But Michel often seems to achieve the impossible. His piano trio albums — Live at the Blue Note and Rendezvous among them — are explosive and virtuosic, peppered with preternaturally fast octave runs and an unbounded creative joy. The two albums for which Michel is being recognized are equally outstanding; Spain Again features sparse and lively duets between the master pianist and flamenco guitar virtuoso Tomatito, while Spirit of the Moment marks Michel’s triumphant return to the piano trio format that made him a Latin jazz legend.
But while Michel is proud of his Dominican heritage and enthusiastically brings many South American elements to his music, don’t be fooled by the label Latin jazz pianist — in fact, his artistic scope goes far beyond. In addition to gigs producing and recording with international pop and merengue stars, Michel has spent much time recently touring the world as a symphony orchestra soloist, performing both original compositions and such popular repertoire as George Gershwin’s classic Rhapsody in Blue.
We recently caught up with Michel and his wife and manager Sandra shortly after he burned up that very piece, serving as guest soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and maestro Leonard Slatkin at the Hollywood Bowl. From the inspiration behind Spirit of the Moment to tips for strong technique, deep philosophies on performance to musical meditation, here’s what Michel had to share with us.
Spirit of the Moment
Before recording Spirit of the Moment, Michel needed to feel a certain comfort with his band, bassist Charles Flores and drummer Dafnis Prieto. “We did 42 concerts in six weeks,” he says, “and after that, the whole thing clicked and I decided we should record. We had that chemistry and that collective improvisation I was looking for. Also, I got to know what [my sidemen] could do for me, so I could be inspired to write music that would challenge them.
“The title of the album is the whole vibe of it. I wanted to do it organically. I forced myself to write music each day, one song. My first stage in creating an album is always a notepad, where I write the moods of the songs. An album has to tell a story for me and read like a book, so this album is three big chapters, and each one has four charts. Since we’re talking about spirit and spirit of the moment, it’s about the human condition and the challenges of human existence. So how do I go about it? We go to symbolism of three parts, the number three, the tri-nature of us. The first chapter is body, second is mind, third is soul.”
The number three plays deeply into Michel’s concept for Spirit of the Moment and recurs in many subtle manifestations: The album was recorded in three days, contains three ballads, was his first trio album in three years after recording three discs with other instrumentation, contains a three-section arrangement of “Giant Steps,” and so on. “There’s an inner architecture that makes things easier. You need to motivate yourself, otherwise you don’t get inspired!” he says, laughing. “It’s all games that I play, maybe subliminally, but at the end, it makes sense, and it triggers a statement.”
With the album divided into body, mind, and soul chapters, Michel meticulously chose his compositions to fit each theme. The groove ballad “Liquid Crystal,” for example, fits into the third section. “There’s bass and drums, but there’s this floating structure on top,” he explains. “I was concerned with the harmonies, inner structures, and clusters, which are as translucent as a crystal would be. And they flow, hence why it’s called ‘Liquid Crystal.’ That’s why it’s in the soul portion of the album, near the end. It serves as an exploration. I start with dark chords at the beginning, very obscure chords, and at the end we just explore the melody.
“It’s a lot of fun creating this whole process!” he continues. “I take my albums very seriously. I feel that an album is a privilege. They’re all my children. Which one is my favorite? All of them. They’re each what I’m doing at that point in my life, and represent how I work so hard to come up with something new and define myself as a musician, as a person, as a soul.”
Trio, Orchestra, and . . . Medicine
Leading a burning jazz trio is dramatically different from fronting a symphony orchestra, yet Michel executes both with polished skill and panache. “In the old world, there was a word the teachers used to use and it means air: pneuma,” says Michel. “It’s the hardest thing for a pianist to learn. That’s what I think distinguishes the classical pianist from the jazz pianist, except for the very lyrical jazz pianists like Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, and Brad Mehldau, who use a sense of space, and the space is a part of the music. We are not trained to do that. There’s something about the metronome and the groove that makes you forget to breath together. At the end of Rhapsody in Blue, I have to look at Leonard’s gestures when I try to nail that last chord. It can come out of nowhere so you have to relax and go with the flow. But once you relax, you learn to be at ease in that. It’s like fluid, like water, and it’s not tight. There’s a groove there, but it’s an elusive groove. You cannot push too hard and you cannot be the one who wants to keep it together. You have to let the train take you where it wants to go.”
