You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Christian Sands Interview: Part 1 - #14

Episode Date: January 17, 2019

Today, Peter goes solo and talks music with the great young pianist, Christian Sands. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Christian Sams. And this is the You'll Hear It Podcast, Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. What's going on, Christian? How you doing, man? I'm doing good. I'm so excited for today's episode, not the least of which Adam isn't here. Not that that's like a bad thing or a good thing.

It's just a thing. But we have a very special guest, Christian Sands, wonderful young pianist. Actually, I don't even know if I can keep calling you a young pianist because you're getting older. but I always remember you when you were younger, but really one of my favorite pianists, one of my favorite people in the jazz community that I've gotten a chance to meet, and I love his last album,

so I invited Christian to come on, so thank you so much for being here. Of course, man, thank you for having me. And you're kind of our first official, well, you're definitely the first kind of co-host if you're up for doing that, and I probably should have told you that. But, you know, we're very casual here at the UL here.

Totally. We'll just, you know, we'll split the royalties and everything. I'm not worried. Oh, that's good. We can definitely split the royalties. That's a very easy non-existent check. So you are also requested by several of our listeners. And actually, a number of people have been requested,

but what I like to do is focus in the ones that I'm interested in having as well, and I only mention them. So I was super excited that you agreed to do this for that because I know a lot of our listeners are fans of yours and have heard you live, heard you on an album, heard you with Christian McBride's trio, all the different things that you've done in your career. so excited to present you to them by special request

because we're all about like, you know, giving the people what they want here. I don't know if I mentioned that before either. That's kind of one of our... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is very cool. It's a very cool podcast. So maybe we could jump right in.

I think most folks certainly die hard, or even medium diehard fans, know who you are, but you're from Connecticut, New Haven. Were you born and raised in New Haven? I was, yeah. Okay. Well, you know what? We all got to be from somewhere.

I'm from St. Louis, So that's how we do it, you know? Right. But I know that, you know, there was a lot of talk about, you know, you being a prodigy and stuff. And I don't know if you would describe yourself as that whenever I talk to people that are, you know, other people say they're a prodigy. I don't know.

But I know you had some association with Dr. Billy Taylor and he took an interest in notice in you at a young age, right? Yeah, yeah. I spent a lot of time with him when I was younger, sort of in the beginning of high school. But I've been playing for so long. I've been playing since I was about officially, you know, since I was like four.

Nice. You know, I mean, I kind of started dabbling at it when I was about one or two, something like that. But, you know, it takes a while to find a teacher that wants a two-year-old, so. Right, right. I think I started, yeah, I started lessons about four years old. But fast-forwarding into high school,

I met Dr. Billy Taylor at this really cool jazz program in UMass Amherst, which I actually teach at now every summer, called Jazz in July. And it's a two-week program. And my teacher at the time, Rex Cadwalder, had told me about it and told me about Dr. Billy Taylor. And, you know, you've got to go and you've got to be under this great musician. And, you know, you're going to have a lot of fun. There's a lot of kids your age that are playing. Because, you know, growing up in New Haven and doing gigs and everything, I was the youngest person.

You know, everyone else was at least in their 60s or 50s or something like that. Oh, no, you were really the youngest. I thought you were going to be like everybody was like two years older than everything. Oh, no, no, no, no. Well, but I did do a few gigs with, for those of you that know, Luce Curtis, you know, and some of the Curtis brothers, you know, I did some gigs with them, Godwin-Louie. We all kind of grew up in the same area.

He was from Bridgeport. Curtis brothers were from Hartford. So we all knew each other. and we kind of did a few gigs here and there. But for the most part, I was always performing with older musicians, Jack McLean. You know, so there's a lot of older musicians, which was great because I got a lot of lessons and I got to learn really how to play this music.

Right. Well, I think a lot of, I mean, a lot of folks know, certainly Jackie McLean's kind of like the godfather of Connecticut jazz, but there's real scenes there. And, you know, we always hear about different musicians from there, but I've got a little bit of chance to go. and play there. There's a lot of hip things happening there. Yeah, you know, and then all the great musicians either retired and moved to

Hartford or New Haven, you know, so you had Nat Reeves, you had Jackie McLean, Horace Silver was there, you know, you have a certain sound, you know, New Haven, Jesse Harmeen, Jeff Fuller. I mean, you have all these cats that kind of were either in these great bands or just working musicians in New York during, you know, the great times of, you know, the 60s and 70s. Nice, nice, nice. All right, well, if it's cool with you, I want to, like, really fast forward to your new album because we don't have a lot of time.

