Sweet romance: Christian Sands wants you to fall in love with jazz

Source: The Santa Fe New MexicanAug.self storage 30–When drummer Ulysses Owens Jr.’s quartet appeared in Santa Fe in May 2012, the pre-gig buzz was all about the group’s bassist, Christian McBride. The chance to see McBride, one of the jazz world’s leading figures, playing as a sideman in an intimate, club-sized room was a rare opportunity outside of New York City. ?But the buzz after the performance was all about the group’s pianist, ?Christian Sands. Sands stole the show, working a mix of styles ranging from the most sophisticated hard-bop to ragtime into his play. A crowd surrounded him after the performance, as if wanting to rub elbows with someone they could later tell their jazz-loving grandchildren they’d heard well before he became a star. Even then, it might have been too late. Sands had famously played a duet with the great Oscar Peterson at the 2006 Salute to Jazz as part of that year’s Grammy festivities. He was 16. It was thought that Peterson, who had suffered a stroke, had retired from playing. But the evening’s festivities and the lure of a young, ?skilled musician sitting across from him was too much a temptation.”I’d sent in an audition tape to appear in the [Grammy] band,” Sands said in a phone call from his Connecticut home, “and they were honoring Oscar and Barry Harris and Hank Jones. Hank and Barry played with the big band after receiving their awards, but Oscar wasn’t scheduled to play. [Pianist] Yuma Sung and I were supposed to play a couple of Oscar’s tunes. But as I started to play all this applause and ruckus breaks out, and I’m young, sitting there thinking, They must like me. And I look up, and there’s Oscar standing up out of his wheelchair and sitting down at the piano and joining in. We must have played that blues for 15 minutes or so.” The event, documented on YouTube, shows Sands graciously paying the jazz ?master deference. But he also plays up a storm in something of Peterson’s style when ?given his turn.Sands’ ear and ability with a whole range of styles is what makes the still-young pianist so unusual. As a member of McBride’s trio and Inside Straight ensemble, he has an international platform for displaying his talents. Listening to his solo on “Hallelujah Time” on the McBride trio’s new Out Here recording, one can’t help but be taken by Sands’ enthusiasm or the way he swirls Latin, gospel, funk, and ragtime into a single improvisation. Unlike so many emerging musicians who employ a discretely contemporary style at the keys to the exclusion of everything else, Sands seems to embrace the entire history of jazz piano and beyond. Music lovers will get a chance to hear Sands on his own terms when he gives a solo concert at the Den (rechristened “The Blackhawk” for the event) on Friday, Aug. 30.He credits his mentor, the pianist and jazz scholar Billy Taylor, with instilling in him an interest in stride piano and encouraging him to apply it to his evolving style. Taylor, who did a long-running music segment on TV’s CBS Sunday Morning and died in 2010, cited Sands in his autobiography published earlier this year as a reason to have hope for the future of jazz. “If anyone has any doubts about the reservoir of talent among our youth, look at Christian Sands. … He not only has the work ethic and the technique, but he understands and communicates the language of jazz both in his playing and in his very articulate speaking.” Sands met the pianist when he attended Taylor’s Jazz in July camp at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “I was 14 when my piano teacher at the time told me about the program and told my parents you really should put him in there with Dr. Taylor. I didn’t even know who he was. But when I got to the camp, he just kind of took to me, took me under his wing. It was unbelievable just watching him work, how he taught. His tutelage was more of an organic approach, ‘watch me do this, now you do it.’ It was amazing, and I really loved the man.”Sands claims he started to learn to play the piano about the time he learned to walk. “We had a friend of the family, and the story goes — I don’t remember, ?of course; I was too young —迷你倉that I was the only child she’d let play her piano. She’d put me in her lap and let me tinker around with the keys.” He started lessons at “3 or 4” and was playing student transcriptions of Chopin, Mozart, and Beethoven by the time he was 5. At home, he was exposed to all types of music. “We always had a lot of R & B playing around the house, the Temptations, lots of Motown stuff, and a lot of classical music. My mom was into jazz, so I got to hear a lot of that. My best friend was a girl from a family that listened to a lot of Latin jazz. Of course, growing up with kids from the inner city, we were listening to hip hop, Tupac, Biggie [Smalls]. There was even just a hint of country western from my mom, lots of Ray Charles, some Charley Pride.” When he was 10, Sands was invited to Dave Brubeck’s house after Brubeck’s doctor heard the young pianist play. “We played together and talked, and he asked me questions and I asked him questions. We spent the whole day together. He was very encouraging.”As a kid who was playing “cocktail gigs” while still in grade school and who wrote his first composition at 5, Sands was a prime candidate for being labeled a prodigy. “But I didn’t like the word. I’m just doing what I always do. I’m very blessed to have this gift, but I think everybody has some special gift. I just happened to find mine at a very early age. To me, it’s like breathing, natural. As long as I remember, I’ve always been around it. Even now, I have an upright piano right next to my kitchen. I can play and go right in to get something to eat and come right back to the piano.” He hasn’t taken his skill and gifts for granted, having spent the time earning a degree in jazz performance from the Manhattan School of Music. “To be effective, I need to know everything.”Sands has an interesting take on stride piano, one he said he learned from Taylor, that involves more than just the simple back-and-forth bass and harmony played by the left hand. “Stride is more than just a style. It has to do with using the whole piano; it’s a continuance of the instrument using both hands in this broad area, the whole left side of the piano. It’s like an extension of classical piano playing, because classical music uses the entire instrument. A lot of today’s [jazz] players just kind of keep the left hand doing one thing in a certain range. For me it’s important to use the whole piano, all 88 keys.”Sands spends some of his time working with Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz for Young People program. He said that when he’s talking to kids about music, he’s working on his career goal: making the audience fall in love with the music. “Go back to Miles, back to Ellington, back all the way to the beginning of the music; everyone loved it. They didn’t just like it; they were in love with it. There was this strong, emotional relationship between the audience and the art form. Today, we have a tendency to be very scientific about the music. Everything has to be advanced, very intelligent. Somewhere along the line, this divide formed between the average audience member and the artist. Players today are like, I don’t care if you like this or not; I’m doing it for me. That makes sense; I understand that. But the whole point of jazz is the connection between the music and the listener. Think of that feeling you had when you first heard Miles playing ‘My Funny Valentine.’ It was inspiring; it was very poetic. Jazz can solve the world’s problems, because it involves everything that’s needed to solve them. It’s expression, it’s feeling, it’s religion, it’s happening on the spot, in the moment. That’s what I strive for. I want you to fall in love with it again. I want you to leave feeling a certain way, so that you go home and you can sleep peacefully knowing that’s the way it is.”details–Pianist Christian Sands–6 & 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 30 (free concert for children 3:30 p.m.)–The Den, 132 W. Water St.–$55-$250; 670-6482Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) Visit The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) at .santafenewmexican.com Distributed by MCT Information Services文件倉