How Water Supplied Christian Sands With His New Album’s Concept

News, From the Magazine, Christian Sands, Marcus Strickland, Miho Hazama, Bobby Sanabria

By James Hale I Jul. 23, 2020

The title of Christian Sands’ album *Be Water* nods to a quote by martial arts star Bruce Lee.
(Photo: Anna Webber)

Now on his third recording with the pianist, Strickland said Sands has a distinctive way of hearing harmony and weaving melodies.

“His compositions are always challenging,” said the saxophonist. “He’s not someone who tells you how to play them, either. He gives you that information through his piano playing, and he always gives me a different way of expressing myself than I might’ve thought of.”

The pattern of surprise sonic attacks continued with McBride, who related to DownBeat in 2017—after he had produced Sands’ Mack Avenue debut, Reach—how he hired the pianist immediately after hearing him rehearsing for a segment of Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz radio program he was guest hosting.

The late Geri Allen, too, fell under the young man’s spell, inviting him to participate, along with Jason Moran—another of Sands’ mentors at MSM—in a 2015 tribute to pianist Erroll Garner at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Together, the three performed the music from Garner’s legendary Concert By The Sea in celebration of the album’s 60th anniversary. Learning the music in a duo rehearsal with Allen in New York was a revelation to the younger pianist.

“I would talk about Garner with Dr. Taylor,” Sands said, “and he would show me some things that Garner would do, but it wasn’t in full detail. It wasn’t until I sat with Geri and we really dove into the music that I really got it. We would sit together and discuss, ‘So, why is he doing this passage?’ or ‘These octaves in the right hand with the chords in the middle, how does he do that at light speed?’ Even at that point, I assumed, you know, that everybody knows. This is just something that I haven’t got to yet because I’m only 25.”

As plans came together for the Erroll Garner Archive at the University of Pittsburgh, where Allen led the jazz program, she asked Sands to join the Erroll Garner Jazz Project as its youth coordinator to bring a younger perspective to the music of Garner, who died in 1977.

“When I was approached by the Garner estate and Octave Music to create more of a social network presence for the project, I didn’t know that Geri had already talked to them about it,” Sands said. “Geri was going to continue to do what she had been doing with it. She wasn’t officially the creative ambassador, but that’s what her position was. And then she got really sick.”

Sands said he visited Allen in June 2017, just days before she died from pancreatic cancer. Unbeknownst to him, she had put plans in place for his future.

“She couldn’t speak at all, but we communicated the best we could. We played some Garner and I talked about his music. About two weeks after she passed on, I got a call from Peter Lockhart and Susan Rosenberg [of the Erroll Garner Jazz Project] to ask me if I would take on the role of ambassador because that was Geri’s wish.”

Through the Garner estate’s deal with Mack Avenue, announced last fall, the Octave Remastered Series will release a dozen albums culled from the archive—which includes some 7,000 reels of tape and more than a million documents—to celebrate Garner’s centennial, culminating with his 100th birthday on June 15, 2021.

Sands hopes that the series will not only reignite interest in the late pianist, but also set the record straight about what he accomplished.

“You know, if you Google ‘Erroll Garner,’ the first things that come up are how small he was and that he couldn’t read music,” Sands said. “I didn’t grow up reading music, either. I mean, I could read, but it was just so much easier and quicker for me to just hear it. But there’s this story that Art Blakey told about Garner just playing the shit out of music that he’d only played a few times. So, it’s like, ‘OK, my man didn’t need to read music.’ It’s not because he couldn’t; it’s like, at a certain point, he didn’t need to. He was the music.”

A big part of the reason he identifies with Garner’s approach, Sands said, is what he learned from elders like Taylor and renowned trumpeter/educator Clark Terry. He recalled playing with older musicians who would have charts that looked to him like indecipherable handwritten notes.

“What I learned was that you need to get the essence of what you’re playing,” he said. “You want to get the feel of it.”

That approach hasn’t changed for Sands, even as he has moved into teaching via educational programs such as Christian’s Jazz Kids in Copenhagen, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz For Kids and Jazz In July at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He said there’s nothing that can replace learning from the source.

“Education is such a big thing in everything I do, and it’s not just being in the classroom. There’s things I play on purpose to make sure you know what this is. Like block chords. I didn’t come up with that, but let me show you about George Shearing or Nat Cole or Billy Taylor, and let me show you the difference between the three.”

The latest educational project Sands has become involved with came about through his role as music director of the Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour project in 2018–’19, and is part of his appointment as artist-in-residence at the festival itself, which has been postponed to 2021 due to the coronavirus. While part of his duties as a teacher and mentor have been scrubbed due to the pandemic, he remained hopeful that he could participate in some of Monterey’s other educational initiatives in 2020.

Meanwhile, the long weeks of COVID-related isolation have been an opportunity for Sands to learn more about his craft.

“I’m really getting to, like, deconstruct my own playing,” he said. “‘How can I improve on this?’ I’m influenced by so many different things, so this is a chance to get out of the thing that I was doing and really shift. I think a lot of musicians are going to sound a little different after this [because] they’re by themselves, just practicing.”

Monterey Jazz Festival Artistic Director Tim Jackson described Sands as “a bright light” in the next generation of jazz pianists.

That’s an outlook shared by Strickland, who said, “When I see Christian, I get a very promising experience. It makes me feel fulfilled to see the way that he’s carrying the torch for jazz. With his broad appreciation for tradition, pop music, funk and hip-hop, he’s basically the new template for what we call a jazz musician.” DB

This story originally was published in the July 2020 issue of DownBeat. Subscribe here.