This week in interviews-with-people-who-know-more-than-me-land, we have jazz pianist and composer Dan Tepfer on blowing off astrophysics for music, putting on concerts that actually speak to young people, and the difference between coconuts and peaches.
Dan Tepfer is a New York-based jazz pianist and composer. Originally
from Paris, France, he earned a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from
the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, before settling down in the
United States. Today he divides his time between sideman work with some
of the great jazz musicians of our time (Lee Konitz, Charles McPherson,
Paul Motian, Ralph Towner to name a few), and a busy touring schedule
with his own projects. One of his compositions was recently premiered
at Carnegie Hall.
How is your time playing with your trio, playing solo, and supporting other artists divided?
You know, I was talking to a friend the other day who has been following my music for quite a while. He mentioned that he had gone on my website a few days before and realized that my gig listing went back to February 2004. It’s fun for me to think of your question while going through this list of five years’ worth of gigs. They are of all shapes and sizes, from trio gigs in hotel lounges to soloist gigs at Carnegie Hall. In my mind, I feel like most of my energy is devoted to my projects as a leader — mainly the trio and solo gigs, but the truth is, in looking at these listings, that a good number of my performances are as a sideman. It’s a great way to learn (especially when you’re lucky enough to be playing alongside one of the great old sages of the music). It comes in waves, too — in the last year I’ve been doing a disproportionate amount of solo playing, for instance, and my trio gigs have taken a little bit of a back seat to that. But overall, it’s really pretty even, really. keeping different artistic interests in balance is one of the keys to working well, I think.
Do you actually have an undergraduate degree in astrophysics? Normally, I would say having a degree in something besides music makes you more accessible to audiences but..I’m not quite sure sure I’m going to say that about astrophysics. Generally speaking, though, do you think having had a “normal” college experience makes you relatable to the masses?
I don’t really think so much in terms of being ‘relatable to the masses’. First of all, there are no longer any masses in jazz (are there masses in classical?). The audience that we’re playing to is a self-selected, small segment of available listeners. In many ways I regret the loss of the kind of statistical truth that results from the presence of huge audiences, but at the same time the current situation means that nobody has any illusions about ‘going commercial’. So I figure that if I can get to a place where I feel that I am being productive and creative in a way that’s as true to myself as possible, then the audience will follow. You know the age-old question: “do you play for yourself or for the audience?”. Obviously we all ultimately want to reach the audience, but for me, at least, the truest path to that is to make music for myself (i.e. that I personally think is good), then sit back and hope that the audience will find some merit in it. So from that standpoint, I’m thankful that I studied something else than music for my undergrad (although the truth is that I still spent more time on music than on astrophysics during that time…). It gave me the opportunity to clearly make the choice of a career in music, to say ‘this is what i want’. And that kind of clarity brings perspective, which I think is essential to finding your voice as an artist. so in a roundabout way, yes, I think having studied something else makes me a deeper artist, and as a result should hopefully make more people dig my music!
What is the most gratifying thing an audience member has ever said to you after a concert?
The most gratifying thing, to me, is when someone has clearly had a very special experience, not one they where necessarily expecting to have. When they’re still a little bewildered by what just happened; when you get the clear feeling that this was something different for them, something special. I’ve been doing a number of solo concerts in the past year where I play completely free, and when it goes well, people talk about having been taken on a long journey through many different terrains and environments. people come up with images, sometimes pretty whacky ones. When my music triggers people’s imaginations this way, when they’re clearly so engaged, it makes me very happy.
This has been studied and written about ad nauseum by musicologists, but I’m still going to ask: how do American and international audiences receive jazz differently?
This is one of my favorite topics, actually. I grew up in France, lived in the UK for three years and have been in the US for five, so I’ve always been fascinated by cultural differences between nationalities: how people live, how they think, how they love, how they listen to music. There’s an image that I came across in a book about the cultural differences between Americans and the French, and it goes like this: the French are like a coconut, with a very hard shell, but once you’ve broken through, everything is liquid and easy. Americans are like a peach: a soft exterior, easy to bite into, nice and juicy, but a hard core that is extremely difficult to penetrate. In other words, the French don’t make friends easily, but when they do, it’s for life. Americans make friends easily and are quickly open and giving, but they might be gone tomorrow.
I see this reflected in the way Americans and Europeans listen to music. fundamentally, Europeans (a caveat — it’s dangerous to generalize about ‘Europeans’; but as Victor Hugo said, all generalizations are false, including the one that says that all generalizations are false) are always looking for transcendence in art, that moment when the hard shell is broken into and all is released. They’re very passionate about that and will listen hard to see if the music can take them there. Americans don’t seem to be looking for that as much. There’s an emphasis on craft, on doing things the right way (viz. Hollywood movies, crafted to perfection), but people don’t seem to hunger so much for a deep understanding of the message, the transformative element (see how often those same Hollywood movies are substance-free). I mean, how do you feel when you’ve heard a fantastic performance of Shostakovich 5, arguably one of the most powerful and meaningful orchestral works of the last century, and at the end of it, the audience’s standing ovation looks and feels like a way of getting out of their seats and home quicker? My subjective feeling is that Americans don’t let the music penetrate them as much as they could; perhaps they’re afraid of letting themselves be vulnerable.
