Jazz Pianist Kuhn Strikes a Straight-Ahead Tone

You expect a horn player to be concerned with his tone, but a pianist? How much control can a musician exert over an instrument that relies not on nuances of wind and embouchure, but on tiny mallets striking strings?

Actually, quite a lot, according to jazz pianist Steve Kuhn, who opens four nights at Elario’s on Thursday.

“It’s the same principle as breathing, if you’re playing a horn,” Kuhn said. “If you can visualize your fingertip as your mouth, the key you’re hitting as your mouthpiece, and your fingertip is ‘blowing’ into the key, you allow the sound to come out through your fingertip so it’s not blocked anywhere in the passage.”

Sounds a little New Age, but Kuhn has refined this approach with excellent results since he first learned it as a teen-ager from his classical piano instructor, a Russian named Madame Margaret Chaloff.

“If you want a medium sound, you can visualize that coming from your shoulder,” explained Kuhn, who names Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Bill Evans and Red Garland as his favorite pianists. “You allow it to travel through your arm and wrist to your fingertip, with uninterrupted flow. To really get the true sound that a piano is capable of giving, if you allow this to happen, it works, and you can project your sound. A lot of people play with heavy tension, heavy arms, and it blocks the flow.”

Kuhn, 53, has managed to keep his music flowing smoothly through 16 recordings as a leader, beginning with the 1965 “Three Waves” and including the excellent 1980 “Playground,” a collaboration between this under-appreciated pianist and an equally under-appreciated vocalist, Sheila Jordan.

His latest offerings are last year’s “Oceans in the Sky,” with bassist Miroslav Vitous and drummer Aldo Romano, and “Looking Back,” with bassist David Finck and drummer Lewis Nash, released earlier this year.

These two recordings present two quite different sides of Kuhn. “Oceans” finds him conjuring spare, brooding moods, partially inspired by his European band mates, a sound reminiscent of some of his earlier work for the ECM label. “Looking Back” is driving, straight-ahead jazz in a more familiar American mode.

The Euro-jazz project suits his playing. The restrained, meditation-like style of his collaborators inspires some of Kuhn’s most lyrical, inventive improvisations, and leaves him plenty of room to explore some haunting harmonic and melodic ideas that date back to his early years of classical training.

Yet Kuhn said the other album, “Looking Back,” with its unabashed swing, is more indicative of his current direction.

On “Looking Back” Kuhn works his way through a range of familiar and not-so-familiar tunes, including “Stella by Starlight,” “Will You Still Be Mine,” “Alone Together” and a pair by Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. He is effective on both slow, meandering ballads and up-tempo tunes, where his solos take witty turns reminiscent of the work of Thelonious Monk--especially when Kuhn punctuates an odd right hand phrase with an unexpected left-hand chord or single note.

When not making music, Kuhn, who is single but has a steady girlfriend, enjoys simple entertainment at his home on Long Island. He’s a crossword puzzle fiend and sports junkie--he enjoys watching baseball, basketball, football and hockey.

Some jazz players spend a significant portion of their time touring Europe or Japan, but Kuhn generally stays closer to home, with only occasional forays abroad--he toured France and Switzerland last month and will swing through Canada in the fall. Other than his visit to Elario’s, his live dates this summer are booked primarily at New York clubs.

Kuhn believes he fits somewhere in the middle of a jazz piano continuum running between the driving attack of McCoy Tyner and the quiet lyricism of Bill Evans.

“More times than not, I’m described as lyrical, but there is also the other side, swinging, hard driving, that I love to play, and I think I can do pretty well,” Kuhn said.

Early in his career, several of jazz’s masters recognized Kuhn’s budding talents.

He played with Kenny Dorham, Stan Getz and even John Coltrane in the early 1960s. It would be easy enough for Kuhn to blow his own horn over his association with Coltrane, but he is brutally frank about his shortcomings during their association.

“I played with him for four or five months in his first quartet after he left Miles (Davis),” Kuhn said. “I had just come to New York, and was fortunate enough to be working with Kenny Dorham. I had heard that Coltrane was leaving Miles and forming his own group in 1960. I’m sort of shy, but I decided I would call him. I did, then I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks. Then he called one evening and asked if I wanted to work with him at the Jazz Gallery, where he had a 16-week engagement.

“I wasn’t happy with my playing at that time. I was very, very young, trying to find myself musically, and my influences had not been assimilated. I did not know what to do with the ammunition at my disposal. He would go way out there, and I would try to go with him, to have a (musical) conversation.

“What he really wanted was a smooth carpet off of which he could spring, but he was not able to tell me this. I didn’t do the whole date. Toward the end, he got McCoy Tyner, and I understood what he wanted. McCoy laid down a nice carpet and didn’t try to go way out there.”

Kuhn joined Art Farmer’s band during the mid-’60s, and lived in Stockholm from 1967 to 1971. Today, he considers the 1960s and early 1970s his formative years, with his mature style coming together in 1974.

That was the year he recorded “Playground,” the first of several albums for the European label ECM, under the direction of producer Manfred Eicher.

“He led me down roads I hadn’t really explored much before,” Kuhn said. “The seeds were there, but starting with those records, that’s where things really began to come together. I was able to use a lot of those musical associations I had when I was growing up, but, at the same time, I was combining them with my later jazz training.”

These days, though, Kuhn considers his ECM period a relic of the past.

“I swung more toward a European influence with ECM,” Kuhn said. “From the mid-1980s on, I have been geared more towards straight-ahead playing, utilizing a more or less traditional song form. I’m leaning more toward other people’s music, where, with ECM, I used to do 100% originals. I’ve come back to a lot of the music I listened to as baby, and in my teens. In a way, I’ve come full circle.”

* At Elario’s, Kuhn will be joined by San Diegans Jim Plank on drums and Bob Magnusson on bass. Shows are at 8:30 and 10:30 each night. Tickets are $5 Thursday and Sunday, $7.50 Friday and Saturday.