A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH BILL CHARLAP


I am not a fan of piano trios. I need a horn in the morning with my leftovers. Bill Charlap is a publicist's dream and a record company's perfect addition. He is a affable pianist, playing standards and selections from the American songbook. He has loyal fans, who seem to come out of the woodwork and purchase his work. He is well versed in the music he plays, its history, and translates that exceedingly well in interviews. He is just not my cup of tea. But I wanted to find out for myself what all the chit chat was about and so I sat down with Charlap and he spoke at great length of his affinity for the American song and his relationship to it, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: What is more important, the act or the knowledge?

BILL CHARLAP: I feel that you should learn with your ears first and then learn the theory. And then the theory will teach you to make the language complete.


FJ: Are there times where the theory becomes a hindrance?

BILL CHARLAP: Only if you are not listening. You know, Fred, jazz is about listening. It is about listening, not just with the people that you are playing with, but listening to yourself and listening to your own honesty and listening to what you can hear. If you can hear it, you can have it, sort of. So you don't want to sit there and think that, "Oh, this is going to work here and this is going to work here." You just don't play like that, at least I don't think that the deepest players do at all. I think that you need, it is like as you learn each new thing in life, first, you learn it and it becomes very conscious and then it slowly becomes something that you don't even think about anymore.


FJ: Who do you find were the greatest listeners of this music?

BILL CHARLAP: Well, it is pretty clear to me. I am probably not going to say anything earth-shattering here that people haven't thought of already. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Charlie Parker, Jimmy Rowles, Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Jim Hall, Johnny Mandel, Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, boy, I will just have to leave so many people out, Benny Carter, Paul Desmond, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Doug Watkins, Israel Crosby, Oscar Pettiford, Sam Jones, Ray Brown, Art Blakey, Louis Hayes, Art Taylor, Jo Jones, Philly Joe Jones, you know what I mean. All these people are people who have deep voices, the guys who contributed that you absolutely cannot avoid their contributions all were that way. They had to be. They didn't waste. Their notes always meant something. I forgot to say Sonny Rollins.


FJ: For a student of this music that yearns to contribute his verse to the idiom, with all that has already been said, how does a young player go about saying something in his or her own right?

BILL CHARLAP: First of all, you can't come at it saying, "I'm going to contribute to it." You just have to come at it humbly and honestly. It is about just trying to find out who you are and what it is you want to say about music. No one can say everything. There is always going to be someone who does something better than you and who understands something deeper than you. You have to find out what it is that you're about and to find out what you're about, you need to learn the history as best as you can first.


FJ: But jazz is about invention and originality, not about not making the same mistakes that predecessors before you made. Should jazz be a history lesson? How do you go about doing anything original by focusing on what other before you have done and done better than you?

BILL CHARLAP: Well, you can't just say that, "Well, I am just going to do my own thing and contribute." Without Teddy Wilson, there wouldn't be Bud Powell. Without Bud Powell, there wouldn't be Bill Evans. Without Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, there wouldn't be Herbie Hancock and the list goes on, Fred. And that is just how it works. Nothing major is created in a vacuum. You have to deal with the history. maybe you will contribute. Maybe you will just do something original that everybody doesn't follow. But that doesn't matter either. Or maybe you will do something that is more derivative, but it is still you, like Sonny Stitt. I don't mean that Sonny didn't play him. I just mean that we don't look at Sonny Stitt like we would look at Bird or we would look at Coltrane in terms of changing the language. But that doesn't make Sonny not valuable. So I'm just trying to say that anyone saying, "I'm just trying to do something new. I refuse to do something that has been done already." I think that is kind of jive. I think you just have to be yourself. I don't think that you can create in a vacuum. I do think after having known what the best comprehensive listening that you can have, that doesn't mean that you have to learn to play in every style, but you should know what it is that they are trying to impart and you should give everything a chance before you dismiss it. Try to get deeper and don't be just too dismissive, too fast. Finally, Fred, what you have to do is find a way to, what it is about and what all those players did was they were themselves. They weren't trying to push anything forward necessarily, even though certainly people like Monk and Dizzy and Bird were very aware that they were pushing things forward. But all they were doing was trying to be honest about the way they heard music. That is all Charlie Parker used to say. He said, "This is the music that I hear. This is the way I hear music. I am not sitting here trying to give you a new language. This is just the way I hear it." And that is what it is about. It is about being yourself. You can't worry about anything else. Hopefully, by being as comprehensive as you can dealing with history, you will be able to finally, yourself, start to shine through. I think that that is the way it works.


FJ: How much of Bill Charlap is in Bill Charlap's playing?