And I think it's such a great, you know, documentation of you. But mainly, it's just such a great sounding record. I was coming back the last few days listening to it. And yesterday, I don't know if you got a chance to hear it yet, but we did a little breakdown. Actually, you don't need to listen to it because we might have made some mistakes on it. But we basically broke down the first track, Rebel Music. And I think that's such a, you know, great placement of where you put it on the album.

And one of the things about this album, I think is so great is, you know, it's great piano playing, great writing. I mean, you wrote almost everything on the album, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know they got that those slacker songwriters, Lennon and McCartney on one tune. I didn't notice that. Those major chord writers. Yeah, exactly. Simplistic.

But I mean, you know, so you really, I mean, I love it when we're putting out original. I mean, we can always do the bebop stuff and the Herbie stuff. All this stuff is great. But I love it when young musicians, any musicians are putting their own music out. But then we got a lot of musicians putting out albums of original music, but you listen to it. You're like, oh, it's great. They did that. But it's not actually that fun to listen to.

This is a record that's a lot of fun to listen to. And we talk about on the, sorry, I'm getting on like a soliloquy. here because I was just a jazz congress so I'm feeling very political, you know what I'm saying? Oh, okay, right. No, but I mean, this is an album for those of you, and I highly recommend it, is to listen to when you get a chance from beginning

to end, because it really tells a story and there's great individual tracks like we broke down rebel music yesterday, but there's a nice progression to it. Is that something that you kind of thought about as you were composing it or as you were making it, or is that part of like the mixing and mastering

process? It was kind of just the composition process. I sat down and I kind of just had this baseline. I mean, it started out with a baseline and it just kind of unfolded from there, just kind of unfolded from just tweaking around the baseline, just kind of soloing on it. And then it just opened up by itself, you know. And, you know, I mean, I'm sure you do the same thing where you write something and then you kind of go away from it for a little while to come back, you know. In this record, I didn't have a lot of time to do. I actually wrote this record in one month. So it was really quick.

It was a really quick record. But it was something that I wrote down and I kind of went away from it and, you know, started doing other things, working on the projects and it kind of came back. And each time I would come back to it, you know, every couple days, I'd add a little more or take a little away, you know, add a little bit more or take something away, you know, and just kind of just back and forth with it. And then I kind of came up with this tune. Nice. So your previous albums were reach and reach further. And I want to just talk about

Facing Dragons and where that came from because I was thinking you could have gone to like reach furthest, right? Right, right. I thought about it. I thought about it just just reaching everything. Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. So where does Facing Dragons come from? Well, facing dragons. Actually, originally this had a different title. The actual title was originally chasing dragons, which we couldn't use because there's also drug references. Exactly. That's what I'm right. It's like either a bad breath reference or drug reference out of the way.

Exactly, exactly. And so, but originally it was that because making the album, I was in a lot of transition. You know, I was doing a lot of different stuff. I was moving. I was trying to figure out what to write for a new record. I was in the middle of touring and figuring that out. I was in the middle of changing management and all this. So a lot of stuff was kind of going on at the same time.

And so the whole idea of the dragon was really trying to, you know, figure out what these obstacles were in my life. You know, the obstacles recording and recording in two days or one day or something like that where you really want to record for a while. You really want to just be able to take your time with things, you know. So it was a lot of these questions I had. And so after doing all of this, after moving, after recording the record, it kind of turned into an answer record. Instead of just asking all these questions, it's now like these are the answers.

We have to face these answers and we have to really go and seek what they are, you know, in order to continue life and continue to be better and to continue to grow. So that's really what this album is all about. Nice. I like it. I like it. Got it. So this is the, so it's referring to more, maybe a little bit more of the challenging scary dragon as opposed to like I'm thinking of the, the Shrek dragon that had a crush on. It's interesting because when I was coming up with the idea, it kind of had all of that, you know, researching dragons too, you know, like, because I'm a big researcher.

So looking up dragons, you find out there's these different meanings for dragons, you know, aside from being obstacles, you know, you have, you have, you have dragons. that represent wealth and prosperity. You have dragons that represent fear. You have dragons that represent like all these different things. So really dragons is not just about like negative things and obstacles, but really just things that you want out of life. You know, do you want to be more successful? Do you want to be more well-rounded?

You know, so there are really things that you really want to just have in your life. Cool. Nice. All right. That concludes part one of our interview and co-hosting with Christian Sands. Tune in tomorrow for the rest of this wonderful interview, amazing pianist Christian Sans. Until tomorrow, you'll hear it.