This carries over to how audiences specifically receive jazz: Americans are super-knowledgeable about the history of the art form, and are discriminating judges of a musician’s craft. Europeans, as a rule, don’t really care about whether something is ‘correct’ or not, and are more interested in their subjective emotional experience, the freshness and newness that they perceive in the music (does this leave them more at risk of being taken by charlatans? perhaps). One of my most rewarding trips was one I took through the Republic of Georgia last year, before the summer war with Russia. I was touring, solo, as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department. The Georgians make the most passionate audiences I’ve encountered. A country that has been invaded countless times over the last thousand years, they’ve come to see art as one of the rare elements of stability in their lives: everything else can go, it stays. These people give themselves entirely to the performance. Across the border in Azerbaijan, where oil money flows, people are far more circumspect. And in Japan, where I’ve had the pleasure of touring a couple of times now, people are passionate and knowledgeable when you talk to them, but they’re extremely shy of expressing that enthusiasm in the hall; whooping and hollering is very rare. Humans: so similar, so different. It’s really amazing.
I love playing for all these different audiences, using their energies as creative stimuli — almost like playing different pianos: they shape you in a way, and as a result they can sometimes bring things out of you that you didn’t even know were there.
How do you distinguish between self-promoting to your peers (that is, networking with presenters and other artists to get gigs) and self-promoting to the outside world (to get audience
s to your concerts)? Can it all be lumped together as general “profile-building” or are there subtle (and not-so-subtle) distinctions? Would a glowing New York Times review of a solo show, for example, solve all problems?
Reviews are nice, and one from the NYT would of course help generate interest; but I know several musicians who’ve had incredibly laudatory pieces written about them in the Times and who still will tell you that they can’t get a gig. I try not to think so much about self-promotion, and more about simply representing myself as clearly as I can. As I was saying before, my main goal is to be as productive and creative in my work as possible. Then it’s just a question of communicating that to the outside world as well as I can. The difference between doing that with your peers and with your audience is that in the first case, you’re establishing one-to-one relationships, so it’s much more of a personal thing — do we like each other? Do we work well together? In the second, it’s more one-sided: I put the material out, and people are free to take it or leave it. I hear from a number of them, but mostly it’s just the ones who choose to ‘take it’, who like what I do.
Do you market yourself differently when you play solo versus when you play with your trio or a group of musicians? When you play with a group, are all the members asked to e mail out to their own lists about performances, post on their own Facebook/MySpace pages, etc., or is it really up to the featured artist/band leader?
The implicit protocol is that getting the word out is mostly up to the band leader. I would say that I do exactly the same thing when I’m playing solo or trio — as long as I’m the leader, I’ll do what I can to get people to come hear the music. sidemen aren’t expected to send out emails about their performances, but it does happen. I’ve been playing with Jorge Roeder and Richie Barshay, the guys in my trio, for five years now, and we’re such a tight-knit band that they’ll let people know about our shows, too. Pretty much everybody posts what shows they have coming up on their website (or Myspace / Facebook), be it as a sideman or as a leader, but I’m not sure how much good that does. People go to shows when they get the feeling that something special is going to happen, and that’s something that can only be expressed by going out of your way to tell people to come — which isn’t the case with a simple gig listing on a website.
What has been the most effective marketing of a concert you’ve been involved with?
One of the most surprising things I’ve had happen was a couple of years ago, on a west coast tour with my trio, when the press in Oregon, where my family is from, got the word that a “hometown boy” was doing a “homecoming tour”. Boy, they liked that! We got a ton of press on that tour, and great audiences as a result, mainly because, it seems, of the idea that this was a special event, with unique ties to Oregon. The ‘home boy makes good’ story. Never mind that I grew up in France…
Touring through the Republic of Georgia was incredible because jazz is still super-hip there. I had TV crews following me around all the time. Now that — having an entire country perceive what you’re doing as cool — is effective marketing. If only we could make that happen elsewhere!
The Hartford Courant said you pay “no attention to that overrated, yet intellectually porous wall between jazz and classical music.” Can you explain said porous wall?
Well, jazz is the result of the combination of African rhythms with Western harmony and melody. The best jazz musicians have always been extremely hungry for music from other sources. Louis Armstrong loved going to the opera. Duke Ellington talked about music not in terms of jazz or classical, but in terms of good or bad (the famous “there are two types of music” line). Charlie Parker quoted classical themes in his improvisations. And one could argue that the whole free jazz movement was really made possible by the fact that jazz musicians became aware of the music of the Viennese School and found a way to make atonality their own. Of course, there are lots of examples of this transference in the other direction, from Stravinsky, Ravel and Shostakovich’s jazz-influenced pieces to the phrasing of the right hand in certain Ligetti etudes. So, regarding the wall, porous it is.
