The jazz pianist Craig Taborn often goes to museums for inspiration, carrying a notebook to record ideas for compositions and song titles. He also sometimes performs at museums, becoming a sort of art object himself. This is a complicated situation for Taborn, who is very private. His mother, Marjorie Taborn, remembers seeing him at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, where he played a recital to a full house at the debut of his solo album “Avenging Angel.” After the show, she was chatting with his friend Tim Berne, a saxophonist, while her son signed copies of his album, smiling graciously and patiently fielding questions. She and Berne looked at each other, because they each knew how much effort this required from Taborn. “Look at Craig,” Taborn’s mother recalls telling Berne, “he’s getting everything he never wanted, all the attention he’d never seek.”
Taborn, who is 47, is used to attracting attention he’d prefer to avoid, and not just because of his extraordinary musicianship. He is an African-American man from Minnesota with features that often draw curious looks: a very pale complexion, reddish-blond curls and hazel eyes. “I have never had a day when someone does not look at me with an openly questioning gaze, sometimes remote and furtive, sometimes polite,
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The jazz pianist Craig Taborn often goes to museums for inspiration, carrying a notebook to record ideas for compositions and song titles. He also sometimes performs at museums, becoming a sort of art object himself. This is a complicated situation for Taborn, who is very private. His mother, Marjorie Taborn, remembers seeing him at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, where he played a recital to a full house at the debut of his solo album “Avenging Angel.” After the show, she was chatting with his friend Tim Berne, a saxophonist, while her son signed copies of his album, smiling graciously and patiently fielding questions. She and Berne looked at each other, because they each knew how much effort this required from Taborn. “Look at Craig,” Taborn’s mother recalls telling Berne, “he’s getting everything he never wanted, all the attention he’d never seek.”
Taborn, who is 47, is used to attracting attention he’d prefer to avoid, and not just because of his extraordinary musicianship. He is an African-American man from Minnesota with features that often draw curious looks: a very pale complexion, reddish-blond curls and hazel eyes. “I have never had a day when someone does not look at me with an openly questioning gaze, sometimes remote and furtive, sometimes polite, sometimes in admiration or awe and sometimes with disgust,” he told me. “It comes from appearing as I do, and not fitting into anyone’s preconceived category.”
Taborn’s music, too, has an elusive aura, both in its spectral, moody textures and in its proud refusal to cater to expectations about what jazz, or even music, should be. A lot of advanced jazz today has the feel of a self-conscious hybrid, combining (take your pick) punk rock, hip-hop, Indian rhythms or Middle Eastern modes. Taborn is a musical omnivore, too, but his explorations of other forms never sound willful: He has so fully absorbed his influences as to camouflage them, in a musical language of casual authority. The beauty of his art resides in large part in his ability to discover new sounds in the piano, from the keys to the strings; his playing inspires something rare in music today, a sense of wonder. Taborn is revered by other pianists and considered by many to be one of jazz music’s few contemporary innovators — a judgment likely to be reinforced by his stunning recent album, “Daylight Ghosts.” Yet he is not widely known even among jazz aficionados. A resident of Brooklyn for the last two decades, Taborn still has the unassuming, somewhat bashful demeanor of a native Midwesterner, and a Midwesterner’s discomfort with self-advertisement. He does not have a website, handles his own bookings in the United States and is barely present on social media. He admires his better-known pianist friends like Vijay Iyer, who started a doctoral program at Harvard, and Jason Moran, who presides over jazz programming at the Kennedy Center, but says he has no desire to shape an institution, being “leery of the impact this would have on my creativity.”
Peter Evans is a trumpet player and composer based in New York City since 2003. Evans is part of a broad, hybridized scene of musical experimentation and his work cuts across a wide range of modern musical practices and traditions. Peter is committed to the simultaneously self-determining and collaborative nature of musical improvisation as a compositional tool, and works with an ever-expanding group of musicians and composers in the creation of new music.
His primary groups as a leader are the Peter Evans Ensemble and Being & Becoming (with Joel Ross, Nick Jozwiak and Savannah Harris). Evans has been exploring solo trumpet music since 2002 and is widely recognized as a leading voice in the field, having released several recordings over the past decade. He is a member of the cooperative groups Pulverize the Sound (with Mike Pride and Tim Dahl) and Rocket Science (with Evan Parker, Craig Taborn and Sam Pluta) and is constantly experimenting and forming new configurations with like-minded players.
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