Aaron Goldberg is Between Two Worlds

Interview, News, From the Magazine, Aaron Goldberg

By Matthew Kassel I Mar. 6, 2019

Aaron Goldberg’s academic work might have influenced his music in more ways than he’s aware of, at least in a conceptual sense.
(Photo: Jack Vartoogian)

“I was at Berklee so much that Berklee thought I was going to Berklee,” Goldberg joked. “They would write me up in the alumni bulletin later because they’d seen me around all the time. I was playing people’s recitals and never went to a class.”

During his summers, Goldberg would venture to New York, subletting an apartment and making connections, feeling out his prospects. “I never thought more than a year or two in advance,” he said. Vacillating between Boston and the Big Apple, he gravitated to the bandstand, working with singer Betty Carter, saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi and Bill Pierce, who played saxophone with Art Blakey. “I had an intense kind of double life of school and music while I was in college,” Goldberg said. That duality has carried through to the present day.

After graduating from Harvard, he settled in New York at the tail end of a commercially resurgent period for the jazz industry, in which many of his peers were signing record deals with major labels like Atlantic, Warner Bros. and Sony. He cut his first album, Turning Point, a self-assured post-bop outing, for the small label J Curve, and although he mostly viewed it as a learning experience, it brought him a higher profile.

Soon, he was recording with a number of estimable peers, including saxophonist Joshua Redman, with whom he has had a long and fruitful association. “Aaron has this really great sense of rhythm and of groove in his playing,” Redman said. “He makes really, really good musical decisions.”

Around the time Goldberg hit 30, he had, somewhat tentatively, decided to commit himself to music entirely. He had released three well-received albums under his own name and had performed with numerous heavy hitters, including trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. But something was missing. “I always assumed that at some point I would go back and study more,” Goldberg said. “I was basically interested in the same thing I’m interested in now, which is how brains produce consciousness. How does the firing of neurons produce feelings and experiences, including the sound of Miles playing on ‘So What,’ but also love and desire and sadness and the taste of cherries—everything.”

Goldberg contacted Daniel C. Dennett, the renowned scientist and philosopher who co-directs the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts, about enrolling there. Dennett was receptive, allowing Goldberg to miss class while touring the world with Marsalis’ big band, as long as he watched video recordings of lectures on the road and turned in coursework on time.

“In spite of this long-distance arrangement, he was a vigorous participant in the course and did some excellent work, sending in his postings from Hong Kong, Tokyo and other outposts,” Dennett recalled. “When he was on campus, he also joined my small gang of squash players and beat us all handily—and generously gave me tips on how to improve my game. His philosophical talent was clear, and he could certainly have gone on, like most of his classmates, to a fine career in academia.”

Although Goldberg was living a kind of double life, he endeavored to keep his studies separate from his music, regarding jazz as an intuitive vernacular art that only can be learned on the bandstand and philosophy as an analytical discipline best approached by hitting the books. “For all his intellectual gifts, he’s someone who, when he’s playing music, listens to where the music needs to go,” Penman said.

But all jazz musicians are scholars of a sort, and Goldberg’s academic work might have influenced his music in more ways than he’s aware of, at least in a conceptual sense. That seems to be the case on his new album, which exists, in part, as a kind of commentary on—as well as an argument for—the piano trio tradition.

The opening track is “Poinciana,” the tune that made Ahmad Jamal famous. Goldberg knew he had to have a fresh approach in order to cast off the weight of Jamal’s legacy while honoring the spirit of his minimalism, and he succeeds in that balancing act, thanks primarily to Parker, whose body percussion and vocalized rhythms imbue the song with a hushed, nuanced vibe. The album also features a McCoy Tyner composition, “Effendi,” and the ballad “When You Are Near,” one of two tracks written by Bobby Hutcherson (1941–2016), whom Goldberg came to appreciate more deeply when he played in a memorial concert for the vibraphonist at Lincoln Center.

On a November evening at Manhattan’s Jazz Standard, Goldberg appeared with his trio as part of a record-release show that gave listeners a sense of how his artistry had evolved since his 2015 album, The Now (Sunnyside). Though the concert featured some flashes of virtuosity, Goldberg, a dexterous improviser, eschewed showiness in favor of a wise restraint that only can come with years of experience.

A highlight of the set came early, with a delicate rendition of a tune by Chico Buarque, the Brazilian singer and guitarist. The song ended quietly and with little ceremony, and for about five seconds, the rapt audience sat silently before clapping in such a way that the silence became a part of the performance itself.

Goldberg remains conflicted about how to reconcile the two paths he has straddled since graduating from high school, though. In fact, he hasn’t yet ruled out pursuing a doctorate. “I miss using that part of my brain,” said the pianist, who still keeps in touch with Dennett. “I miss pushing myself in that realm, and I’m still super interested in that world.”