Jon Regen

Earlier in his career, Jon made his own opportunities, booking gigs and leading groups. “I wasn’t about to sit around and wait for the phone to ring,” he says. But the gig that really got Jon going was backing bassist Kyle Eastwood. “He took me around the world,” he says. “I saw I could make a living playing music. I saw that I could really do this.” Quickly establishing himself as one of the rising jazz pianists on the scene, he then toured for three years with the legendary Jimmy Scott, an experience Jon calls “the greatest honor of my life.”

He was, however, a restless sideman. “Sometimes you don’t know what you want, but you know what you don’t want,” says Jon, who had witnessed Jimmy Scott masterfully expressing the songs of a much older generation. That got him thinking: “What if I do a night of Jon Regen? On my next project I’m going to have to dig deeper.”

He dug away indeed, and salvation came not as a reinvention, but a rededication — an affirmation of the power of vocal pop music, and the lyrical gravitas that the popular song form offers. On his own gigs, what had first started as a cool vocal tune closing a night of blazing bebop became a whole new direction. Everything came together: The directness and economies of pop music appealed to him, and he went for it.

Let It Go reflects the immediacy and the pop sensibility of Jon’s many influences: Sting, Paul Simon, Elton John, and especially Bruce Hornsby. As Jon puts it, “Keyboardists were always the lost guy in the band. Bruce Hornsby put the piano back on the radio. He had an immediate sound of his own.” Like Hornsby, Regen has facility, hipness, and the confidence to pull it off.

Lyrically, some songs convey his experiences of life on the road or his relationships; some are “unanswered love letters to people close to me.” He says, “You play like you are. I’m a guy who’s very intense in a lot of ways, but really a hopeless romantic. For me, music is that place where I can try to make sense of what’s happening in my life. Music is the closest I’ll ever be to ‘okay.’”