Talk with Tyrone

I recently sat down with pianist Tyrone Jackson at MetroFresh to chat about his latest release, Another Voyage. During a light lunch on a hot day, he talked about growing up in New Orleans, working one-on-one with Ellis Marsalis and his new life with HotShoe Records. The official coming-out party for the new CD is tomorrow at Feast Restaurant (directions). The music starts at 3:30 p.m., and the $25 admission includes a CD (if you already have a copy, bring it with you and get $10 off the door).

We hear you on the CD in a trio setting, at the head of a quintet and accompanying vocalists. Why all the different ensemble configurations?

Tyrone Jackson: Being a piano player, you find yourself in a lot of different scenarios. Most often, you find yourself in a trio setting and a solo piano setting. The solo piano setting, I wanted to explore that on a CD as well, but I just had so many other ideas for the group. The trio format for the piano player is one in which the rhythm section can really explore different harmonies. Everybody has a part to play in creating the rhythm and the groove. You can’t do that on a quintet all the time because if everybody gets too creative, then you just have a jigsaw puzzle. Accompanying vocalists is a totally different aspect of playing as well. I could have done just a trio CD, and that would have been nice, but I love playing with a quintet; I love playing with horn players.

How would you compare the city's current jazz scene to what you saw when you moved to Atlanta?

TJ: When I came here in '97, there was a very vibrant scene. You had great players playing around town — any given night you could catch somebody really good. In the daytime, if you closed your eyes, you would feel like you were in New York; at nighttime, everybody goes home. You have a big city, and you have culture, but the city shuts down because everybody’s getting ready to go to work the next day. Supporting the arts is not as important as going home and getting some sleep.

The support from the community has waned over the years. Now there’s fewer places to play. Right now, we have to be a little more creative, and then with the recession, it really changes everything. There’s a lot of great players here — there’s not a lack of talent, that’s for sure.

When I lived in New Orleans, the attraction was that you could find great music there. I don’t know if people really think they can hear great jazz in Atlanta. The connotation is that the rap scene and the hip hop scene is thriving here, but if people knew we had a thriving jazz community of musicians, I think they would come check it out."

In New Orleans, you studied with Ellis Marsalis. Tell me about that experiece.

TJ: He really loves his students. People would call to get him to do a gig, and he would say, 'I would love to do it, but I have some really great students, and I think they would be great for you.' He also gave us a key to his office. I didn’t have a CD player, and he had tons of CDs. He bought me my first CD ever. I didn’t have a lot of money, and it was just in that period where we were transitioning from cassette tapes to CDs. He bought me the CD and gave it to me and said, 'Now you’re going to have to buy a CD player because you’re going to want to know what this CD sounds like.'

One thing he said was that I should transcribe everything. Music is a language, and the first words you learn how to speak are by imitation. A child learning how to speak may say dog, and then he’ll point to a cat and say dog, and you say no, that’s a cat. As you get older and you get more fluent with the language, you might not want to say dog, you may want to be a little more eloquent and say canine. If you want to speak on another level, you might call it a dawg. That’s non-standard, but it communicates to a different kind of person. That’s how music is. You can play as sophisticated as you want to play, you can play as dirty, or you can play somewhere in between.

Everybody can’t say the same thing the same way all the time.