Taylor began studying the piano at age four, shortly after cancer took the life of his 17-year-old sister Shannon, a talented jazz and rock pianist in her own right. He progressed in true child prodigy form, opening for David Benoit at eight, opening for Diana Krall and Al Jarreau at twelve, and sitting in with Dave Brubeck at thirteen. “Taylor is the most amazing talent I’ve come across,” Dave said afterwards. “Remember him.”
Thoughtful, open-minded, and wise beyond his years, Taylor met with us at the Jazz School in Berkeley, California, shortly after a killer showcase gig at San Francisco’s Dragon Bar.
Onstage, I saw you manipulating the inside of the piano while you were playing.
I don’t pluck strings often, but I do put my hand over the strings so the sound of the note will be muted. It forms an interesting texture. If you press harder, it’s more of a rhythmic attack. If you angle your hand just right, you can get to some of the overtones. If you hold down the sustain pedal, hitting one note will activate other tones. I’ll hold down four notes, like C, G, C, and D in the lower register then play in the higher register [plays a short melody] just to activate those lower strings as well.
Why do you use the inside of the piano?
There’s so much you can do with 88 keys, so it’s hard to argue that the piano’s a limiting instrument. I’ve heard Keith Jarrett say that when he plays, when he goes into those convulsions, it’s because it’s a musical wrestling match, where he wants the instrument to play as if it’s a singer. To do that, he feels like he’s got to help it along. The piano is limiting in the sense that you’ve only got those twelve notes, and to get to deeper subtleties, it takes controlling the pedals, recognizing different qualities in different registers, or affecting the strings.
I’ve spent a lot of time practicing different ways of using my touch. If I’m playing a bunch of chords, I’ll try to bring out the top note in the voicing [plays a series of chords, emphasizing the top note of each], then maybe a middle voice. [Plays another series, emphasizing middle voices.] It becomes so tempting to rely on your strongest fingers to really bring out the melody, so I find ways to do that with my other fingers, or to emphasize inner voices that create counterpoint and relate to each other.
When you bring out inner voices in a thick right-hand chord, are you using those voices specifically to create melodies?
If I’m moving chords around and improvising chordally, a lot of times, the motion and direction of where I’m going is controlled by the inner voices. They are little sub-melodies, in a sense. Out of a big nebulous blob of chords, one part will attach itself to something else, then I’ll find some note I’ve just played is a common tone between one chord and another chord I could move to. Basically, what drives my different harmonies around is those common tones.
Are you speaking in the context of free improvisation, or playing over changes?
You can do it either way. If you’re just improvising an intro of a tune or an ending, then obviously it‘s more of a free improv context. If I’m playing a tune, a lot of times I use a similar context to move chords around. I don’t like to jump from really high to really low. It feels less efficient that way, and you’re able to move harmonies around better when you can just find an inversion or voicing for the next chord that’s close to the one you just played.
You have some really interesting countermovement going on in “Giant Steps.”
I’ve been influenced by people like Dave Brubeck, who often plays with the melody going up but the chords going down. [Plays a grand, Brubeck-esque phrase with the right-hand melody ascending and the left-hand chordal accompaniment descending.] He’ll make any note work over any chord. A great piece of advice Nicholas Payton told me once was that each time he plays a note, it’s part of a chord. For him everything is an extension, and his solos become all different extensions of some chord. When you think about it, improvising over changes is just forming a melody where every note ends up being some form of extension. Even if you’re not trying to make it that way, that’s how it turns out. It’s an interesting way of thinking, and it changes the way you conceptualize and play.
It feels like more of a vertical approach than a horizontal one.
Exactly. You can think about soloing horizontally, like in terms of lines and creating an actual melody, but you can also create great melodies when you’re thinking vertically. When you look at horn players, they can definitely go either way. You hear ’Trane take a long solo that might be on an augmented chord, and a lot of the solo is just arpeggiation of different augmented elements and the whole tone scale. It’s totally vertical, in the sense that he’s staying in that same zone, and he’s not necessarily using passing tones. That’s one of the great things about ’Trane’s playing. He could use passing tones if he felt like it, but he didn’t always feel they were necessary.
