Bruce Hornsby returns to the keys in piano-centered album “Halcyon Days”

Hornsby’s current CD, “Halcyon Days,” won’t generate such diametrically opposed reactions. In fact, for fans of the CDs that preceded “Big Swing Face,” it will sound like the return of an old, familiar friend.

“This is actually the first record where every song is a piano song,” Hornsby said. “I know that sounds odd, but … I’ve always had one or two accordion songs or electric piano, Wurlitzer or just synthesizer songs. This is the first time where I’ve made a record where every song is about the piano.”

Read the full interview and review: Hornsby back at the keys

Tim Lyddon moves to Houston

Pianist Tim Lyddon has moved to Houston from New York confident that he’ll find a jazz audience here, or help create one.

Read the full interview and profile: Pianist seizes a jazz opportunity

Interview with jazz pianist Fred Hersch

Jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch, once described as “a poet of a pianist,” has been gradually erasing the barriers between classical and jazz traditions.

A Cincinnati native who began playing the piano at 4, Hersch worked as a sideman in the 1980s with the likes of Art Farmer and Stan Getz, then went on to record more than 20 albums as a solo artist and bandleader, receiving two Grammy nominations for best jazz instrumental and, in 2003, a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition. His two most recent releases, “Leaves of Grass,” settings of Walt Whitman poems, and “Haunted Heart,” a collaboration with soprano Ren?©e Fleming, have been widely admired.

Hersch spoke recently from his home in New York City about his music and about the fact that he has become, in his words, “the poster person in the jazz community for gay issues.”

Questions posed include:

• Does your writing concert music give your jazz playing a little more structure?
• You appeared on a panel in New York in 2002 with Gary Burton and Andy Bey on a subject seldom discussed, homosexuality and jazz. Why do you think there are so few gay jazz musicians? Or are they simply keeping it quiet?
• When you’ve done solo piano for a while, is it a relief to get back to the trio or does the trio then seem confining?

Read the full interview: Jazz: An interview with pianist Fred Hersch

Non-conventional pianist plays toy pianos

Margaret Leng Tan is probably the only woman to make a living from playing the toy piano - a miniature version of the ‘real’ piano - and receives accolades and high volumes of album sales.

She’s also the first woman to graduate from New York’s elite Juilliard Music School in classical piano, so her change in choice of instrument may seem a little strange.

She draws much of her inspiration from the musician John Cage; both have a fascination in altering the sounds made in ordinary pianos by placing foreign objects in and between the strings.

“The prepared piano was an invention of John Cage’s where he inserted various objects between the strings of grand pianos like bolts, screws, pieces of rubber, bamboo, felt. The objects functioned as mutes which completely transformed the sound characteristics of the piano. It gave the piano a completely different (sound) range, a whole wealth of sonic possibilities came about by inserting the objects between the strings,” she says. “The whole point of it was to create a percussion orchestra under a single player and he really did succeed.”

Her concerts feature a choreography of piano manipulation and playing, and now the toy piano:

She travels with her two “best” toy pianos, an upright and a custom-made toy grand, when she does overseas concert dates.

Her enthusiasm for them is plain and she credits her toy piano playing with helping her improve her “big” piano skills.

“I have really finely honed my skills and when I play the adult piano it is an unexpected bonus that my control is so finely honed, I can do anything. I still feel I haven’t reached the limits because there are no limits, there are no rules, the sky is the limit, the only limit is your imagination and how daring you are willing to be.”

“I’m very privileged to be able to make a living by that which obsesses me,” says the toy piano player.

Read the full article: The non-conventional pianist

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