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Saxophonist Houston Person joins Joe Alterman (left) on the pianist’s latest release, Brisket For Breakfast.
(Photo: Anna Yatskevitch)The piano saved Joe Alterman’s life. Dealing with crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder as a teenager, Alterman would work to hide his compulsions from his friends at Woodward Academy south of Atlanta, balling up his anxieties the best he could.
After school, he needed a release. That’s when the instrument became his “best friend.”
“I’d come home at the end of the day totally worn out, and I’d run up to the piano and just play — just improvise for hours and hours every day,” said the Atlanta native. “It was really a healing thing for me.”
Those initial sounds, and the feelings in his head, didn’t come from jazz. That came later. Alterman focused on replicating the feeling he got when attending bluegrass festivals with his dad. He wanted to bring Doc Watson’s hard-driving boogie-woogie sound or the soul of “You Are My Sunshine” to the piano.
“My first ‘in’ to jazz wasn’t really the solos,” he said. “It was really how these jazz musicians interpreted melodies that I was already familiar with.”
As Alterman beat his compulsions and brought the sunny bluegrass spirit into his playing, he also copied the style of piano jazz giants like Les McCann, Ramsey Lewis and other players who would soon become dear friends.
Alterman developed a joyful, almost palliative sound. That spirited noise can be heard on his latest release with tenor saxophonist Houston Person, Brisket For Breakfast. Joined by his longtime trio mates — drummer Justin Chesarek and bassist Kevin Smith — the new recording is a continuation of a musical dialogue with Person that stretches back to Alterman’s studies at New York University. Trace the throughline on YouTube: There’s a young Alterman, in 2011, with Person performing “Georgia On My Mind” at the pianist’s senior recital. Person would appear later, in 2013, at the Iridium with Chesarek in tow. The tenor saxophonist is also on three tracks from Alterman’s 2012 and 2016 albums.
This long musical relationship led to a deep friendship and a kinship for breaking bread, hence the title of Alterman’s latest recording. And Person and Alterman have had a lot of meals together.
“He definitely makes friends with waiters and waitresses wherever we go, whether that’s Waffle House, Longhorn, Outback or Ruth’s Chris,” Alterman said. “We went to the same Waffle House in Atlanta twice a year in between each visit, and the staff 100% still remembered Houston and were excited to see him.”
An early internship at the Blue Note in New York, which grew into offers to open for headlining artists, helped solidify his bonds with jazz royalty. While most of his peers at NYU were striving to develop their own voices, Alterman found his approach by trying to play like the musicians he idolized.
“So much of my early college was trying to sound like these guys,” Alterman said, adding that this was unusual among the other student musicians. But in those old recordings, Alterman heard friends he knew intimately, and he wanted to imitate that approach. “I really resonated with their sound. It felt really personal.”
Alterman attributes his connection with the past to his love of history, his need to research jazz lineages and track the twists and turns of an artist’s career. When he was first becoming a jazz player, in high school in Atlanta, he indeed thought all of it was history. He got to New York and realized that the artists he listened to on recordings were still making music and he could learn directly from them.
Instead of performing a history lesson for the audience, Alterman simply strove to evoke an emotion. His approach became “this music makes me feel good, I bet it could make you feel good, too.” He added, “So it wasn’t really looking back on the past as much as it was connecting with the past and wanting to share that with the present.”
Chesarek, his longtime drummer, sees Alterman’s openness reflected in how he pursues the business of making music. The pianist’s willingness to make music happen opens up opportunities that wouldn’t normally occur. In the somewhat limiting scene of Atlanta, Alterman doesn’t need to play a jazz club or an established music venue.
“He’s one of the more resourceful people I’ve ever met,” Chesarek said. “He’s also such a big-ideas guy. We’ll end up playing somewhere that’s not intended to be a venue because of his connections, his network.”
Alterman and Chesarek have been performing together for more than a decade. He said the trio has long since evolved into a musical kinship. The musicians all have the same likes, the same depth of knowledge, to go along with their deep familiarity as musicians and artists. Alterman just has to start a tune with a certain feel, and Chesarek said he and Smith know what to do; this allows them to be more spontaneous on the bandstand and truly react to the crowd.
“We all speak the same language with the recordings that we’ve fallen in love with. The trio is so rooted in a shared love of the music,” Chesarek said. “It feels like home to play with that trio.”
That trust means when an artist like Houston Person is added to the mix, they can fully focus on the new voice. Brisket For Breakfast is a live recording put together from gigs at the Breman Museum in Atlanta and the Savannah Music Festival. Chesarek said these recordings were full of special moments. They captured the intimacy of the gigs but also the energy from the crowds responding to the fun, vibrant music.
“It really unfolds on the recording like it felt onstage to me,” the drummer said.
Alterman keeps this lively feeling in his playing partly by keeping his love of instrumental string music close to his heart. He proudly adds that the first improvisational sound he fell in love with might have been the labyrinthine solos and jam-band aesthetic of the Grateful Dead. It’s this music, and this dedication to riding on a riff, to taking a phrase and playing with it, letting it sink into the groove and slowly morph into a new melodic idea that keeps his music happy, approachable and full of joy. DB
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