Jazz pianist Marc Copland used to play the sax, but began hearing different sounds . . . and made a mid-career switch. He talks to Ray Comiskey about the poetry of the piano
A poet, according to an old quote, is someone who tries "to give to airy nothing a habitation and a name". Well, something like that, anyway, and Though you might feel inclined to quibble over "airy nothing", it's best to take it as poetic licence; poetry, after all, pursues the evanescent, the spiritual, the emotional behind the concrete, the elusive that is seldom, if ever, fully captured in any art form.
Just one hearing of jazz pianist Marc Copland's solo album, Poetic Motion, recorded for Sketch in 2001, is enough to establish that he is a poet of sound. It's not simply the album's title, nor the sleeve note, a poem by his friend, Bill Zavatsky, called "Nevertheless". Nor is it the additional quotations from Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Jacques Prévert, André Breton, Jules Supervielle, Virgil and, above all, from Dylan Thomas's great cry in the face of oblivion, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night".
Neither is it the suggestive titles of Copland's compositions, like Second Sight, Dark Territory, Bittersweet Road, Not Going Gently and Nevertheless. The real evidence is in the sounds he metaphorically sculpts from the piano. His playing, ruminative, discursive and probing, is full of odd harmonic twists, unusually-voiced chords, sudden flashes of volubility, above all the pursuit of the evocative colours of sound; his pedalling, by the way, is often exquisite.
He sounds quite unlike any other pianist that comes readily to mind, so it's not surprising that he has been hearing these musical colours in his head for a long time. What is surprising is that he began as an alto saxophonist in his native Philadelphia and was good enough to play with the likes of guitarist John Abercrombie and drummer Chico Hamilton in New York before he abandoned it and turned to the piano.
Effectively, he was gone for almost a decade, returning in the mid-1980s to gain speedy acceptance as a jazz pianist at the highest level with players like tenor saxophonist and composer Bob Belden and Abercrombie, as well as establishing a long-lasting musical relationship with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Bill Hart.
Such a mid-career switch was certainly courageous but, according to Copland, the decision was really a very easy one. "I was hearing more and more sounds and textures and colours in my head," he says. "Tunes started coming out that were in a different musical direction and didn't make sense on saxophone. And I knew I had to do something with this kind of music and those kinds of tunes, and piano seemed the best vehicle available.
"It was as if up to that time I had been wearing clothes that were all too large or too small. When I made the decision to play piano 100 per cent and go with these sounds and tunes I'd been hearing, it was as if all of a sudden someone had given me a suit that fit perfectly." His original inspiration on alto had come from the late Paul Desmond, the witty, urbane, endlessly inventive, immensely sophisticated and well-read altoist in pianist Dave Brubeck's quartet. With the switch to piano, did he find that a whole lot of different influences crept into his playing? "Absolutely," he confirms, "things I would have never given a second thought to, such as what happens in a rhythm section, became of paramount importance. And it was really great fun and a great lesson in learning to hear things from another person's viewpoint. Everything sounds different from another chair in the band." What of influences from other pianists? "There are two answers to that. One answer is anybody with a certain sound or feeling coming out of the instrument - which could be Joni Mitchell's piano playing. It could be the music of any one of a number of late-19th, early-20th century classical composers.
"The second answer is this. In jazz there are, perhaps among others, two major strains of development. On the one hand you have Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea, that line of development. On the other hand you have Nat Cole on piano, George Shearing, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and that is the line of development from which the music I play comes."
Copland first played here two years ago, at the Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork, continuing a musical partnership with Abercrombie and the great trumpet and flugelhorn player, Kenny Wheeler, which has blossomed since the late 1990s. In sharing a double bill at the Triskel with tenor saxophonist Julian Argüelles, drummer Jim Black and bass guitarist Ronan Guilfoyle, he was part of one of the best concerts at the festival that year.
The interaction between himself, Wheeler and Abercrombie was remarkable. Pianist Lynne Arriale describes such interaction in her own trio as like three people looking at a scene, each remarking on various aspects of it to each other, while being simultaneously aware of what their partners are saying about it.
"There's a lot of truth to that," he says. "The interesting thing that happens with a band, of any kind, is you can kind of find a space which perhaps doesn't exist physically, but it seems as if it's floating 20 or 30 feet above the heads of the musicians, where your ears and your feelings and your spirits can all meet and join hands and make music." Dublin, however, is the second stop of a solo tour for him and solo piano, he acknowledges, is a completely different story. "It's a soliloquy, and it makes a performance, in a way, much more intense from moment to moment. There's no laying back while the guitarist or the drummer or the bassist solos. And playing solo," he adds, "is really about self-awareness personally and musically." It also offers no place to hide. In that sense it's a bit like death, which also offers no hiding place and, in so doing, heightens self-awareness; think of how a knowledge of life drawing to a close informed, in differing ways as their sense of themselves grew more focused, the final recordings of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz and pianist Bill Evans.
"I think there's an equal intensity and an equal energy in lyrical music and in more hard-hitting music," Copland responds. "It's a question of how the energy and intensity are used. Quantitavely, I can't find any difference in energy and intensity between, for example, early Bill Evans and late Bill Evans, or between Bill and Coltrane. I really can't. To me it's an equal level of commitment. I think it's possible to convey intensity in many ways, and solo piano is a great opportunity to do that." That should be demonstrated when he plays here early next month. The solo tour is part of a very busy year for him. There are plans for work with his regular trio, with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Jochen Rückert, while in the autumn he's hoping to have some things with Gary Peacock, with further plans for work with alto saxophonist Greg Osby.
This year also sees more albums coming out; What It Says, a duo with Peacock on Sketch, was released last month, and a follow-up duo recording for Nagel Heyer with Osby, as yet untitled, is due out some time next summer. Most intriguing of all, especially for anyone lucky enough to have heard them in Cork, is another, as yet untitled, recording with Abercrombie and Wheeler, to be released on Challenge next summer. The once-upon-a-time alto saxophonist has more than made up for the mid-career "break" to find a suit that fits. On him, the new one looks good.
Marc Copland performs at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin, on Saturday, March 6th and at the Triskel in Cork on Wednesday March 10th