BROADBENT AND ALL THAT JAZZ
Pianist/composer/orchestrator Alan Broadbent sat over a morning cup of coffee, talking about the legendary alto saxophonist Charlie (Bird) Parker.
“When I hear Bird, I don’t hear music made 40 years ago,” he said of the artist who was active from the early 1940s until his death in 1955, “I hear something fresh and sophisticated. Bird had the essence. He could put the most beautiful notes in the most beautiful places.
“Bird played the same tunes over and over again during his career but they were never the same improvisations. It’s guys like him that play those lovely lines that are so swinging that get me. It’s life-affirming, giving, healthy music that deals with human feelings.”
Though Broadbent doesn’t always include Parker tunes when he performs (tonight with his quartet at At My Place and with his duo on Tuesdays this month at Linda’s), the saxophonist’s musical presence is never far from mind, for Parker serves as the pianist’s chief inspiration.
And Broadbent is as adamant as Parker was that “jazz is a real art, not a folk art. Once you have the essential element of rhythm, then you can apply all the rules of all music to it, and it remains jazz. You can still aspire to play as great a phrase as Bach wrote when you’re improvising.”
“The jazz chorus should be like a flower opening,” said the 39-year-old former New Zealander. “I don’t want to hear a long-winded statement. You should try to tell a story with a beginning and an end, with the fewest superficial notes. A 10-minute improvisation is going to be boring, unless it’s a great one--like Bird on a fantastic night.”
Broadbent also has a reverence for Bud Powell, the be-bop piano giant whose life (along with saxophonist Lester Young) was the basis for Dexter Gordon’s character in Bertrand Tavernier’s film “ ‘Round Midnight.”
“To me, Bud transcended the instrument,” he said. “There are plenty of pianists who are better than Bud, but as musicians they don’t come close. Every note of Bud’s, whether he was in good form or not, had a special intensity.”
Broadbent says the “great jazz artists have ‘style,’ ” which he sees in direct opposition to “something stylized, which is copied or contrived.”
To illustrate this idea, Broadbent paraphrased a line delivered by Gordon. “Dexter said, ‘Style is not a fruit you pick off a tree; it’s the tree itself. It’s something that grows inside you.’ And with people who are musical, that’s how it develops into a musical personality.”
Broadbent, whose first domestic trio LP, “Everything I Love” (Discovery), has just been released, started playing jazz in his teens in his native Auckland. “I began at 6 with classical studies, but when a schoolmate took me to a Dave Brubeck concert at 14, I couldn’t believe what I heard. I went home with this music reeling in my ears.”
A few years later, jazz had become the focal point of his life. “I left my homeland and my family at 18, just because I loved this music,” he said. “I was in search of the feeling that is jazz expression and (the United States) was the only place I could get it firsthand.” After he arrived in New York in 1966, he studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and privately with renowned pianist Lennie Tristano.
Broadbent--who first achieved acclaim for his composing and arranging talents with Woody Herman’s band, which earned him Grammy nominations in 1974 and 1978--sees quite a difference between working on paper and playing jazz choruses.
“In composition, you’re always being referred back to something the composer wrote, something you’ve heard before,” he said. “Improvising is hearing something you’ve never heard before. For example, Bird had his stock licks, but they were just springboards into the unknown. He would go around corners that you didn’t know were there.”