Aaron Goldberg → THE MATRIX

I CURATE

Aaron Goldberg

LABYRINTHINE PATHWAYS (BEGINNING IN BRAZIL) THROUGH THE SPRAWLING CREATIVITY OF OUR TIME ... CURATION BY THE MOST SOPHISTICATED & SUBTLE RECOMMENDATION SOFTWARE YET DEVISED → the minds of musicians, writers, filmmakers, painters, producers, architects, graphic designers ... all now — via the virtual magic of small world networking — discoverable from anywhere on the planet ▶

▶ curates 12 people/categories

(outgoing curations by: the matrix)

Who I Am & Where I Live:

Name: Aaron Goldberg
City: New York City
Country: United States

My Life

Biographical: 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 counterintuitive 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.”

In every idiomatic zone from Brazilian ballads to roaring bebop, Goldberg and the trio have a way of spontaneously sculpting every bar as it flows by, like a wave on a river. That Rogers and Harland have also spent the last few years working with master saxophonist Charles Lloyd has deepened their communication and subtlety beyond measure. With Goldberg, they revel in the lesser-explored corners of jazz repertoire, bringing wit, explosive chops and also keen understatement to bear on the music at hand.

“I met Reuben back in 1992 in Boston, when he was going to Berklee and I was going to Harvard,” Goldberg recalls. “He had just started playing upright bass. Eric I met in 1997, playing with [saxophonist] Greg Tardy. I felt an instant connection with them. There was never a feeling of having to tell them what I want or even what I want the trio to sound like. It was intuitive in the way that friendships are, or romantic relationships. It feels right and you find yourself growing, discovering things, getting somewhere new that you wouldn’t have gotten to alone. When you feel that connection, it opens a path to your subconscious — you can escape your preconceptions, the need for an agenda, and you can just let the music be.”

Goldberg became a jazz devotee in Boston during high school. After spending a year in New York City at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, he enrolled at Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude in 1996 with a concentration in Mind, Brain and Behavior. A founding member of Betty Carter’s famed and indispensable Jazz Ahead program, he continued his ascent performing in bands led by Al Foster, Freddie Hubbard, Nicholas Payton, Stefon Harris and Mark Turner among others. By the late 1990s, he was garnering wider attention, and an incessant touring schedule found him both inspired by music from around the world yet appreciative of the zen creativity that only jazz demands.

On Chico Buarque’s “Trocando em Miúdos” (roughly, “settling the small things” in Brazilian Portuguese), Goldberg and his partners reveal the sense of inner dynamism and flux that perfectly embodies the concept of The Now. “It’s a song about a couple that has broken up and they have to divide up all their common belongings,” the pianist says. “I heard it at a point when I was ending a long relationship and dealing with many of the same emotions, so I had a kind of total body experience of the song. It was a song I needed to play. In the studio was the second time we ever tried it, so it was being worked out in the moment and it has that explorative quality.”

Extending the Brazilian theme, Goldberg interprets Djavan’s “Triste Baía da Guanabara” and Toninho Horta’s “Francisca” with great lyrical and virtuosic flair. “There’s a deep Brazilian songwriting tradition, every bit as deep as our American songwriting tradition,” Goldberg says. “In the same way that our Tin Pan Alley composers were thinking equally about melody, harmony and lyrics, these Brazilian composers were also synthesizing melody, harmony, lyrics — and their best songs are pristine in all respects simultaneously.”

“Yo Yo” is a traditional Haitian song with lyrics “about a guy who’s a seller in the market,” Goldberg says. “The idea is that he always gives you more meat or more vegetables than you ask for. Everybody loves him — the women in particular love Yo Yo because he always gives them more than they bargain for. It’s a great tune for improvising, oddly related to some more familiar standards like ‘Autumn Leaves.’ Rhythmically it’s open to many approaches even though there’s something deeply African in the groove. Reuben is from St. Thomas and has a very intuitive concept of a range of Caribbean music.”

Goldberg’s lyrical waltz “The Wind In the Night” is “basically a love song, where the male character is the Wind and the female character is the Night.” The subject of “E-Land,” meanwhile, is Eric Harland himself. Goldberg offers “a sort of introduction to the world of Eric, or at least one of his realms. I wanted to design an environment for him to unleash the 'drummer' side of himself. The piece has a few different sections, we move between them, and essentially he’s at liberty to do whatever he wants.”

Goldberg’s bread-and-butter jazz vocabulary, his mastery and sense of invention on blues and standards, is second to none. On The Now, he lends Charlie Parker’s “Perhaps” a twist: the melody is played one quarter note apart in the right and left hand. Warne Marsh’s “Background Music,” on the changes of “All of Me,” is jaw-dropping in its speed, precision and unrelenting swing: the trio at full blast. “One’s a Crowd,” in another twist, uses the chord changes to Joe Henderson’s “Serenity.” “On Worlds (2006), we recorded a tune called ‘Unstablemates,’ and this is a similarly respectful de-rangement,” says Goldberg. “‘Serenity’ has a 14-bar form, while ‘One’s a Crowd’ drops a bar to 13, which alone renders it less serene. Melodically and improvisationally it aims to capture that mood when you're alone but your inner voice won't stay quiet."

“One Life,” the closing track, brings Goldberg’s friend and sometime employer Kurt Rosenwinkel on board as a guest. The eerily peaceful, almost whistling sound of Rosenwinkel’s guitar has even more impact when one learns that Goldberg wrote “One Life” at the request of a married couple who had lost their teenage daughter. “It’s impossible to capture a life in music and I’d never met their daughter in person,” he says. “But their loss moved me, and I was moved that they asked. It took a long time just to sit at the piano and believe I could write something worthy of this one Life. We learned the song and then right before we recorded it, I told Kurt [about the dedication]. I watched him process this for a few minutes, he closed his eyes and sat with it. He didn’t even know the people involved, but he internalized the purpose and urgency. It’s hard to channel your emotions to that degree of depth in the studio, and Kurt was magnificent.”

