Bill Charlap’s Inner Rebel

Interview, From the Magazine, Bill Charlap Trio

By Phillip Lutz I Oct. 22, 2024

Bill Charlap with trio mates Kenny Washington, left, and Peter Washington, right.
(Photo: Carol Friedman)

Hunched over a round table in the Algonquin Hotel — where, a century ago, New York’s reigning wits famously gathered — Bill Charlap, a modern-day musical wit out of Manhattan’s East Side, was thumbing through his photos.

In just a few hours, he was due to play a date down 44th Street at Birdland. So he thumbed quickly. And soon he found what he was looking for: a digitized image of himself as a boy sporting lots of hair, a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the prog-rock group Yes and the face of a would-be rebel.

Could that really be the well-dressed, mild-mannered man of 57 reputed in some circles to be the avatar of mainstream jazz piano? The man who humbly eschews composition for a life of interpreting 32-bar tunes from the worlds of jazz, theater and pre-rock popular song?

The questions, of course, are rhetorical. In Charlap, a radical sensibility coexists with a passion for accessibility. While he is duly respectful of form and deeply sensitive to the goals of composers, even the most sober of his sets will, at some point, yield to a rebellious spirit bubbling up in pianistic forays that exploit in spectacular fashion seemingly every known avenue of improvisatory attack.

“I love Cecil Taylor’s playing, and I love Teddy Wilson’s playing,” he said. “I’m not trying to play like either one.”

The Charlap aesthetic was very much in play in September last year, when, on a rainy weekend of working sets at the Village Vanguard, he and his bandmates — the redoubtable pair of Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington on drums — were recording tunes for possible inclusion on a live album. That document, And Then Again (Blue Note), was released to the world in August.

Embarking on the project, the trio was not operating in a vacuum. By 2007, when they released Live At The Village Vanguard (Blue Note), they had been issuing albums for nine years. Since then, they have often recorded and toured, and their annual two-week Vanguard engagement helps launch New York’s fall jazz season. The trio is widely regarded as one of the city’s top working units.

“It’s a great trio,” said pianist Kenny Barron, who wrote the new album’s title tune. “I love that group.”

As the trio has evolved, Charlap has, by his own account, gravitated toward a role in which he is, in roughly equal measure, leader of and listener to his bandmates. With tongue only partly planted in cheek, he likened them to something resembling a merry band of mutineers.

“I’m like Captain Queeg,” he said, referring to the main character in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny. “There’s no boss, just a guiding force, and I will be willing to listen to my troops if they say, ‘There’s a minefield that way.’”

On that weekend in September, the group was igniting its small explosions. Sunday’s early set opened with what seemed a straightforward, weather-appropriate ballad, “Here’s That Rainy Day.” Finely wrought and delicately rendered, the treatment struck a mood of melancholy — until, that is, flashes of brightly articulated keyboard filigrees and splashes of double-time brush strokes threatened a break in the clouds, complicating the simple narrative.

The set closer, “Groovin’ High,” offered a similar lesson in complex storytelling. Blindingly fast to the point of near-parody and intermittently dense to the point of near-opacity, the treatment teased every rule of bebop language as only a master grammarian could. Yet it came off as a clear-eyed communion with the composer: both an intoxicating rumble à la Dizzy Gillespie and a loving paean to his memory.

For all that closer’s energy, the emotion had already peaked mid-set, when, after building up a head of steam, the trio suddenly downshifted to “Detour Ahead.” Transporting listeners back a half-century, the lighter-than-air interplay evoked, without imitating, the Bill Evans Trio at its most inferential. The group then shifted into overdrive with an “April In Paris” that found Charlap crushing the Count Basie band’s five-chord figures into clusters of sound so dissonant that one wondered just what happened to Charlap that April.

By set’s end, the trio had effectively conjured the ghosts still haunting the hallowed Vanguard space, sparking cheers from a spent audience that seemed to rattle the photos lining the club’s walls. An obviously ecstatic Charlap joined in: “The one and only Village Vanguard! The one and only Peter Washington! The one and only Kenny Washington!”

The bandmate-shoutout was classic Charlap. Seven months later and a world away from playing the Vanguard — sitting, to be precise, in his cramped office at New Jersey’s William Paterson University, where he is director of jazz studies — Charlap again displayed the impulse that compelled the shoutout as he prepared to consume a bagel with a schmear. Though obviously famished after a crazy-busy late-April morning, he insisted on sharing the delicacy with a visitor — transforming a prosaic act of sustenance into a telling moment of munificence.

