Bill Charlap: The Natural by Whitney Balliett

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"He always leaves something to remember him by."

This is a reprise of one of the earliest postings to the blog and it has a special meaning for me because it is among the last of the distinguished Jazz critic and author Whitney Balliett's pieces for The New Yorker [during a career with the magazine that spanned four decades] and because his essay offers an informed overview of the first decade of pianist Bill Charlap's career.

A sort of end of a beginning and a beginning of an end.

Of course, in the the twenty years since this piece has written, Bill has gone on to great things with his trio with Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington on drums and as a member of the New York Trio with bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer Bill Stewart.

I have appended YouTube videos to the end of this piece to provide you with audio examples of music by both trios [Also included is a video of Bill's performance of Ornette Coleman's Turnaround that Whitney references in his article].

Beyond the trios, Bill has been involved in many other activities in the Jazz World since 1999, but this is our favorite venue in which to enjoy his artistry.

© -Whitney Balliett, copyright protected; all rights reserved. The New Yorker, April 19, 1999.

“There is a secret emotional center in jazz which has sustained the music since it outgrew its early melodic and rhythmic gaucheries, in the late twenties. This center, a kind of aural elixir, reveals itself when an improvised phrase or an entire solo or even a complete number catches you by surprise and sends tremors up your spine. When these lyrical bursts happen in night clubs or at concerts their lovely afterimages inevitably fade. Caught on recordings, though, they last forever.

So here, in no particular order, are some classic recorded beauties: the first twelve or so bars of Louis Armstrong’s second solo on both takes of "Some of These Days," played in a revolving half time in his low register and unlike anything else he ever recorded (Columbia; 1929); the eerie, almost surrealistic melody that Paul Gonsalves fashions on the first bridge of a "Caravan" done with Duke Ellington (Fantasy; 1962); Charlie Parker's stunning two-chorus solo on "Funky Blues," replete with an opening now-listen preaching figure, a shivering, sotto-voce run at the start of the second chorus, and a dodging, ascending climactic figure (Verve; 1952); the cluster of soft, keening notes that Joe Lovano plays near the end of "Lament for M," a dirge by Gunther Schuller written in memory of his wife for "Rushhour" (Blue Note; 1995); the Sidney de Paris-Ben Webster-Vic Dickenson-James P. Johnson-Sid Catlett "After You've Gone," certainly as close to a flawless jazz recording as exists (Blue Note; 1944); and all of the remarkable pianist Bill Charlap's "Turnaround," an Ornette Coleman blues that he fills with huge, stuttering chords and sailing-along-the-tonal-edge single-note lines (Criss Cross; 1995).

Indeed, Charlap is a lyrical repository. At thirty-two, he is the best, but least well known, of a swarm of gifted pianists who have appeared in New York in the past ten years or so. He has already filled much of the sizable space once occupied by Bill Evans, who still reverberates almost twenty years after his death. Unlike many of the younger pianists, whose tastes tend to be parochial, Charlap has absorbed every pianist worth listening to in the past fifty years, starting with Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rowles, Erroll Garner, Nat Cole, and Oscar Peterson, then moving through Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, and Bill Evans, and finishing with Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Kenny Barron. His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes - some off the beat and some behind the beat - followed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us.

Charlap has a narrow, handsome face, attentive eyes, and a direct, ready-to-laugh voice. He talks fast, and when he talks about his music he gradually accelerates. Here is what he said recently: "I don't ever remember not playing the piano. Everything was by ear at first, and I'd pick out everything I heard. When a teacher came to the house, I'd charm my way through the lesson. It was very painful and slow for me to learn to read music. The songs of Arlen, Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin were paramount in my house, so jazz is about vocalism for me. Even a drum is vocal. To me, there are three steps in improvisation. The first involves the player's concentration, his heavy thinking. In the second, he becomes almost blasé, and he lets his fingers do the walking. And in the third he is detached from what he is doing. He's moving the pawns of the music, yet he has become a listener, who's, like, sitting there and watching what he's doing. From this stage, you go on to experience that supreme feeling, that omnipotent feeling at the heart of improvising."

Charlap knocks out both his musical contemporaries and his musical elders, some of whom are almost twice his age. The matchless bassist Michael Moore made a tight duo album with Charlap in 1995 (Concord), and has said of him, "So many players of Bill Charlap's generation haven't digested Jimmy Rowles, maybe haven't even heard of him, one of the greatest pianists. A lot of the young piano players today take themselves so seriously that sometimes their solos turn into complete piano concertos. They eat everything on the musical table and leave nothing for anyone else. But Bill goes right through each tune to the bone. He has a great imagination, and he has lightness and humor, even the pratfall kind of humor. We played a kind of Mafia Christmas party a while back, and when the guests sang the 'Twelve Days of Christmas' Bill played something totally different behind each person. He did Stockhausen behind a guy who couldn't carry a tune, and he played the 'St. Louis Blues' behind a woman who thought she could sing."