Locking in with an orchestra requires Michel to pay close attention to both sight and sound. “I can feel it, but in a large space like the Hollywood Bowl, where you can hear basically half of what you in the audience hear volume-wise, I trust both my ears and my eyes,” he says. “There’s also the question of, ‘Am I hearing the right sound, or am I hearing an echo?’ I have to be sure.”
The on-stage interaction between a soloist and orchestra is only a fraction of what happens before the audience enters the concert hall. “Rehearsals are more than just playing the notes,” he says. “It’s a way to get to know each other. That’s the challenge. I’ve been to so many rehearsals with so many symphonies around the world where I’ve literally heard, ‘Who’s this guy? Can he play? Well, I heard him play jazz, but can he play with us?’ It’s a very closed society, especially if you come from the jazz world. You have to prove yourself to them big time, and they won’t give you any breaks. You can either play or you can’t play. And it’s incredible how the barriers come down.”
Michel’s early training helps him make the jump from jazz leader to orchestral soloist. “I was the youngest member of the national symphony in the Dominican Republic,” he says. “I was 16 when I was named to be a professor and became part of the symphony. All that training paid off big time. Little did I know I’d be working with orchestras later on.” In fact, despite his early talent and success, Michel wasn’t even sure he was going to pursue music professionally. “I was going to medical school as well,” he says. “I did three-and-a-half years. And I was really good! In the Dominican, to become a musician, it’s hard because they’re viewed as nonprofessionals and as bohemians, nightlife, and all that. Even though my family is two generations of musicians and composers, I’m the first one to go pro. And now there are a few more, including one of my sisters.
"For a while, I thought I should be a professional — a doctor, an architect, a lawyer. [Laughs.] The usual. But there’s something about medicine and music. They both heal, the soul and the body. It was difficult to make a decision. At that time, my teacher saw that. He gave me a great favor by naming me as part of the symphony.” And for Michel, that favor made a huge impact, helping to shape the jazz style that would soon emerge. “Being the pianist in a symphony orchestra, you have to be very strong and have a very sharp attack. In the symphony, the piano commands rhythms. That helped me develop my touch — and learn how to play with strength.”
Technique
What makes for an amazing piano performance? According to Michel, even the smallest technical adjustments can help you conjure grand results. “Play around with your bench,” he advises. “Most pianists forget you can adjust it, and a millimeter more or less means the whole world, at least for octave passages. That angle is crucial. Even last night at the Hollywood Bowl, before going out on stage, I lowered the bench ten notches. That’s quite a lot, a little more than an inch, but it paid off big time, because I had not been happy with my legato touch before the concert.
“The whole theory is, the lower you sit, the more legato you can play, and the higher you sit, the more staccato you can play. Once you know that, you have to find a happy medium between both. If you’re going to play a lot of big chords and big octaves, you sit a little higher, but the problem is you lose the other side. When the filigree comes and you have to play fast lines, those won’t come out as well, unless you hunch and cheat, in a way, to find that proper angle.”
In the October and November ’07 issues of Keyboard, self-described “banger” Billy Joel commented on how high he sits at a piano; with Michel’s insight, this makes even more sense. “He sits so high because he has a lot of power,” says Michel. “You know who was the epitome of this? Glenn Gould. He sat very low. The keyboard would be almost face level and he would even hunch on top of that, and that’s how he had an incredibly beautiful tone on the piano. And Oscar Peterson, he’s the other way around. Another factor in the equation is your size, how tall you are. Oscar sits very high, yet he was very mobile. Chucho Valdez is another one who sits very high. I think it’s because of the size of their bodies. They’re both big guys.
“Even where you sit at the bench matters,” Michel continues. “Most guys sit halfway or three-quarters back. You’re fighting your point of balance. It’s better if you sit on the front half of the bench, since that frees your legs to be creative with your pedaling.”
As Michel thundered through the double octave passages in Rhapsody in Blue at the Hollywood Bowl, the jumbo screens showed his hand and wrists hanging low off the keyboard, descending below where his fingers actually impacted the keys. “Ah, you noticed that!” he exclaims. “In the big passages, it gives you control. If you raise your wrist, you’re out of control. If you lower your wrist, you can play fast octave melodies very accurately. Usually, I like flat wrists, but for mellow passages. For octaves, I lower the wrist just a little bit. It’s much safer, especially if you’re playing a very loud passage.
