplified, as it would otherwise be in a larger band making more sound.”
Keith Jarrett performs Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Maison symphonique. Tickets cost $90.50 to $106.50.
Marc Copland, with Gary Peacock and Joey Baron, performs Saturday at 10:30 p.m. at Gesù — Centre de créativité, 1200 Bleury St. Tickets cost $47.35.
Baptiste Trotignon, with Mark Turner, performs Sunday at 9 p.m. at L’Astral, 305 Ste-Catherine St. W. Tickets cost $30.10. Tickets for these shows are available via montrealjazzfest.com. Prices include taxes.