Keyboard Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 30) LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES Jazz piano wizard Jacky Terrasson flies solo, breaking the rules in all the right ways. by Jon Regen A SELECTED JACKY TERRASSON DISCOGRAPHY Mirror (Blue Note) A Paris (Blue Note) What It Is (Blue Note) Jacky Terrasson (Blue Note) For more on Jacky, visit www.jackyterrasson.com. 30 keyboard 03-2008 “I know it’s going to be very exciting,” New Yorkbased pianist and composer Jacky Terrasson tells me, as we listen to musical sketches for his next recording project. “I’m already feeling ‘Wow.’ I want to take this new group on the road and see how the music is gonna evolve.” Not even four months after the release of his seminal new solo record Mirror, Terrasson is firing on all cylinders, practicing Brahms and Chopin on his Steinway grand piano, touring solo across Europe and the United States, and writing for his next project, which merges computer-based grooves with angular piano lines. “I like contrasts, I like extremes,” he says. “If I were a painter, I would want to have a palette with a lot of colors. A lot of bright things, and some darker things, and some obscure things. I’m seeing music very much in images.” It was this kind of contrast that brought Terrasson to the forefront of jazz piano some 15 years ago, and has kept him there ever since. Since winning the Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition in ’93, Terrasson has released ten critically acclaimed albums as a leader, each one infusing a rare combination of history and possibility. His orchestral explorations of the standard jazz trio format have earned him legions of fans across the globe and, in many ways, have rewritten the rules of just what the pianist’s role should be in jazz. “There are some things that just work,” he tells me, sitting in his music studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Like the combination of piano, acoustic bass, and drum set. That just works. But you have to find other ways of presenting the music so it stays fresh, and interesting, and most of all, that you have fun as the performer. Because honestly, if there was a way it had to be, I would be out of here so fast. If I can’t make that moment on stage a fun and challenging experience, I’ll just quit.” Terrasson delivered a shock to the jazz establishment with his eponymous major label debut in ’94, and has continued to blur the boundaries ever since. While many of his contemporaries released tribute albums that seemed to yearn for yesterday, Terrasson paid tribute to the essence of jazz — possibility. He would take the almost-expected trio format and quickly turn it upside down, with a varied repertoire and a sense of adventure and playfulness at the keyboard. This seemingly schizophrenic approach to the piano would become a Terrasson signature. “There are probably more than two sides to my musical personality,” he says. His subsequent records confirm this exploration of the entire musical and pianistic spectrum — the deconstruction of the piano trio on Jacky Terrasson, Reach, and Alive; the expanded sonorities and compositional structures on What It Is; and the blending of innocence and intensity on A Paris and Smile. With the arrival of Mirror, his latest solo recording on Blue Note, Jacky Terrasson’s playing once again defies categorization. From the torrential downpour of running notes on Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” to the playful and harmonically adventurous ballad “Juvenile,” Terrasson meets the inherent challenges of playing solo head-on, refusing to allow the format to define just what or how he will play. An almost perfect melding of instinct and inspiration, Mirror is a career-defining moment for the 41year-old Terrasson. MIRROR, MIRROR “I’ve wanted to do this for many years,” Terrasson says of recording his first solo record. “In fact, I had been talking about it for four years before actually recording it. But it’s such a self-conscious thing. I kept postponing it, pushing it back. And also, you always think, ‘If I practice this more, in six months it will sound better.’ This kind of project forces you to get naked to an extent. At the beginning it was such a mind twister. I was going to call the record Mirror, Mirror. Finally, one day you just go in and do it.” Terrasson approached Mirror with the same orchestral sensibility of his earlier records, playing the entire piano, inside and out. “I still think the piano has so many sounds to give if you’re willing to go fetch them. That’s what the approach was. I’m trying to make this as much a musical statement as a pianistic one. At the end, I was hoping that anyone who listened could see my musical identity there. “Before recording the album, I had been doing solo concerts for about a year,” he says. “And I love it. There’s a freedom that’s not accessible anywhere else. There’s a sense of really trying to be above, of seeing the concert from beginning to end before it’s started. Giving a shape to that whole 90 minutes. Obviously, with solo, you have more control of the thread — all the dynamics, the silences. Sometimes in the middle of the third song, I’m already thinking, ‘Okay, this is going to lead-up to the last song of the concert.’ And that’s great.” Terrasson’s approach to playing solo piano challenges the limits of the instrument — he plays all over the piano, in and out of time, with a dynamic http://www.jackyterrasson.com
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