Did Michel discover all of this on his own, or was it taught to him? “I have two techniques,” he says. “The one I learned in the Dominican, and the one I learned in the United States. In the Dominican Republic, some important words from my teacher were ‘dynamic tension.’ The etude he made me study forever was the Moszkowski Étude de Virtuosité No. 9 in D Minor, which is all octaves. And that’s how I acquired that crazy technique. It was up and down, up and down, and you had to find a way of playing where you wouldn’t get tired, and so you wouldn’t get any cramps. The whole thing was about not overplaying ever, so being in constant touch with your body was necessary.”
Meditation and Virtual Reality
“You can spend hours at the piano, but the best practice is playing the piece in your mind,” says Michel. “Then you are, in a way, in a virtual reality that exists in your body and your muscles remember it. When you just practice, practice, practice, you’re only using one third of your nature. There’s more to it than that — the spirit and the mind.
“I usually meditate at night,” he continues. “At one point when Sandra was speaking to me [the evening before the Hollywood Bowl concert], I didn’t answer. I was playing Rhapsody in Blue in my mind. That’s when you know you know a piece, and that assures you that you will not have a memory lapse. It’s very distracting on stage when you have a 95-piece orchestra around you making sounds. [Laughs.] On top of that, a guy up front waving his arms and people coughing in the audience.
“There are lots of distractions, and if you get nervous, you have to learn a way to relax, always, in a nanosecond, literally, before a big section comes. It feels like an eternity, but that eternity is nothing. Breathing is so important. Most pianists stop breathing when the big passage comes, and that just cramps the muscles so they end up fighting your own bodies. How do you expect your fingers to move if they don’t have enough oxygen? Maybe because I studied medicine, I can tell you these things,” he says, laughing.
During Michel’s solo breaks in Rhapsody in Blue, a tremendous amount of musical territory is covered. “There’s so much going on, but it’s only two minutes,” he says, referring to the composition’s central piano showcase section. “It feels like an eternity to play it. It’s a challenge, the line, and the clarity of thought. In a way, you’ve got to train yourself to think faster than what you’re playing.”
Michel’s meditation practice, like his study of piano, started early. “Sandra and I used to do yoga in the Dominican, very early on,” he reminisces. “We used to go at 5:30 in the morning and watch the sun come up and be at one with nature. It’s important, at-one-ment with your existence. Basically, I feel what we’re dealing with here is a universal language of the soul — that’s what music is for me. You’re dealing with emotions using the human spirit translated into the physical realm. You’re dealing with moving your audience. They can cry, they can smile, they can erupt in laughter, their hearts can race. It’s the excitement of being alive. Once you get into that, your music changes completely.”
Finding the Spirit
The deeper you get with him, the more you realize that Michel is equal parts musician and philosopher. “The hardest thing to do is stop your ego from distracting you when you perform, and that takes meditation,” he says. “Use your own personal mantra — Ohm, I am — that clears your mind, your hang-ups, your inhibitions, your self doubts. At the end of the day, there’s no bigger enemy than yourself. Your self. With my teacher, the first lesson when I came to New York was that music moves in time and space. Instead of thinking what didn’t happen in the previous bar, think about what you’re going to play in the next bar. Always have forward thinking. That’s very hard. If you miss a note, you freak out, and not only are you suffering in the moment you missed it, but in the moment you’re about to play. In a way, the self-discipline is to always think ahead, especially in jazz if you improvise, but in classical too. You have to pre-plan everything, in a way. That eternity we talked about, that nanosecond, is so crucial to a performer.” Psychological preparation isn’t all about the self, though. “What’s important is to give to your audience, to have generosity, so your ego has to stay in the dressing room. You have to go out there blank and let the music flow through you.”
To many performers, relaxing on stage is no easy task. Does Michel ever experience stage fright? “No, I feel very much at ease,” he says. “It’s my own environment, my own cocoon, and I basically think about music more than anything else. The Rhapsody in Blue concert was being taped — ‘Oh my god, this is going to be recorded for posterity!’ Even the first note, you cannot think about these things. That takes a lot of discipline, and to maintain focus is crucial.”
When performing, Michel adopts different attitudes for different genres. “With classical, you have to get as close as possible to the composer’s ideas. With jazz, it’s about you, your ideas, your life experiences, and how you communicate them. It’s not about licks. What do you want to create? What is this song about? Are you delivering it? That’s what separates the boys from the men!