BILL CHARLAP: Hopefully all, Fred. There is also everybody else that I've loved is there too. And I don't just mean pianists by any means. Then there is the players, you forget about the players that I grew up with playing with who each have touched me in a very deep way or the heroes that I've grown up playing with, the singers that I've played for, all these different people, there is some lesson that I feel that I have learned from everybody. So there is hopefully all of me, all of the way that those people touched me, should come out as me. I'm not saying that everything I've done is, like I say, nothing is created in a vacuum, but hopefully, it is pretty honest as far as who I am. That is what I mean by hopefully all, that I am not standing alone. I am standing with everybody else. That is all.


FJ: And your latest release on Blue Note, Written in the Stars?

BILL CHARLAP: Yeah, well, I will put it to you this way, Fred. The record that I have just made for Blue Note is the same record that I would make for No Note. It is just, it is not made differently because it is made for a major record label. It is the same music that I would be playing. I think that for that matter, I think that Bruce (Bruce Lundvall, President of Blue Note Records) recognizes that that this is an honest reflection of where we are as a trio at this point. The music was chosen by us. It is what we do play. It is what is probably one of the most central things in my life, which is my relationship with the American popular song and the American popular songbook. It was just something I grew up with. It is just something that is in my blood in a way. Hopes for the record, I hope that people will hear it and like it. But, the truth is, Fred, and I am not being dishonest about this, but I think if you have something to say, really it is incidental what people think about it. It shouldn't really change it. You have to put it out there anyway. You have something to say, obviously, you want people to like it. Obviously, I would love the record to do well. I would love people to respond to the music. I would like people to hear it. Of course, I want that. I'm not going to tell you that I don't care. Of course I care. I think that everyone who is an artist and does something that means something to them wants to be appreciated, but that is not why it's there and that is my hope in a commercial sense, but like I said, it doesn't change or influence the record that I made. That is all.


FJ: And your trio?

BILL CHARLAP: Kenny and Peter, to me, are, well, I've got my favorite bass player and drummer in the world, of whom there are none greater. There are those who possibly are as great, but there is nobody greater to me. That is what Red Mitchell used to say about the ones that he loved, "of whom there are none greater." There are other individuals, but Kenny and Peter, Kenny, to me, and Peter, are both extensions of what I feel are the central stream of the greatest rhythm section players. In every note that Peter plays, you hear Doug Watkins. You hear Sam Jones. You hear Ron Carter. You hear Percy Heath. You hear Oscar Pettiford. You hear Paul Chambers. You hear Ray Brown. The list goes on and on. You hear all of those people, but you hear Peter's experience with them and that is, to me, the central stream of what modern bass playing is all about. In Kenny, the same thing, he is just as comprehensive in his understanding of all the little things that each major master gave to his instrument to contribute more to the language, to deepen it, to broaden it. With Kenny, he understands Jo Jones. He understands Philly Joe Jones. He understands Art Taylor, Art Blakey, Jimmy Cobb, oh, there is so many others, Max Roach.


FJ: How much of an importance should the public place on the American songbook?

BILL CHARLAP: Well, I think it doesn't have to be remembered. It is here. You think of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and you think of, "duh-duh-duh-duh." It exists. It is a mountain. You can't move it. It is almost as if Beethoven came along and uncovered it. It was always here. I imagine it was always here with things like that. The Rite of Spring, can you imagine a world that didn't have it? It is like imagining a world that doesn't have one of your children in it or one of your friends. It has always been here and the amazing thing is, is that it wasn't always here. Those creators did possibly uncover it, God maybe or something. How important is it? It is very much here to stay. It is very much a part of what the entire American popular aesthetic is all about. The thirty-two bar song, to get right to the point, it is what our language is all about. It's the way that we speak to each other, the way that everyone says that they have ninety channels on TV and you flip if you don't like what you see in five seconds. Well, American culture has always been that way, Fred. It's always been those types of things. I think that these songs, they're blueprints. You can't look at them as compositions with the same criteria that you look at European compositions. You are not talking about developmental composition in the same way. You're talking about the short form brought to its very highest, in terms of melody, harmony, and lyrics.


FJ: So the American songbook is even in its inception different than the European classical compositions.

BILL CHARLAP: Well, you are talking about a blueprint, Fred and what I mean by that is you would never hear someone perform the sheet music of "Blue Skies." You'll just never hear it (laughing). I always thought that would be very comical, to play the music of Jerome Kern or whatever and just the sheet music (laughing). You will never, ever hear it. The thing is, Fred, is that is what this music is all about. It is the real melting pot. It is America. I am not saying only Americans can play it, of course, it belongs to the world. It belongs to everybody. Nobody owns anything in art. But that is, I think, culturally where it comes from and there is more to it than that of course. You are not even talking about that many composers. If you think about all the people that want to compose, to me, there is only about six songwriters of that very, very highest upper epsilon, Mount Rushmore.


FJ: And by that you are speaking of?