Such moments, multiplied many times, help explain the outpourings of communal love he elicits, like the one in April at which Jazz at Lincoln Center gave him its 2024 Award for Artistic Excellence; or the one last year at which 92NY honored him at the final concert of his 18-year tenure as artistic director of the Jazz in July series; or the one that April day at William Paterson, where students heaped words of praise on him after an end-of-term workshop.

“The first word that comes to mind is generosity,” said Eoin O’Mara, a guitarist and graduating senior. “Generosity of spirit, generosity of time, the understanding that you can light someone else’s candle without diminishing your own.”

Charlap’s generosity extends from acts of personal kindness to the realm of performance. Like a fine actor who disappears into a role, he will sublimate his ego and lose himself in the musical text or the needs of his fellow players. That he finds his voice in this act of artistic generosity is the great mystery of his practice.

“There’s always a deeper layer with him,” said James Bally, a pianist and graduating William Paterson senior. “He’s very rooted in something. You’re not even sure what.”

Untangling those roots, Charlap’s wife and sometime musical partner, pianist Renee Rosnes, said that as he plays, she can hear in his musical choices echoes of those who “lived in him”: a turn of phrase that Charlap himself employed and expanded on when talking about his approach to making music.

Seated at that Algonquin round table — not far from the hotel’s now-defunct Oak Room, a swank spot where he accompanied his singing mother, Sandy Stewart, once a formidable presence on television and records as well as in cabaret — Charlap explained: “If there’s someone you love and they die, they’re not gone because they do live inside of you, and you’re living in them and that’s why we get bigger and more expansive when we embrace each other. That is where art is. It’s in a reflection of others.”

Gazing upward as if casting his own version of the Village Vanguard walls, Charlap added: “Imagine the photos all the way around: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Prokofiev. They’re all there and they’re always there.

“I have a funny relationship that way to death.”

Death came early to Charlap; his father, Broadway composer Morris “Moose” Charlap, passed away when he was 7. The passing had an impact that lingers, Rosnes said: “It was traumatic and changed his life.”

The elder Charlap, she said, had a big personality and a big voice that is preserved in recorded material. She suspected that Bill’s extraordinary powers of communication — as an artist and educator, and in his everyday interactions — resembled those of his father.

For his part, Charlap recalled a father who was “an iconic force,” and a home life filled with song, courtesy of both his parents. Through them he mingled with songwriting stars like Jule Styne, Charles Strouse and Yip Harburg.

With that start in life, Charlap’s songbook — and his appetite for adding to it — began to grow early. It got a big boost when, as a 15-year-old student at New York’s High School of Performing Arts, he met Dick Hyman. A virtuosic pianist with encyclopedic knowledge who knew Charlap’s mother through their mutual work at NBC studios, Hyman took him under his wing and began shaping his jazz repertoire, as did Gerry Mulligan, Phil Woods and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. Ultimately, Charlap built a book that invites hyperbole in its description.

“He knows a million songs,” Barron said.

Matching the size of his book is the depth of his interpretative ability. Chatting after a Charlap set at Birdland in May, bassist Ron Carter, who was attending the set and will be playing duo with the pianist at that club in October, was asked to sum up the man and his music. With a sly smile and firm tone that suggested he meant what he said both literally and figuratively, Carter repeated the phrase: “He knows all the verses.”

Arranger Pete McGuinness, a professor at William Paterson, suggested that Charlap possessed special sensory powers. Speaking after the school’s April workshop — a wide-ranging affair Charlap led with humorous asides, compassionate critiques and the kind of erudition that is rare in or out of academia — McGuinness praised Charlap’s “phonographic memory” and ventured that “telepathy” might explain his uncanny connection to composers. “He gets the intent of the song in ways others wouldn’t.”

In his rhetoric, Charlap links an understanding of a tune to a knowledge of its composer’s motivations and interpretive history. On “In Your Own Sweet Way,” a standout track on the new album, he points first to composer Dave Brubeck’s reason for writing the piece: “It’s a gift to his wife, Iola. He’s telling her he loves her — and they were together forever.”

Charlap’s focus then shifts to Miles Davis, noting that, while Brubeck introduced the tune on Brubeck Plays Brubeck, a 1956 solo effort recorded at his Oakland home, Davis’ take — specifically the quintet version on his 1956 release Collectors’ Items — is more persuasive. Most improvisers, he said, adhere to Davis’ melodic and harmonic alterations. He includes himself in that group, even as Brubeck remains a factor in his approach to the piece.