It’s inspiring to listen to people who can clearly switch between thinking vertically and horizontally. As a pianist, man, it’s hard not to let what you’re doing be controlled by what you’re seeing, or by what fits the hand. That’s one of the biggest challenges as a pianist, period — to do something not because it’s easy, but because you’re truly hearing those notes. You can hear musicians who do. Two of my favorite pianists are Aaron Parks [award winner in the 2006 Thelonius Monk Competition; see Jan. ’07 for the story] and the stuff he does is so deliberate. When he plays passing tones, they intentionally lead to something.
The topography of the piano does make some things much easier to play than others. How do you get around that? How do you get the distance between your head and hands to be as minimal as possible?
When I’m practicing, whether I’m practicing for half an hour or an hour-and-a-half, I try to get the most out of it by giving myself different challenges. I’ll try not to do the same exercise for more than a week in a row without putting a new hitch in it. One thing that strengthens weaker fingers is to accent different notes when you’re doing scales. If you’re taking the major scale, first accent every other note, then accent every third note, then every fourth one. Then the ring finger, which is like the stupid little brother of the rest — if I find that I have to turn on a dime on that finger during a solo, by shedding like that, I know I have the strength to propel through it.
Scales are great for technique and the ease of getting from point A to point B, but I think some people put too much emphasis on them. It can lead you to have a tendency towards a really linear approach. I like to practice ways to leave a lot of space within the notes. If you leave space, it lets notes in between become more cutting. The same thing is true with voicings. I try to take out redundancies. If you have the same note playing in both hands, most often it’s not going to be as strong as if you’re not doubling notes.
Onstage you played a Nord Electro 2, as well as an acoustic piano. Is the Nord the only non-acoustic piano instrument you use?
Within a performing context, yeah, unless there’s no piano there. I sometimes use the Yamaha Motif to put under the Nord for some extra sounds. It depends on the stage and setting. Yamaha’s sounds are so incredibly consistent, and they also produce stuff that really sounds realistic. I have a Motif at home, but I use Nords to play either on top of the piano or to the right. The Electro 2 has such a slamming Rhodes sound. You can tweak it to no end. Organ too, though I don’t usually incorporate it. There are so many beautiful subtleties and so many masters of the organ out there, for me to try to touch that, I’d want to wait until I was more prepared. You listen to people like Larry Goldings or Joey DeFrancesco — it’d be years before I was at that level.
How do you approach using the Nord?
I don’t like to get too gimmicky. The Nord has great effects like the ring modulator and overdrive, and you feel like you want to bust it all out at once. But if you wait for it, then only bust it out for a second, it’ll be so much more powerful. It’s like a whole string of swear words. [Laughs.] Eventually, they’re going to be meaningless, but if someone yells out of nowhere, “Hey man, f**k you!” that’s going to stand out more. Musically, in any situation, improvising in particular, busting out everything at once has no meaning. Especially with effects, I try to think, why am I playing with this? I like to treat it as more than fun, to really integrate it in the music.
There’s a school of thought that says that jazz is about life experience and an expression of joy and suffering. When you hear older cats like McCoy Tyner or Hank Jones, every single note just sings — there’s so much life experience behind each one. As a very young, very talented player, what’s your take?
I’ve always felt that everything you do in the context of improvisation is a reflection on your own life, and a reflection of life in general. That’s the same reason I don’t believe in staying in a room and practicing ten hours a day. When you practice, you’re shedding the technique, but then you need to go out and live your life, do things, get your heart broken. You come back and you’re going to have tools and colors to help you express yourself. If you want your music to convey a lot of emotions and get across feelings, it’s important to go out and live a life.
I’ve had a lot of stuff happen to me with my dad and sister both dying. I’ve had to mature faster than I would have without those things happening. Having music in my life is an outlet where I can apply that maturity. Essentially, I believe you get the most happiness and you’re yourself when you live in the present. When you’re improvising, it’s the ideal, absolute example of living in the present. If you’re living in the past, you’re imitating, because you’re thinking of something you heard before, and if you’re living in the future, you’re not concentrating on what’s going on around you. To live in the present, within a musical context, it’s important to listen to everything every other musician is playing and everything you’re doing in that context, but also to lose that self-awareness and become part of a larger group and sound. That’s one of those things that attracts me to music, as opposed to anything else. It’s more than just a profession or a language.
With music, I’m truly myself in the moment. When I’m around friends or playing Xbox or whatever, I’m my totally different dorky self. [Laughs.] And that’s fine. The more confident and mature perspective comes from living in the present and playing music.
