Mar 18, 2025 3:00 PM
A Love Supreme at 60: Thoughts on Coltrane’s Masterwork
In his original liner notes to A Love Supreme, John Coltrane wrote: “Yes, it is true — ‘seek and ye shall…
Chicago area native Pat Leary has released two volumes of solo piano improvisations, with a third on the way.
(Photo: Emily Lindeman)If you were lucky enough to grab a copy of pianist Pat Leary’s solo debut, Vol. 1, from its 50-unit, limited vinyl run, you’d find a surprise inside: a handwritten note on card stock, and a doodle of bug-eyed, needle-fingered alien waving at the reader.
“That’s Ertkit,” Leary said during a visit to his apartment on Chicago’s West Side. It’s his alter ego from years ago, when he used to DJ at a now-defunct bar; he still uses the alien’s name for his Instagram handle.
Leary’s path to the piano is indeed a bit extraterrestrial, and so is Leary himself. The third of four children in the southwest Chicago suburbs, Leary, 35, has a dreamy, drifting quality. He always adored music, amassing an iTunes library with tracks in the tens of thousands before college. But beyond slinging a mean guitar in high school and college bands, music didn’t seem to be part of his future. Piano certainly wasn’t. Like so many kids, Leary took piano lessons at 6, only to abandon them a few short years later. He would have rather been skateboarding.
“My mom gave me the option to quit, and I did. I was too cool for school,” he says, his speaking voice still slack with a skater’s vocal fry.
The only other piano lessons Leary would take would be with Rodney George Peacock, a saxophonist who had once played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Then a student at the University of Illinois, Leary met Peacock while heading home from a college party in Urbana. (“He was hip, man. He wore an ankh around his neck and was writing an opera for the college,” Leary remembers.) Peacock gave him two or three lessons and invited him to listening sessions at his house.
A physics major, Leary intended to leave U. of I. with a well-paid engineering job. Instead, he burned out. He moved back in with his parents, toyed with going to med school, got a job delivering pizzas. Most of all, he spent hours — as in, eight hours or more a day — playing his family’s old upright.
“I’d wake up and play piano 9 to 5 before my shift. My mom thought I was insane,” Leary says. “She thought I’d do this for a little bit, then get a professional job. But I didn’t want that.”
He liked the pizza delivery job in the first place because he could score study in his copious downtime. Shortly after returning to piano, Leary had challenged himself to learn all 15 of Bach’s dexterous Inventions. He went from there to transcribing solos.
“I was listening to a lot of music that I found exceptionally beautiful — a lot of Bill Evans Trio, Krystian Zimerman playing Chopin nocturnes and ballades, Glenn Gould. … It was blowing my mind,” he says. “I thought, ‘Man, if I can grab like 10% of this beauty, that’s enough for me.’”
2020 was going to be the year that Leary really put himself out there as a performer. Instead, we all know what happened next. He burned out again, this time on music.
“Between March 2020 and March 2021, I basically didn’t touch the piano,” he says. “Maybe once a month, I would sit down and just play the blues for an hour, just to exorcise those demons.”
Once the world slowly started to reopen, Leary’s mental health healed along with it. He tentatively returned to the keys. To keep his fingers and mind fresh, he challenged himself to perform a solo piano improvisation a day. Some, he says — with his usual, easygoing understatement — “sounded pretty good.” So, he decided to record them.
Those solo excursions became 2023’s Vol. 1, Leary’s solo debut. Vol. 2, based on the same conceit — each track is not just titled but dated — is in the can and looking for a label. Between the volumes is Live At Midnight Tea, a solo set recorded in Chicago’s historic Fine Arts Building.
In all, Leary’s sound reflects the melting pot of influences he absorbed when returning to the keyboard. The solo chops and long-form command of Keith Jarrett. The heart-on-sleeve lyricism of Bill Evans and Chopin. The impressionism of Ravel and Debussy. Counterpoint and clarity of touch from Bach.
These days, Leary performs between 100 and 150 gigs a year, or between two and three a week. He’s a member of several working groups — he’s recorded a trio album with drummer Alex Santilli and bassist Jeff Wheaton, and he plays frequently with a quartet at Lemon, a new bar/performance space in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood. He’s got another duo recording planned for later this year with guitarist Tom Kelleher. Though his discography to date would imply otherwise, Leary only sparingly performs solo sets, mostly for private bookings and other jobbing gigs. He hopes to do more of it going forward.
“It’s in my blood for whatever reason. I don’t know why. Some people are like, ‘Isn’t it really hard?’ To me, it’s the opposite. It’d be harder to play something like Bach — everyone hears when you [mess] up. But [when you improvise solo], you can mess it as much as you want. You just gotta make it sound nice.”
Leary has to end the interview so he can pack up his gear. He is, in fact, off to one of those 150-odd gigs, so he walks this interviewer out. Waving goodbye from the front gate, Leary is silhouetted in the darkness. Ertkit, that alien? I see the resemblance. DB
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