This is all very personal — some people (and Wynton Marsalis, for example, would be a leading exponent of this view), feel that jazz is best defined in stylistic terms. It swings, it uses a certain melodic and harmonic vocabulary, it has a certain rawness and brawn, etc., and as such is substantially different from classical music. That’s never really worked for me, and I don’t think it’s how the great figures of the music thought about it, either (witness Duke’s quote above, check out the incredible freshness and originality of Ornette Coleman’s melodies, listen to Keith Jarrett’s free playing) — I think they happened to come from a certain background, which formed their aesthetics, but really, they were just reaching for music, in as pure a form as possible. To me, the defining characteristic of jazz is improvisation, and it’s mind-blowing to realize just how far the great improvisers in jazz have gone in becoming extemporaneous composers. There are great tools to be learned in the history of the music. But to me they’re just tools, and what I want to create is a music that’s as personal and contemporary as possible, so I’m open to all sources of inspiration, be it classical, jazz, or anything else.
A lot of classical music critics are former (and current, actually)
composers or musicians. Is it the same in the jazz world? If not, where
do the critics come from?
A lot of them are
former musicians, too. One example that springs to mind is Stanley Crouch, one of the preeminent jazz critics. He used to work as a jazz
drummer. What may be lacking in jazz is a body of criticism from actual
working musicians at the top of the field. You know, the way novelists
will review each other’s books. The pianist Ethan Iverson, of the band The Bad Plus, has been been doing something about that, crafting
well-written pieces on all sorts of jazz-related topics, with the
knowledge of a top-flight jazz improvisor (himself) as a resource, for
a number of years now.
In classical music, presenters and artists often complain that, while houses are full, audiences are old. One might argue that, if houses are full, perhaps we should not fret about hair color. That said, I assume there is a similar problem (” “) in jazz? If the traditional audience is aging, how concerned are artists and presenters with getting younger audiences out to concerts?
There are two problems with older audiences: clearly, if most of your audience is old, then your audience is soon going to start diminishing. But also, because of years of habit, older people can sometimes become used to a routine of concert-going where the actual routine, the fact of getting dressed up and going out, can be more important than the experience of the music. I see this happening in concert halls, especially. now, that’s certainly not true of all older audiences — I’ve had some of my warmest and most perceptive feedback from older listeners who were there for entirely the right reasons. but it’s a concern, I think.
After all, we want to be making art not because it fits into some consumeristic mold — the “I’m cool, so I’ll go hear some jazz”, or “I’m fancy, so I’ll go hear some classical” mentality — but because we feel that what we are making conveys something specific about our own existence. We want people to come because the music itself speaks to them, not because they want to be seen at a club or a concert hall. So if young people aren’t coming to classical music concerts or jazz clubs, is it because the music just doesn’t speak to them? I think that needs to be addressed.
That said, classical music is still pretty darn hip in the UK, for example. Audiences are of all ages and contemporary pieces are premiered all the time to unfeigned enthusiasm from crowds that actual care if the music is good or not. And audiences for jazz in New York City are often young, hip, super-knowledgeable, passionate about where the music is going. And all over Europe, in my experience, jazz-club crowds are pretty evenly spread, age-wise. At the festivals, you see more older people, but that may just reflect an economic reality, too. The aging-audience issue, I think, is a bigger factor in the US then elsewhere, which may reflect a lack of exposure or education (as many people would argue), but also might be due to the music itself. Is classical music really being presented in as alive a way as possible in the states? As something that is of today, not as a historical artifact? Is jazz being presented as a thriving, growing art form, or has it been shoehorned, in the eyes of the masses, into a relic of the past, played by musicians with more of a bent for academics than for passion? The thing is that in Europe, since audiences are looking for transcendence, the musicians, whether classical, jazz or pop, are still trying to give it to them. In the US, too often classical and jazz musicians seem to be trying to ‘get it right’. That works for a while, while the audience still cares if things are right or not, but the younger audience just wants it to sound good! And as the saxophonist Steve Lacy said, “there’s nothing more boring than being right”. My good friend Rob Moose recently arranged one of Bach’s French Suites for mandolin player Chris Thille’s band The Punch Brothers, and I can’t help thinking that the performance, grooving, dramatic and a little raw, definitely alive, would have made Bach happy.
My response to this “problem”, as an artist, is that we need to make music so strong, so true, that it will speak to young people, no matter what style they think they like in the first place. And there are musicians doing that, today, thank God. I actually have faith that audiences know what’s good, in the long run.