With support from a 2015 French-American Jazz Exchange grant, Aaron joined creative forces with percussionist Leon Parker to expand the sonic, communicative and expressive possibilities of the piano trio setting to include a significant role for Body Percussion and Body Rhythm techniques, both in place of and in addition to traditional drum set. This creative exploration has resulted in new works and a new trio recording to be released in 2018.
Join us for an Artist talk-back immediately following the performance.
About Aaron Goldberg
Hailed by Down Beat magazine for his “quick-witted harmonic reflexes, fluid command of line and cut-to-the-chase sense of narrative logic,” Aaron Goldberg has made his name as one of jazz’s most compelling pianists, both as a bandleader and frequent collaborator with Joshua Redman, Wynton Marsalis, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Guillermo Klein and many more. On his most recent release The Now, Goldberg reunites with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland, the virtuoso rhythm team going all the way back to his 1998 debut Turning Point. On their fifth outing together, the trio foregrounds a central truth about the art of playing jazz: that no two performances will be the same because the music is created, in Goldberg’s words, “in the dynamic plane of the present.”
“A jazz record is literally one moment in time,” Goldberg explains. “Each song captures those five minutes, and not more. This is especially counter-intuitive when you think about iconic jazz recordings like Kind of Blue, where we can all sing every solo. That record would sound totally different, we’d all be singing different solos, if it’d been recorded five minutes later or even five seconds later. That aspect of jazz is what makes it magical for me. I think every time you make an album you contribute to this illusion that jazz operates like other forms of music, where you figure out the song, you practice it, you play it a million times, then you record the definitive version. Jazz doesn’t work like that, and I felt it was time to explicitly wrestle with this in some thematic way.”
This engagement of The Aaron Goldberg Trio is funded through the French‐American Jazz Exchange Tours program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
