So it goes that pianist Yeager draws inspiration from Vonnegut
The late Kurt Vonnegut was a pulp-fiction philosopher. Often writing in a quasi-sci-fi mode, he dispensed pearls of wisdom like a busy gumball machine.
He once wrote that he wanted his epitaph to read: “The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”
Framingham native Jason Yeager has loved Vonnegut’s novels for much of his life. He got the habit of reading them from his father, who recently named a new kitten Kurt.
Some years ago Yeager, a pianist and composer who studied in the dual-degree music program at Tufts and New England Conservatory and now teaches at Berklee, began writing a few tunes inspired by Vonnegut. Once he’d gathered four or five of them, he realized he had an entire project underway.
On Friday, Yeager celebrates the release of his latest album, “Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite,” in his hometown at Amazing Things Art Center, officially known as atac: downtown arts + music. A brief tour also includes a stop in Portland, Maine, on Saturday and a special performance at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indianapolis on Nov. 11, on what would have been the writer’s 100th birthday. (Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut lived for most of his adult life on Cape Cod. He died in 2007.)
It’s a song cycle played by a versatile big band featuring brass, woodwinds, bass, drums, and vibraphone. The saxophonist Miguel Zenon guests on two tracks.
Each song title — “Kilgore’s Creed,” “Blues for Billy Pilgrim” — is a Vonnegut reference. The music ranges from meditative and daydream-y to quizzical and — as Vonnegut would have approved — flat-out farting around. (The minute-and-a-half track “So It Goes,” named for Vonnegut’s trademark catchphrase, consists of the band members and the author’s son Mark repeating those three words in a cacophony of voices.)
The hallmarks of Vonnegut’s writing are all here in the music. The writer’s work, says Yeager, is a combination of “a mischievously dark sense of humor, a feeling of adventure and also cynicism, paired with a directness of tone. In my music, I try to capture the playfulness, the darkly funny way he pokes fun at the foibles of humanity.”
Like Thelonious Monk, he says, Vonnegut was a master of his art form who often ignored its conventions.
“They were both brilliantly intelligent craftsmen,” Yeager says. “Monk practiced endlessly, honed exactly what he wanted. Vonnegut wrote umpteen drafts of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’ But they both break the ‘rules,’ quote, unquote.”
Yeager’s musical mentor, longtime Milton Academy educator Bob Sinicrope, will showcase the school’s current jazz students as the opening act on Friday. For Yeager, it’s a “pay-it-forward” moment. As a Milton Academy student, some of his earliest public performances came on bills with Sinicrope’s own band at places such as Ryles Jazz Club.
The pianist, who lives in New York, will be accompanied in Framingham by a pair of fellow Berklee professors, multi-instrumentalist Mark Zaleski and bassist Fernando Huergo, as well as first-call drummer Jay Sawyer.
“One thing that was very gratifying was there was a lot of enthusiasm in the recording studio and the rehearsal process about how much fun the music was to play,” he says. “As a composer, that’s your first audience. If they like the music and they’re having fun, then it comes through on the recording.”
More so than from any philosopher or poet, Vonnegut drew his own inspiration, he liked to say, from comedians and jazz musicians. “Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.”