It's my main activity. Tomorrow night I'm playing at the Deer Head Inn with a couple of up-and-coming little monsters, Reid Taylor [bass] and Matt Zebroski [drums]. Matt is 21. He came to New York and went to the New School for a couple of years and now he's playing around town. He's tremendous. I've never heard a drummer at his age so musical and have such a mature sense of phrasing and such great swing. He's been studying with Billy Hart, and he's gonna really go far. I'm playing the Jazz Gallery next week with Sean Conly [bass] and Derrek Phillips [drums].

Maybe because I grew up in the 70's I'm also drawn to an electronic sound. I picked up a vintage Wurlitzer, and I had to have a lot of work done to make it playable. It has a great sound, a funky sound. It's drier and grungier than a Rhodes. It's not a piano--a Steinway is a piano. Bruce Arnold plays guitar and contributes a lot to the band. We have a very compatible musical awareness. Konrad Korsch or Cliff Schmitt play electric bass, and I usually get Kirk Driscoll or Derrek Phillips on drums. There are a couple of tunes I do in both bands, but most of the electric tunes would not sound good played by the acoustic trio and vice-versa. The jazz piano has so much history, 100 years. You almost feel like you're expected to master this whole heritage of the instrument. With the Wurlitzer there was none of that baggage. The first couple of gigs we did I was having so much fun letting go, and I brought some of that back to the acoustic piano. The Wurlitzer has freed me up on the acoustic piano--made me comfortable breaking more rules, which is what it should be about in the first place.

I played with the same drummer, Jeff Williams, for a long time. We did four records together. The musical connection we have is amazing, but I started feeling like it's not healthy to be locked into one thing. Lately I've been exploring with some other people. I've always gone through a lot of bass players. There's been some overlap in the musicians between the two bands. For example Derrick plays in my acoustic trio at times. With the electric band the music is so specific and difficult I can't just call someone the day before. The acoustic band still requires some rehearsal, but there's more looseness so I can experiment with different people.

Speak Memory is really hard to find. (Record label wanted!) People can get it through my web site or order it through Tower Records. It's newer and closer to my heart. Masa Kamaguchi and Jeff Williams played on it, and I am very happy with how it turned out. The Blue Note one is in the stores. John O'Gallagher sits in with the trio on a couple of the tunes. There's a mix of standards and originals on both. I love standards, the great melodies. The chords can use updating. I like to personalize them, change the rhythm. Not just old standards--on Speak Memory I have a version of the Jimmy Webb tune "Up, Up and Away." I play with the meter on that and with the harmony. Whether I'm doing standards or originals there's always an element of composing so I see it as the same process: composing, recomposing, arranging, editing.

I write a lot more original compositions when I don't have a boy friend. I don't know why that is. I've written about five new tunes lately--maybe I should spend the rest of my life alone! Other than that I may write for a specific need. I recently had a gig at the Blue Note with Dave Liebman. Some of my tunes are hard, and the band wouldn't have a lot of rehearsal time so I decided to write some music that would be interesting but still wouldn't require a lot of rehearsal. Dave and I were supposed to do a duo record for gmn.com (I guess they're your competitor, sort of.), but it got canceled. I had already written a duo piece with his soprano sound in mind so we played it. Sometimes stuff just comes out because of an emotion. A couple of weeks ago my uncle died unexpectedly. He was a great guy, and the whole family was devastated. The day after he died I sat down at the piano and wrote this tune in one evening. It was something I needed to do.

Because I'm a composer, and I'm a leader, and I have a very strong concept other musicians have had trouble seeing me as a sideperson. I don't get as many side gigs as I'd like. If it's someone I want to play with of course I'm going to do the gig. There's always this tension between being true to your own concept and serving the concept of the leader. I've resolved that by only playing with leaders whose concepts are either close to mine or who just love what I do so much that they're happy to have me stretch their concept. Lately I've been able to play with some people who are heroes of mine and that's been great.

Lately I also seem to be a big band pianist. The bands have been freer than the traditional, straightahead big bands like Count Basie or Duke Ellington. Jamie Begian's thing is kind of minimalistic but very well crafted. Joe Phillips has a band called Numinous. It's a different instrumentation. He has a few strings, vibes, marimba. Last year I did the BMI Jazz Orchestra concert. We played ten or eleven compositions by members of the BMI Jazz Composers' workshop. Some of it was like Schoenberg. They have a reading session every month. Ted Rosenthal is the regular pianist, but he's busy a lot so I end up doing it, and it's a lot of fun. In a way big band piano is the opposite of what I've been doing in my own trio. With a big band you have to sublimate your personality. Sometimes it's more about craft than expressing your artistic personality every minute--it has to be that way. If somebody writes a chart that's supposed to be something stylistically it would be selfish for you to just ignore what they're trying to do.