The guitarist Gene Bertoncini is another Charlap admirer, He was part of a spectacular trio that included Charlap and the bassist Sean Smith and drew S.R.O. crowds on a 1996 jazz cruise on the S.S. Norway. (Selections from the trio's three spacious performances are available on a Chiaroscuro CD, "Gene Bertoncini with Bill Charlap and Sean Smith.") "What I admire, aside from his playing, is his incredible knowledge of songs," Bertoncini said recently. "Whenever I work with him, he'll say, 'Gene, have you heard this song from 1947, or this song from 1938?' So in that way, although he's only thirty-two, he's an old man."

Born on East Fifty-first Street, in New York, Charlap grew up in a musical and theatrical atmosphere. His mother is the singer Sandy Stewart, and his father, who died when Charlap was seven, was the songwriter Moose Charlap. Moose wrote most of the music, with Carolyn Leigh, for the Mary Martin "Peter Pan" that was on Broadway in the mid-fifties. And he wrote the music, with Eddie Lawrence, for a still lamented 1965 musical called "Kelly," which got terrific reviews in Philadelphia but was disastrously fiddled with at the last minute by its producers and closed in New York alter one night. Lawrence has said, "Moose loved to laugh, and he loved to sing. He had a gravelly, wonderful voice - a rough kind of thing, like Aznavour. When he died, we were working on a musical about Paul Gauguin." Bill Charlap went to the Town School and to the High School for Performing Arts when it was still in a dilapidated building on West Forty-sixth Street. He spent a year or two at SUNY-Purchase, and he studied classical piano, but, he says, "My classical piano was not authentic. I was speaking classical piano with a jazz accent. A teacher I had asked me why I played everything with street rhythms." Gerry Mulligan hired Charlap in the late eighties, and he has since divided his time between his own trio and random gigs abroad and with the Phil Woods Quintet.

You have to search for Charlap in New York. He did four nights at the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill, on University Place, in January, and he was at Zinno, on West Thirteenth Street, with his trio-Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington on drums-for five days, in March. The gig at the Knickerbocker was hard work. Most people go there to eat and drink and talk, and the piano is almost an afterthought. It sits on the floor hard by a low wall that separates the huge main room from the thundering bar. Charlap's first number on his third night was a medium-tempo version of Kurt Weill's "Here I'll Stay." It was full of backpedaling chords, loose, almost atonal single-note lines, and a couple of mercurial arpeggios. The din in the place was palpable, but Charlap's passion for his music was immediately clear in his playing and in his bobbing, tightly masked face, which stayed a foot or so above the keyboard. Six people near the piano clapped at the end of the tune. His next number, Gerry Mulligan's "Curtains," got eight claps, and Irving Berlin's "The Best Thing for You" got ten. Cole Porter's "All Through the Night," played at an up tempo, was the last number in the set and, when it began, a heavy, middle-aged, wool-wrapped Irish couple stood up in the bar to leave, stopped ten feet from the piano, and listened, their big Irish faces still and pleased. They clapped twice before they left, and there were twelve more claps from the main room. Charlap has said of the Knickerbocker, "It's a great place to practice when you're not working that night."

In the meantime, before Charlap's next New York gig (with Phil Woods at the Iridium, early in June, and with his trio at Zinno later in the month), find his newest CD, "All Through the Night" (Criss Cross), and listen carefully to the start of the second full chorus on Alec Wilder's "It's So Peaceful in the Country." Charlap, leaving a beautifully chorded and measured melody chorus, steps off into a handful of unevenly spaced single notes, a firm four/four rhythm underneath, and the earth suddenly moves.”

Bill Charlap - "Elevating the Great American Songbook" by Terry Teachout

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The following appeared in the December 18, 2017 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

From the standpoint of swinging Jazz pianists who also bring lyrical, sensitive and reflective overtones to their Jazz interpretations, today’s Jazz scene is blessed with a host of talented players among them: Fred Hirsch, Brad Mehldau, Aaron Goldberg, Tom Ranier, David Hazeltine, Mike LeDonne, Dado Moroni, Enrico Pieranunzi, Peter Beets, Larry Goldings, Tamir Hendelman, Larry Fuller, Joey Calderazzo, Michel Camilo, Benny Green, Eliane Elias, Christian Jacob, and many more.