BILL CHARLAP: Oh, it is pretty obvious, Fred. Harold Arlen, Gershwin, Kern, Berlin, Porter, and Richard Rodgers. Everybody else is next to me.


FJ: What about Duke Ellington?

BILL CHARLAP: I'm not saying that they are lesser. It is just that, and no pun intended, but next would be Cy Coleman, Frank Loesser, and many, many others. These are major, major writers of course. I didn't mean to say that those six are better than anybody else. I just mean to say that when you are talking about major innovators in terms of how prolific they were, how much they left, after you name about thirty songwriters or songwriting teams, you're almost finished. And think about it, Fred, that is sixty people maybe. Less because Loesser wrote his own lyrics and Berlin wrote his own and Cole Porter wrote his own. Think about how few people that is. That is lesser than a full house at the Vanguard. So you are really talking about a very high calling of these composers who did this. What I am getting at is that it is hard. It's not any less than composing a symphony. If it were than more people could do it. I remember reading a beautiful essay that Leonard Bernstein wrote and he wrote those things where he would have conversations with himself. He was the publisher and the composer. They were these mock conversations and one of them was why don't you go write a nice Gershwin tune and after a lot of bantering back and forth, it finally comes down to because I can't. It is too hard and he accounted to it very easy. But of course he was a giant and did contribute some wonderful popular song. But he was just saying what a deep craft that it is and what a gift it is for those composers that did that, but again, I am not saying that these weren't very technically profound musicians. Of course they were, but then, there is just natural ability too and all the things that you can learn in a theory book that get absolutely broken when you deal with someone like Berlin. He said that I only know that falling in love is grand and. What is that and doing there? It's a whole note (laughing). I always found that very comical that he was able to do that and make it work because if anybody else tried to do that, it would sound terrible. And it is absolutely amazing that he was able to do something like that. There are all kinds of examples of that, all throughout this music. To me, these aren't the only American writers. There are other short form writers and jazz composers that extended that way of thinking, who of course, it had a lot of blues in it. Berlin, he can just about write about anything. He is kind of amazing that way, but Arlen really has that true blues feeling. Gershwin does too, but it is a little more Jewish. The jazz writers, the guys like Monk, Kenny Dorham, and Ellington, of course, and Wayne Shorter, these are major, there are other major jazz writers, Tadd Dameron, they are extending, Bill Evans, they're extending the songs as well and the short form, either melodically or harmonically or both, or rhythmically, or structurally, but it is still the short form and it is still the blueprint. That is partically, technically, why those songs are so important. Then we get to the lyrics and these lyrics are, a lyric is not a poem. It is a lyric. It is a different thing. Making the words and the music work together in a natural way that says something fresh. The song that hasn't been said in a song before, perhaps. I think that is something that songwriters were always striving to do. I have heard people say that those songs are nothing but love songs. They are pretty much right, except for a couple of things, but pretty much they're all love songs, but the thing is, they are about all the different types of love that you can have. They are about the myriad of elation to heartbreak and everything in between. That is very adult and sophisticated. It is pretty primal too. Again, it is the balance. It is that balance on both sides to me.


FJ: Is there a greater muse than love?

BILL CHARLAP: Well, I will put it to you this way, Fred. I like music that contributes to a better world that makes things better. I am not saying that there can't be a great deal of anger in music too and that there is not a value in that or just tragedy. Penderecki's thernody for the victims of Hiroshima is just a scream and I don't mean scream like it's funny. It is pretty horrific. There is spiritual rage and struggle. A lot of the music that was made too that is very important, certainly a good deal of that exists in Coltrane's music and so there is values to all that. It is one of the great ones. It is maybe the great one for me. I would like to experience those types of adult themes and those special feelings in life more than I would want to experience, perhaps, the others, but I think that there is a place for everything. I think there is a place for everything. There has to be. Nothing can be outlawed. Everything has to be tried before you say that you don't like it. I can just say what my cup of tea is. How is that for an answer?


FJ: At the end of the day, when all is said and done, if Bill Charlap is remembered for his honesty in his playing and his music, is that enough?

BILL CHARLAP: Well (laughing), no. I hope I will be a good dad. I hope I'm a good dad (laughing). Forget about my honesty in my music. I want to be a good husband and dad.


FJ: Enough said.

BILL CHARLAP: It is lovely to be appreciated and understood and have the opportunity to express myself in the world through music. It is an incredible gift to be a musician. That is good enough. I don't need to be remembered or revered or anything else. It feels great for people to like what you do. I am not saying that I am immune to that by any means. Of course, it feels great, but I really have no control over how I am going to be remembered, either tomorrow or twenty years from now. All I can do is try and do what I do. I am just going day to day and trying to keep it real.


Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and believes Godfather I and II are one movie. Comments?  Email Fred.