Jazz has a way of summoning that kind of spirit from musicians, and Goldberg knows exactly how to capture it, surrounding himself with kindred spirits in pursuit of the highest expression. He and the trio embody the best of what jazz can be today: the ability to speak from deep within the tradition while putting their own collaborative imprint upon it. Combined with his personal take on jazz’s intangible and viscerally uplifting heritage, this makes Goldberg just the player to share all he knows about The Now.

My Media

Website: http://aarongoldberg.com
Instagram: aarongoldbergmusic

Listen on Spotify

Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/2n12HqIagVlEPeXY4hhWUs
Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/5rLbGsIApd7zvfde9mUFgH
Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/6EcJ7bR7B5JWBxbl70eOo4
Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/2AIeX18ZJJYLhzAt7gcJl6
Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/7fuNFXQOOlUxcSJlHlAnxA

Contact Information

Management/Booking: Management & Booking:
(Except France and Spain)
Sherry McAdams
McAdams Creative Management
t: 617-642-4702
mcadamscreativemgmt.com
e: sherry@mcadamscreativemgmt.com

France:
Genevieve Peyregne
Accords Productions
62 Bis, Rue Des Rondeaux
75020 Paris - France
m: +33614814677
e: g. peyregne@accordsproductions.com

Spain:
Ivan Pivotti
Marmaduke
Plaza Dolores Fernández 1, 2º D
41009 Sevilla Spain
t: +34954065525 m: +34607432345
Skype: ivanpivotti
marmaduke.info
e: ivanpivotti@gmail.com

Publicity:
Matt Merewitz
Fully Altered Media
o: 347-384-2839
m: 215-629-6155
www.fullyaltered.com
e: matt@fullyaltered.com

Label:
Francois Zalacain / President
Bret Sjerven / Distribution & Marketing
Sunnyside Records
t: 646-519-3560
sunnysiderecords.com
e: francois@sunnysiderecords.com

Clips

Personal Evolution
By Aaron Goldberg

226 views

If You Can't Stand the Heat

Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.

But!

Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.

For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...

Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.

THE MATRIX BEGAN IN BAHIA, GROUND ZERO FOR BRAZIL'S SUN-CARONA-VIBRANT CULTURE

⇒ ...rooted in a region called the Recôncavo, analogous in Brazil to the Mississippi Delta in the United States.

IT REACHES FROM BRAZIL TO CUBA TO BROOKLYN TO BERLIN TO TOKYO TO TIMBUKTU

⇒ To wherever people want to take it...

IT IS THE NEXT-STEP EVOLUTION OF A SPECIALTY RECORD SHOP

⇒ ...opened in Salvador to showcase magisterial musicians almost completely unknown to the world...many of them living in poverty or close to it and unable to avail themselves of traditional (and costly) means of publicizing.

PRE-BRAZIL — IN NEW YORK CITY — WE "RESCUED" UNPAID ROYALTIES FOR PERFORMERS & COMPOSERS INCLUDING:

⇒ Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Led Zeppelin, Philip Glass, Mongo Santamaria, Airto Moreira, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Jim Hall, Taj Mahal, Robb Royer of Bread, Speedo & the Cadillacs, and many more! With Speedo's (Earl Carroll) amazing story (kid singing on the streetcorners of Harlem to doo-wop fame to working as a beloved school janitor) I learned (as Quincy Jones had figured out decades before) that greatness and fame are completely independent. The wave repeated here in Brazil with Raimundo Sodré, who went from zero to national fame and back to zero.

HENCE THE (so far world's only) SMALL WORLD CURATION NETWORK...

⇒ A wave of Exu's cyberwand opening pathways allowing ANY ARTIST — FAMOUS OR NOT — in ANY FIELD — in ANY PLACE in the world — to potentially be reached by ANYBODY from ANYWHERE. (Exu -- eh-SHOO -- is the Afro-Brazilian deity responsible for opening pathways)

BY WHAT WIZARDRY?

⇒ We've all heard of six degrees of separation, more properly called a small world network. Within six or so steps we can move through a chain of people knowing other people to just about anybody on the planet.

SIMPLY CHANGE "KNOW" TO "RECOMMEND"

⇒ In exactly the same way — although the number of steps might vary — we can move through chains of ARTISTS CURATING ARTISTS to to just about any artist on the planet.

LIKE THIS...

⇒ From Quincy Jones we access one of his protégés, stellar young Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez. From Alfredo Rodriguez we access a fabulous multinstrumentalist Alfredo plays with, Munir Hossn. Two more steps and we've reached the above-mentioned Raimundo Sodré, formerly virtually unreachable in Bahia...

Raimundo Sodré Now

Dengo

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DICTATED SILENCE

⇒ Sodré's meteoric major-label career was crushed by the Brazilian dictatorship years ago and he was forced to flee Brazil under threat of death...into a 19 year exile. He became almost impossible to find and hear, even after returning to Brazil.

*MUSIC FALLS LIKE RAIN

⇒ But now lines of everbranching interlinked recommendations rise from Bahia to form a (small world) network rounding the planet like the arboreal canopy of a vast Amazonian rainforest. When the dictatorship ground Sodré into the dust, they unwittingly planted a seed.

IS THE MATRIX AN ALTERNATE REALITY?

⇒ Only if your reality has been defined by corporate mass media. The original meaning of "matrix" is "source", from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!

DOES THE MATRIX WATCH YOU?

⇒ Zero surreptitious tracking, data mining and data brokerage per Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, et al.