To my ears, Bill Charlap has been a consistently brilliant performer who places great emphasis on finding new and different ways to express his pianism in the Great American Songbook such that these familiar melodies take on an entirely new melodicism.

Over the past three decades, I’ve always looked forward to Bill’s latest CD to hear what he’s been up to as he refashions many of my favorite songs and also introduces me to many new ones from the canon that was American popular music throughout most of the 20th century.

Here’s the distinguished Jazz author and critic Terry Teachout’s view on what makes Bill’s approach to Jazz interpretations of the Great American Songbook so unique.

“Jazz pianist Bill Charlap takes on standards and the obscure, playing with a warmly singing tone.”

-By Terry Teachout

“Will jazz ever become popular again? I claimed in this space eight years ago that “the audience for America’s great art form is withering away.” I still fear for jazz, though I also believe (as I did then) that it remains creatively vital. The problem, I argued, was that its transformation from a dance-based popular music into “a form of high art…comparable in seriousness to classical music” inevitably alienated many once-loyal listeners, who turned instead to less complex, more immediately engaging styles of pop music. The result was deftly spoofed in a “Simpsons” episode that poked fun at KJAZZ, a fictional radio station whose slogan was “152 Americans Can’t Be Wrong.”

That’s why it’s such good news that younger jazz musicians like Robert Glasper, Ethan Iverson and Kamasi Washington are integrating today’s pop-music styles into their playing, just as Miles Davis, Gary Burton and Pat Metheny assimilated rock in the ’60s and ’70s. But postmodern fusion isn’t the only way to expand the jazz audience. Jazz instrumentalists can also follow the hugely successful example of singers like Diana Krall by embracing the American songwriters of the pre-rock era, whose appeal remains undiminished to this day. That’s what Bill Charlap does — and nobody does it better.

Born in 1966, Mr. Charlap played piano for Gerry Mulligan and Phil Woods before starting his own trio in 1997. Today he’s a major name in his own right, touring constantly (he’ll be performing in Boston; Sarasota, Fla.; Tokyo; and Tucson, Ariz., in January) and cutting an album a year. “Uptown, Downtown” (Impulse ), his latest release, came out in September to universal acclaim. His admirers include Tony Bennett, who tries to poke his head into New York’s Village Vanguard and sing a song or two whenever Mr. Charlap is in residence there, and Maria Schneider, jazz’s top composer-bandleader, who once described him to me as “one of the few mainstream pianists out there who really moves me — he plays standards with such love and honesty.”

That’s Mr. Charlap’s trademark. He quarries the Great American Songbook for gems, some familiar (“The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” “There’s a Small Hotel”) and others obscure. “Uptown, Downtown,” for instance, is named after a Stephen Sondheim tune that was cut from the score of “Follies” before it opened on Broadway in 1971. He comes by his taste for standards honestly: Moose Charlap, his father, wrote the score for Jerome Robbins’s “Peter Pan.” At the same time, his jazz pedigree is impeccable, and he has an identically sharp ear for overlooked jazz originals like Jim Hall’s “Bon Ami” and Mr. Mulligan’s “Curtains.”

No matter what Mr. Charlap plays, he does so with a warmly singing tone that puts you in mind of the noted vocalists whom he likes to accompany whenever his crowded schedule permits (one of whom, Sandy Stewart, is his mother). It’s no surprise to learn that he knows the lyrics to every song in his vast repertoire. His pellucid balladry, especially at the super-slow tempos that he relishes, is nothing short of exquisite—but whenever he dives head first into an up-tempo flag-waver, he leaves you in no doubt of his ability to swing hard. And while he doesn’t flaunt his technique, Mr. Charlap uses every inch of the keyboard with miraculous facility, popping lower-than-low bass notes with his left hand in much the same way that a drummer might kick a big band into high gear with his bass drum.

Ask Mr. Charlap what piano trios of the past he admires most and he’ll likely mention the ones led by Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson. All three have left their mark on his bright, airy style, but it is the group that Mr. Jamal led from 1957 to 1962 that his own trio evokes most strongly (though never derivatively). Mr. Jamal specialized in an immediately accessible brand of supper-club jazz, mixing tried-and-true standards with jazz originals to crowd-delighting effect. Yet his uncluttered pianism was so arrestingly fresh that Miles Davis, the foremost jazz innovator of his generation, instructed his own keyboard men to “play like Ahmad.”

“The best you can do as an artist, what you ought to do, is be yourself, here and now,” Mr. Charlap once told me. “If that self is avant-garde, so be it. But maybe who you are is something else.” Well, he’s definitely something else: a user-friendly jazz master whose smart, imaginative playing gives equal pleasure to musicians and nonmusicians. After following his career closely for the past decade and a half, I now rank him as my favorite living jazz pianist—one whose well-deserved success fills me with hope for the future of the great American art form.”

