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Aaron Goldberg: Growing as a Band Leader

By Joao Moreira dos Santos
August 7, 2007
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AG: I am happy with my label. Sunnyside is a great label, they have a lot of great music on it, the people that run it are music lovers and I respect them. They don't have a huge budget to invest in me; hopefully they will invest some money in me in the future but that just puts me in a position where I have to work a little bit harder to get all those puzzle pieces in place. It's a necessary struggle for artistic reasons. I want my trio to grow.

AAJ: What about jazz, how do you expect this music to develop?

AG: Jazz is not about copying stuff that came before you. It's about imitating, assimilating and then looking ahead and looking inside yourself to find out who you are. As long as you look inside yourself the music will continue to grow because people are changing. Each generation presents new types of people, new environments, and new personalities. So as long as we continue to look backward and forward and inside at the same time, and also draw from each other, each generation will create new music that is of the moment.

My generation is a perfect example of that: quietly, outside of the limelight, people like Omer Avital, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Joshua Redman, Mark Turner, myself (I hope), Avishai Cohen, Nicholas Payton... all of my peers have been making great, exciting new music that doesn't sound like something that came before. It doesn't sound like anything, it sounds like us. In that sense the community is strong again in our generation, so I have great high hopes for the future of jazz.

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