In their take, the Charlap trio delivers a remarkable work of collective spontaneity. Launched without the oblique intros Charlap has lately favored, it includes early episodes of rhythmic risk-taking bordering on anarchy in which, as Charlap put it, “Everybody’s arranging, but everybody’s on their side of the street.”

The take thrillingly survives autonomous moments in which drummer Washington almost subverts the narrative — breaking into what Charlap termed “a crazy Latin thing” — before saving it, on Charlap’s cue, with a tightly argued cymbals-only solo.

“He rarely does that,” Charlap said. “He wasn’t expecting it. But I knew I could trust him to take it.”

That trust, Washington explained, reflected a relationship with his bandmates that he could draw on to turn almost any situation to their common advantage: “After more than 20 years together, I know them like a book.”

Hovering over the affair is the spirit of pianist Tommy Flanagan, whose subtle lyricism has proved a touchstone for Charlap. On the piece’s interlude, Charlap references Flanagan. And while he arguably does so with a buoyancy that the young Flanagan, under Davis’ leadership, does not muster, any Charlap reference to Flanagan is meaningful.

“I’d place him in the same lineage as Tommy and Hank,” Barron said, referring in the second case to Hank Jones. “It’s his touch. He knows how to tell a story. He knows how to leave space. He’s not just a blur of notes. He’s right in there.”

Kenny Washington, who recorded with both Flanagan and Jones — and, as fate would have it, first encountered Charlap as a patron at the Village Vanguard when Washington was playing there in Flanagan’s late-1980s trio — seconded that sentiment.

Though inclusion in such distinguished lineage was a feather in Charlap’s cap, he was modestly reluctant to accept it. In fact, he said, discussion about the music’s development as a linear series of steps needed conceptual nuance.

“I don’t think about the next step,” he said. “It’s just a personal step. That’s really what this whole thing is about — being yourself. That’s what makes a jazz musician or any artist have something to say.”

Charlap has plenty to say on “In Your Own Sweet Way,” most pointedly near its climax when he lays down a stunning sequence of chords. At that moment, his ethos of discovering his voice through embracing the artistry of others finds some realization. Referring to the composer as pianist, he said: “When Dave would play, it was like ‘Columbia The Gem Of The Ocean’: bombastic, two-hand screaming. I wanted to have a little of that.”

And so he does — and more. With the subterranean thunder of bass and drums adding bulk to the bombast, he achieves a rawness of texture and richness of color that eluded Brubeck. In doing so, he coaxes his inner rebel to the surface.

If there is any format in which Charlap reins in that rebel, it is the piano duo. The format puts a premium on his heightened sensitivity to providing space for musical partners. Barron said he found Charlap “very gracious” in their 2003 duo encounter in Japan, while Charlap and Rosnes report total synchronicity since their first duo performance in the late 1990s in Bern, Switzerland. Workouts like Lyle Mays’ “Chorinho,” their flagwaving set closer, demand it.

The solo format, by contrast, offers a chance to loosen the reins. And Charlap can get surprisingly loose, especially when he tackles a war horse like Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays.” Art Tatum’s solo bag of tricks alone provides so many figures for the fertile mind to abstract that a master of allusion like Charlap never tires of it. Nor do his fans.

“I love his solo playing,” Barron said. “He knows how to take a piece apart and really explore before he even plays the melody.”

But even flying solo, Charlap has been known to rein in his inner rebel. At Jazz at Lincoln Center’s April awards ceremony, he kept it simple with a dreamlike solo performance of “Long Ago And Far Away,” a tune he had more elaborately addressed with Rosnes and Tony Bennett on Silver Lining (Blue Note), the Grammy-award-winning album of Kern tunes released in 2015.

Floating through time and gently closing in on the piece’s finale, he suddenly hit a high note squarely in the middle of the last line — “That all I longed for long ago was you” — mirroring a small but striking Bennett improvisation on the album. As a tribute to Bennett, the gesture no doubt went unrecognized by much of the assembled crowd. But that wasn’t the point: It allowed Charlap to keep a compact with himself, to honor what he had promised the audience before playing the tune — and to find his voice in that of another.

“Whenever I heard Tony Bennett sing something,” he told the crowd, “that was the way I heard it in my heart, in my head — forever.” DB