My father was a secular composer, not a cantor. He was much older than my mom. When Hitler came to power he was forced to leave Austria. He came to the U.S. and took a job at a synagogue as a music director. Someone suggested he should write liturgical music, and he did. He had this radical idea that the music these texts would be set to should be sophisticated and musically valid. He felt the texts were too important to be entrusted to amateur composers. He was very successful in that tiny field--his name is a household word among cantors for what that's worth. Occasionally I'll talk with my mother about my musical views, and she'll say, "It's so funny--your dad used to say the same thing." My father was out of a classical background, but he loved jazz. He died when I was eight, but he had tremendously influenced my attitude toward music by then.

I met Marian in 1993 when I was in the Thelonious Monk BMI Composers Competition. (I came in second place.) She was one of the judges of the piano competition. She didn't judge the composers, but she heard me play. She had me send her a tape--I didn't have a CD out. A couple of weeks later she called me and invited me on her show. [Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, PBS Radio] I've kept in touch with her over the years. She called me up recently and said, "You've grown so much we should have you back," and we did it. [Piket's second show aired in mid-April, 2001 on many PBS stations.] We're playing together at Eastman next month, which I'm totally excited about. Every year she brings a young pianist to introduce--this year it's me. We'll both play some solo and then some duo. Marian is so good at putting her guests at ease. She really knows how to bring out the best in people. She has a great sense of humor--she's kind of mischievous. She's such a big supporter of young musicians. I hope when I grow up I'm like her.

I'll do a workshop while I'm up at Eastman. I do some private teaching and a little bit at a school here in New York. I teach an ensemble at Long Island University. I've done a couple of tours with my trio in the Midwest, and we've put on some great clinics out there with some high school and college kids. It's rewarding to do that stuff even though all those kids aren't going to become professional musicians. By increasing their abilities and their appreciation for the music hopefully you're perpetuating an interest. A lot of young pianists have the same weaknesses--they're very focused on harmony at the expense of their time and their rhythmic concept. I harp on clarity--always be aware of what you're doing and why you're doing it. I'll say, "Are you playing rubato or in time?" They'll say, "I don't know." Generally young musicians these days have a lot together in terms of their scales and chords, and they can really make the changes, but they're not necessarily thinking about making music. I encourage young players to think about what they're doing--not just go on automatic pilot and play a bunch of licks they've learned. Of course at Eastman you're dealing with people who are going to become professional musicians. That's also exciting to me--dealing with students who are that serious. That's kind of why I've gotten into playing with younger musicians lately. As I mature as an artist I feel I have something to offer young players.

That's something I'm getting more into. For the Jazz Gallery concert I play a set of solo and a set of trio. I did a fun solo concert back in January at St. Peter's Church in New York. I mentioned the Eastman thing. When I was at Tufts Paul Bley once gave a master class. I remember he came in and said he liked playing solo piano because the more people you have playing with you the more chance there is for them to ____ you up. I know what he means now. One of the things I love about solo is I can do whatever I want--I make all the decisions. I'm a little bit of a control freak, as anyone who's worked with me will tell you. Of course one of the beautiful things about jazz is the interaction with other people. I don't think I'd want to do only solo.

It's a cooperative band with Jamie Baum, Virginia Mayhew, Nicki Parrot, and Allison Miller. It's a really fun project. We played at the Kennedy Center in the Women's Jazz Festival. We played at the Blue Note last summer. We did a tour of Missouri about a year ago and we're going back this year. Everybody in the band writes and arranges. We have a CD, but it's not in the stores yet.

You don't need a computer science degree to do a website--I just use Netscape Navigator. I do have a degree in computer science. I worked for a very good company, Digital Equipment, for a year. I quit because I wanted to be doing music. Even though I've never made as much money as I made that first year I haven't regretted it even when things have been tough.

Web site

I handle everything myself. It has my itinerary and people can contact me through it--send me an email or post to my message board. They can give me feedback or talk about whatever they want--ask questions about jazz. It has sound samples from my latest CD's and from a gig with the electric band. They're real audio, not MP3.

http://www.robertajazz.com