Brandon Goldberg: Forget About My Youth

News, From the Magazine, Brandon Goldberg

By Ted Panken I Jun. 11, 2024

“I’ve always wanted to explore the piano trio tradition, and to find my own voice within it,” says the youthful Goldberg.
(Photo: Jacob Blickenstaff)

This February, a week before his 18th birthday, Brandon Goldberg, a high school senior in Miami, played at Smalls in Greenwich Village, subbing for pianist Orrin Evans in Ben Wolfe’s quartet with tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover and drummer Aaron Kimmel. It was the first night of a weekend engagement.

Despite his youth, none of his bandmates were strangers. Wolfe and Kimmel are Goldberg’s go-to trio partners, represented on Live At Dizzy’s (Cellar Live), which dropped in March. In 2018, Wolfe produced and played on Goldberg’s debut album, Let’s Play, with Donald Edwards on drums and Marcus Strickland on tenor. In 2021, Glover did gigs with Goldberg, then 15, supporting his second album, In Good Time, featuring his original music tailored to the tonal personalities of Josh Evans, Stacy Dillard, Luques Curtis and co-producer Ralph Peterson, working on his final recording.

A few hours before the first set, Goldberg sat alongside the Steinway at Mezzrow, Smalls’ sister club, where, three months before, he’d led a trio with Wolfe and drummer Jimmy McBride. “Ben’s music is hard,” Goldberg said, citing the varied time feels and slalom-like chord changes in Wolfe’s tunes. Still, with only an over-the-phone rundown of the songs and a brief warmup, Goldberg navigated both sets with aplomb and inspiration, comping surefootedly and uncorking melodic improvisations on his solos.

“If that was an audition, Brandon passed with flying colors,” Wolfe joked a few days later. “When we first met, I told him, ‘I’m not going to treat you as a kid who plays good, but as someone who plays good, period.’ What I noticed most was his swing feel, which has developed into an authentic bebop feeling. Not too many people of any age feel as good to play with. Also, Brandon isn’t just making the crowd go crazy and ‘check me out.’ He knows how to play a beautiful ballad. As a sideman, he’ll learn conceptual things he won’t learn as a leader — which is what he wants. To him, music is this amusement park of fun.”

“I thought my first lessons were a playdate, that we’d move on to the next game,” Goldberg confirmed. He added, matter-of-factly: “From age 4 or 5, anything I heard I could play back on the piano with both hands.”

“Anything” included the Frank Sinatra songbook, which he heard via his grandparents’ Rat Pack videos and albums. It also included the repertoire of Ira Sullivan, a mainstay of Chicago’s thriving jazz scene during the 1950s. Sullivan met Goldberg at 6 and began to include him on gigs featuring music by, Goldberg remembered, John Lewis and Benny Golson. Inspired by Sullivan’s reminiscences of his associates and contemporaries, Goldberg absorbed their records and made his own connections, assimilating the vocabularies of Herbie Hancock and Hancock’s early idols George Shearing, Wynton Kelly, Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson, and building from there.

“I’ve always wanted to explore the piano trio tradition, and to find my own voice within it,” Goldberg said. Live At Dizzy’s, recorded a month before his 17th birthday, shows him well on the way toward realizing that aspiration.

As on In Good Time, Goldberg plays with intense contextual consciousness, takes chances, resolves self-imposed conundrums and facilitates three-way conversation.

“I’m making different pianistic choices on this album versus In Good Time, and in the year since then I’ve worked a lot on refining my sound,” Goldberg said. He credited piano teacher Giselle Brodsky for helping him “fall in love” with the Euro canon. Through Brodsky, Goldberg also connected with Bill Charlap, whom he’s consulted frequently on matters of tune provenance.

“Brandon wanted to get to the essence of the song,” Charlap said. “He immediately understands the concepts you tell him. You can hear he’s thought about it and is making more deeply informed decisions. I think he’s in a constant state of reassessment and growth and basically the joy of the process, which our life’s work is all about.” DB