Mar 2, 2026 9:58 PM
In Memoriam: John Hammond Jr., 1942–2026
John P. Hammond (aka John Hammond Jr.), a blues guitarist and singer who was one of the first white American…
“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
Hammond came to the blues through the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which he experienced firsthand in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Mar 2, 2026 9:58 PM
John P. Hammond (aka John Hammond Jr.), a blues guitarist and singer who was one of the first white American…
“Cerebral and academic thought is a different way to approach music,” Flea says of his continuing dive into jazz. “I’ve always relied on emotion and intuition and physicality.”
Mar 30, 2026 10:30 PM
In the relatively small pantheon of certifiable rock stars venturing into the intersection of pop music and jazz, the…
Vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater will be among the headliners at this year’s DC JazzFest.
Mar 2, 2026 9:48 PM
The first wave of artists scheduled to perform at the 2026 DC JazzFest have been announced. This year’s headliners…
Blindfold Test proctor Ted Panken, left, with the Grammy-winning Nicole Zuraitis.
Feb 24, 2026 12:00 PM
After earning the 2024 Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy for her seventh album, How Love Begins (La Reserve), comprising 12…
“These days, with curated news, where people only get half the story, people can’t even speak to family members anymore,” Schneider laments.
Mar 10, 2026 1:43 PM
Maria Schneider is doing her part to try to fix what ails America. Which got her thinking about crows, specifically,…