“Now that way of thinking is needed more than ever,” he continues. “I go to give a master class and the first question usually is, how do you play as fast as you do? That’s the wrong question! And then I ask my students, do you enjoy what you do? Are you able to participate in it? Are you communicating? Those are the things you should go after first, and the rest should come after that. The interplay is so important, the interaction, how you surprise your fellow musicians on stage. When you practice, new licks come out, and a new language, and you keep growing it. All of a sudden, you become a spectator of your own growth and your own progress. For that, you have to prepare, you have to spend hours at the keyboard. But those hours, you need to do them so you don’t get tense on stage. Once you’re up there, if you haven’t done your homework, it’s too late.”
Confidence, conviction, and clarity of purpose are equally important in Michel’s musical worldview. “If you don’t believe your own story, that you are going to play for your audience, how do you think they are going to react? You need to feel that you’re at one with your own feelings about what you’re playing, whether it’s classical, jazz, whatever. You’re a storyteller, so tell that story. You have to understand it and believe it and that’s the bottom line. And then people will react, because they will feel your inner soul coming through your playing. These are all my personal beliefs, of course,” he adds. “But I’m a firm believer.”
Stretching, Thumbs, and Mirrors
An average Michel Camilo performance is as much an athletic tour de force as it is an artistic one. And to pull off such a rigorous feat night after night, the pianist pays close attention to his body. “Stretching is very important,” says Michel. “I stretch my shoulders, neck, and wrists, and make sure everything is loose. My fingers, I stretch them both ways.” He pauses, using one hand to push the fingers of the other first down towards the palm, then away, towards the back of the hand. “Actually, my stretch exercises come from when I used to be a Tae Kwan Do practitioner. I love karate. That’s also another side, for me, of controlling your stamina. It helps, and those stretching exercises are crucial. You can be confidently fast or slow without getting tense.”
Michel recommends several sitting stretches as well. “Put your hands flat on your lower back and push to stretch your back. Last, put your hands on your lap and slowly stretch your wrists. [See Figure 1, right.] You want your wrists to feel relaxed. You want to press hard. This stretch is the best; the forearm is where most pianists get in trouble because they never stretch it out. I do it even on stage when I’m waiting. I’m not posing — I’m stretching!”[Laughs.]
Tight muscles can hurt a pianist’s technique in a slow, unnoticeable way at first. “Know yourself,” advises Michel. “If your body starts to cramp a little, it’s important to think that you’ll never just recover from it. Never let it go that way, because it’ll keep going that way. I’ve seen too many of my friends and colleagues [develop pain and cramps that inhibit their playing] and they wonder how it started. It started a long time ago — you just didn’t notice it! You know what happens if you let it go? Then you start creating your own bad technique and that’ll get you in deep trouble.”
In addition to stretching, self-awareness training can help create and maintain healthy technique. “When I was teaching at Berklee as a visiting professor, I said the best way to practice as a pianist was to put a tall mirror at the end of your keyboard,” he says. “Not too close, but just close enough so that you can always check your position sideways. The thumbs are the anchors of your hands. If you look at your thumbs and how they sit on the keyboard, it’ll tell you whether you’re doing it right or wrong. Always. If you look at your thumbs sitting comfortably on the key, you’re in the right position. People ask me sometimes, how do you play all those octaves? The first thing I think is, if the thumb is in the right place, the rest of the hand will fall in the right place, too. I play octaves with one finger — my thumb. That’s it. And even for legato, and stride piano for that matter, the thumb is the grandmaster. The conductor is right there!”
Piano Times Ten
“[Conductor] Leonard Slatkin asked me to write a piece for a festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, for ten pianos,” says Michel. “So I wrote a tango. It’s pretty involved. It lasts ten minutes and we premiered it there with him conducting.” For Michel, working with 20 fistfuls of ivory firepower wasn’t as intimidating as it might seem. “It’s just like a symphony orchestra. You have to know who’s going to do what, and the placement of the pianos on the stage is crucial. We placed two of them curve to curve with the pianists facing each other, like normal, then the other eight facing the conductor, like a big symphony orchestra just of pianos. It’s a great sound. If you milk it, it’s a hundred fingers and you can do marvelous things with it.”
A Selected Michel Camilo Discography
Spirit of the Moment (Telarc)
With Tomatito, Spain Again (Emarcy)
With the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, Rhapsody in Blue (Telarc)
Solo (Telarc)
Live at the Blue Note (Telarc)
One More Once (Columbia)
Rendezvous (Columbia)
On Fire (Epic)