Dan Tepfer Raises His Practice Game

By Gary Fukushima I Aug. 15, 2023

“I think one of the great privieges we have as artists is that we can choose what game we play,” Dan Tepfer says of his fun but challenging daily practice routines.

(Photo: Maria Jarzyna)

On Jan. 1, 2023, Dan Tepfer recorded a video of himself at the piano, improvising four-voice chords that moved through systematic progressions in the key of C major. Almost daily over the next three-plus months, he video-logged a myriad of fun but challenging musical games with himself, over standards, rhythms, classical pieces, computer programs and apps. On April 24, he recorded his 100th day of practice, starting with the same tonal chordal exercise he did on day 1.

“What I’m documenting in those videos is typically [just] one aspect of my practice,” Tepfer explained, over video, while sitting at his piano in the same mood-lit Brooklyn studio where he recorded all those games. A few of them involved Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, not surprising considering they were the focus of his latest album, Inventions/Reinventions (StorySound), where Tepfer performs all 15 Bach Inventions, interspersed with free improvisations.

Mixing Bach and jazz improvisation is nothing new to Tepfer; he might be the world’s foremost authority on it now, 12 years after he audaciously recorded Goldberg Variations/Variations (Sunnyside), which many classical pianists consider to be a signature piece of the keyboard repertoire, while adding an improvised vignette to each of the 32 variations. But in order to actually perform them in public, he wanted to have a stronger grasp of not only that formidable piece, but of the music of Bach in general, which led him back to the Inventions.

“I was just looking at them one day and realized they’re like a perfect microcosm of how Bach tells stories in music,” he said, explaining that Bach uses a common narrative form in his compositions that is found in literary and dramatic works. “I just started analyzing the harmonies on all of them, in terms of how they work functionally … and I asked myself if I could improvise [with] that same concept of classical narrative structure, and then maybe I [could] perform the inventions and do free improvisations for the missing keys.”

When improvising for the Goldberg Variations, Tepfer creates a spontaneous complement of each variation while adhering mostly to the original harmonic progression in the key of G — essentially blowing over the changes to the Goldberg. “Whereas in the Inventions,” Tepfer posited, “I’m not taking any data from Bach. I’m taking this this concept of storytelling in music.”

Tepfer sees musical themes as “actors” in the story, and the harmonies as “landscapes.” He elaborated: “In a good story, if a character goes geographically somewhere, there’s some sense of that place belong[ing] in the same world as the place he was in previously … and that’s true of how Bach is constructing these inventions. The places he goes harmonically are all part of the same landscape. I’ve found that incredibly helpful with free improvisation.” Those improvisations certainly don’t sound Bach-like, but like Bach, they suggest a deep harmonic functionality, and a sense of direction and purpose, much like Tepfer’s Day One chordal improv practice.

Doing either free tonal improvisation or Bach alone would be hard, let alone doing them together. Seeking and attempting difficult things for the sake of knowledge seems to be a crucial strand in Tepfer’s DNA. His father, his grandfather and his uncle were all biologists. “And we always were having these discussions around the table about searching, which is really the core of science … that feels really genuinely fun for me.”

Tepfer himself has a degree in astrophysics from the University of Edinburgh. For his last album, 2019’s Natural Machines (Sunnyside), Tepfer programmed an AI app to respond in real-time to what he played on his Yamaha Diskclavier, essentially allowing him to play spontaneous duets with a machine, sounding like a musical game of ping-pong.

And, just for fun, he programmed a three-dimensional version of the tonal landscape he sees in his head. On the computer it looks like a video game, with mountains, gullies and even ancient temple-looking structures, all representing the interactions of harmonic tonal centers. One can wander through this sonic landscape, simultaneously seeing and hearing the chordal journey unfold. But no matter where one is, the main tonal center, a.k.a. the “key” to the landscape, is visible in a deep well in the center of the map, enticing the sojourners back to its familiar comforts.

Tepfer returns often to his caldera of familial comfort: Paris, where he was raised as the only son of an American couple who had expatriated there. His mother, Rebecca, was an opera singer in the Paris Opera Chorus.

Three-and-a-half years ago, tragically, she was killed in a traffic accident while on a bicycle trip through Crete. Her husband of 50 years, David (Dan Tepfer’s father), was with her at the time, and he suffers from traumatic memories of the ordeal.

“My dad and I … we were close before, but we’ve gotten much closer, and so I just try to spend as much time with him as I can,” said Tepfer. He decided to record Inventions/Reinventions in a popular Paris performance space that his parents converted from an old woodworking factory, on a piano that belonged to his grandfather.

Playing over standards was one of the many “games” Tepfer did often during his 100 days of practice. “I mean, that’s a beautiful game, too, and it’s almost like the more I do my own games, the more fun I have playing that existing game, because it doesn’t feel like I’m defining my entire self-worth by how well I can play,

“One of the great privileges we have as artists is that we can choose what game we play. Of course, there’s the mainstream jazz piano game. It’s a beautiful game. ... And then I realized you don’t [always] have to play that game. You can make up your own game.” DB

Footnote: And with that, this author set out to make up his own game, trying to sculpt this article in the same classic narrative fashion as Bach’s Inventions and Tepfer’s Reinventions. It was new and challenging and fun.