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings,” a column about the arts, every other week. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

The New York Trio on Venus

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The title of this piece should read - “The New York Trio on Venus Records” - but I thought it was more fun this way .

By way of background, while ruminating on the subject of a recent theme on these pages to do with favorite Jazz recordings, I came across S’Wonderful, a 1998 recording by the Bill Charlap Trio with Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington on drums that Tetsuo Hara produced for his Tokyo-based, Venus Record label.

Since then, Bill, Peter and Kenny have continued working as the Bill Charlap Trio for the past twenty years or so recording as a unit primarily for Blue Note and more recently for Impulse! Records.

But as I dug a little deeper into the Bill Charlap stack, I was suddenly reminded of a major change that had taken place concerning “The New York Trio on Venus Records” for while the label remained the same, the personnel of The New York Trio had changed.

The “new” New York Trio now consisted of pianist Bill Charlap, bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer Bill Stewart.

Beginning in 2001 and concluding in 2007,  this New York Trio issued a new recording on Venus annually.  Here’s a complete listing:

2001 - Blues in the Night

2002 - The Things We Did Last Summer

2003 - Love You Madly

2004 - Stairway to the Stars

2005 - Begin the Beguine

2006 - Thou Swell

2007 - Always

As can be discerned from the CD titles, a consistent theme among them is that each is made up of songs selected from what has come to be known as The Great American Songbook.

Indeed, four of them  - Love You Madly,  Begin the Beguine, Thou Swell and Always are devoted to the work of a single composer: Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart and Irving Berlin, respectively.

Tetsuo Hara and his partner Shuji Kitamura have a penchant for piano-bass-drums trio recordings having produced multiple recordings by artists who shine in this setting among them the late Eddie Higgins, David Hazeltine and Steve Kuhn.

Listening to the pace of the music on these CDs, it seems to me that Tetsuo and Shuji essentially “turn the tape on” and allow the artist to record what they want in a variety of tempos and styles with the only “directive” being to clearly state the melody somewhere along the way, preferably at the outset.

The cover art for many of the Venus CDs provides Mr. Hara with a platform to indulge another of his passions - the depiction of exquisite female models, some of whom are posed quite exotically [erotically?]. Although to be fair, this is not always the case as he also uses some plain vanilla cover art primarily made-up of old time photographs.

Having parents with a broad musical background and who were also involved with the Broadway stage and variety show television may have been an influence on Bill Charlap and his long association throughout his recording career with the Great American Songbook.

If, as the late bassist, composer and bandleader, Charles Mingus asserted -“You have to improvise on something” - why not on some of the best melodies ever written?

The universal timelessness of these songs allows the listener to easily follow these familiar tunes as Bill, Jay and Bill Stewart - who is quite the melodicist notwithstanding the limitations of the drum kit - improvise new melodies over each theme.

By and large, the pace of each track is relaxed with up and medium tempos played in a “frisky” manner and ballads played in a reflective and deliberate way that give the original meaning back to the word “slow” in a Jazz context.

Each tune is thoughtfully arranged with an eye toward creating a sense of adventure for musician and listener alike: how about Blue Skies in 5/4 time?

Many of these songs have a close relationship with composers who lived in New York; some were performed as part of musicals that appeared on the city’s Broadway stages; and all three musicians are based in New York - hence the New York Trio seems particularly appropriate.

The musicianship is unsurpassed, the audio quality is first-rate and the bevy of songs collected on these 7 CDs is a bonanza of piano-bass-drums Jazz that would fast become one of the highlights of any Jazz fan’s collection.

These recordings are also remarkable because you can listen at any point and be instantly fascinated.

Charlap is a master storyteller with commanding interpretive skills.

Masterful, too, is Jay Leonhart’s uncanny ability to select just the right bass notes to determine the harmonic identity of sonorities. In other words, in his quiet way, Jay is influencing Bill’s choice of chord progressions, cadences and modalities.

Bill Stewart has drum chops to spare, but you’d never know it as “spare” is the operative word here in terms of the way he employs his awesome technique in the service of the music: never pushing or pulling but always adding a pulse and a rhythmic pattern to keep the music fresh and alive.

3 musicians + 7 CDs + 67 tracks = piano, bass and drums Jazz heaven.

If Venus is the Roman goddess of beauty and love, my guess is that you will find much to love in the beautiful music of the New York Trio on Venus Records.

The following video features the New York Trio on Duke Ellington's C-Jam Blues.