Every Note Lives

“There are days when I sit down and really practice,” says Cyrus. “I spend a great deal on developing and maintaining strength. I do various things to get a good workout.” The secret behind the rich, soulful sound of Cyrus’ playing, he says, is simply having the strength to realize the range of sounds he imagines. He has developed a basic regimen of scales, arpeggios, and Hanon exercises because he wanted more out of his playing. “There were times where I was very frustrated with how I was playing, that nothing seemed clear. There was this one piano in Washington, D.C. at a club called One Step Down. I sat down and over a two-week span, I started doing basic scales and arpeggios. I did them the way I was taught in school, with the metronome at a low tempo, starting out one octave, quarter-notes, two octaves, eighth-notes, three octaves, triplets, four octaves, sixteenth-notes. If I was breaking one note, that was no good, I had to do it until I could do it effortlessly. I did that for two weeks. And then I played that piano and it was mine. I had full control over it. And that has stuck with me.”

The lesson of hand strength is one Cyrus says he’s learned again and again, advised by masters like Dr. Billy Taylor, Tommy Flanagan, and McCoy Tyner. “I was watching McCoy warm up and play sound check. Now, there were no microphones on the piano — this was a very large hall — and there was construction going on, people hammering. And I’m sitting in the middle of the hall, and McCoy’s sitting there playing with the top down, and I heard every note as clear as day. Afterward I went up, and it was my first time meeting him. He said, ‘Hey, youngblood, you sound good! That piano was sad, wasn’t it?’ And I was flabbergasted, because from how he sounded, I never knew that that piano was not to his liking. So I just asked him, how do you do it? How do you play different pianos night after night? How do you get your sound? And he said, ‘Well youngblood, you just keep working, you keep playing, and over the course of time you develop the strength in your hands to be able to get your sound.”

Strength isn’t about lots of pyrotechnics and fast scales, Cyrus says, it’s about realizing the range of the piano as an instrument. “Strength doesn’t mean simply playing like a wild person. It’s very easy to go dat-dat-dat-dat-dat and sound like you’re shooting shrapnel, and there are times for that. But you want to have the flexibility to be firm when necessary, but then very delicate. You have to have a certain amount of strength to develop this range so that when you make your attack, you can have different kinds of effects, how well can you control the hammer striking the string. It’s very easy just to go whack and have it go whang! But to really touch it ever so lightly that you hear almost like a bell tone? It’s like the soft triangle. You can take the metal stick and go whack and go baing. But can you just lightly touch it and go bing?”

An evening with him on the keys is enough to convince you he’s found what he’s looking for. Even when he’s comping softly in the background, each chord and individual note has a depth of sound. “I may be biased being that I’ve been playing the piano for 40 years,” he says. “That’s a love affair that’s really stood the test of time.” It’s hard not to love the piano a little more, too, listening to the results. His versatility as a pianist could convince you you’re listening to more than just a piano. Maybe that’s why he’s working on something most of us would consider impossible on an acoustic piano: bending pitch.

“I think about a lot of different instruments, like guitars, like a Stratocaster, to a rhythm guitar and how sometimes you slide into a chord,” says Cyrus. He has had stints on saxophone, brass instruments, and a little bit of guitar, so why not apply this to his favorite instrument? “Now I don’t have a pitch bend on an acoustic piano, you know, no whammy bar, but the question is how do you do that? How do you make that happen?” The answer to which Cyrus returns is strength. “It takes full hand strength, not just from your thumb to third finger. You have to work on your touch to the point where each note can be intact in a few milliseconds. Because of the basic setup and the logic of the piano, there’s going to be hammers striking. But if I strike one note forte but then the other notes differ in dynamic, hopefully it can create that ooooooohhhh. The more of a dynamic range you can develop, the more opportunities to develop a particular sound you have.”

On his new album, Genuine Chestnut, his first for Telarc, Cyrus is bending more than just pitch. His far-reaching experience comes across, from gospel to an easygoing jazz that tells the story of his predecessors while remaining personal and original. “I feel as if I should be able to draw from everything I experience. That’s what this new record is about,” Cyrus explains. But there’s something more, too: extra seasoning that becomes clearer on repeated listening. “If you dare to dig inside that record, you’ll find that there’s a different logic going on,” says Cyrus. Conventions of arrangement are mixed up, music flows fluidly from one style to another, forms get subtly but cleverly melded. You can look at details like “El Numero Tres,” in which sections are repeated three times instead of two, or the complete rethinking of the Bread ballad “If” that miraculously turns on a dime from bittersweet to mischievously sexy. (For “If,” perhaps Cyrus is channeling the spirit of his younger self: He played the song for the wedding of a ninth-grade English teacher on which he had a painfully strong crush, a story he tells the crowd at Dizzy’s.) Cyrus likes to talk about his formal inventions, but the freshness of his playing ultimately goes beyond that: Even on the occasional straight-ahead track “Mason Dixon Line,” his playing is spontaneous, not calculated.

You can thank Betty Carter as a “pivotal influence,” says Cyrus. “She was the one who planted the seed in me to always try something different. I remember playing a song one night opening for her to come on. And she got very upset, because I played it just like the recording. And she said, ‘I heard that 40 years ago. I know what that is. Why are you going to play it? I don’t need to hear that. Play something new. If you have to play the song, figure out a different way to approach it.’”

That difference is always present, whether the tune is gospel, bebop, or ballad. “If I’m going to play a song, I have to figure out how it relates to me,” Cyrus says. He takes a critical tone when referring to the “jazz police,” those who would bind players slavishly to transcriptions of older music. “We would still be singing Gregorian chants,” he says. “I don’t see myself playing bebop licks 24/7. I didn’t come up that way. I have no problem with transcription, I do it myself. But my preference is to look for the concept. I’m sitting listening to someone play — how am I connected to that?”

The more you listen, the more apparent how beneficial feeling good can be for music. “The first thing about this record is I just want you to feel good,” he says. “There’s a lot of emotion in that record. I want people to feel good. If they’re uptight, maybe they’ll relax. If it sounds good, and it feels good, whether it’s major or minor, augmented or diminished — it’s got to feel good.” And soon you see that Cyrus’ endless practicing of each note, his focus on sound, comes from more than just a desire for technical accuracy. It’s a very personal respect for the gospel of the note.

“I have a deeper appreciation of music these days. Maybe it’s just I’m growing up a little more. Every note is important to me. Every rhythm, every harmony, every melody is important. And rather than playing the note for its rhythmic and melodic and harmonic value, there’s also an important element of life that must be in every note, every chord, every rhythm. It’s very important to me to have every note live.”