Interview: Renee Rosnes

I've always loved Renee Rosnes's piano—on albums and in concert. She appears on stage, politely recognizes the audience and then disappears into a stormy world of musical energy, complex originality and passion. So it was gratifying to have the opportunity recently to interview and write about her new album for The Wall Street Journal's Arts in Review section. 

I've known Renee's husband, Bill Charlap, for years and have huge admiration for him. He's a gorgeous, exceptional jazz player and accompanist. As for Renee, I didn't know much about her. There has always been a Sphinx-like solitude about her, and I wanted to find out what made her tick, how she became so accomplished and how she and Bill interact. I also wanted to understand the creative thinking that went into her exceptional new album, Kinds of Love (Smoke Sessions), which, in my opinion, is her finest to date.

Here is my interview with Renee (pronounced REE-nee) conducted over the summer. Because this interview is long, I'm going to leave it up for two days—today and tomorrow, Friday:

Jazz Wax: Do you go out of your way to keep a low profile? Renee Rosnes: I find that a difficult question to answer. I haven't purposely stayed away from the limelight. I've been out here, as you know, for a very long time. I came to New York at the end of 1985 and worked ever since. I've been a sidewoman to many jazz giants. I've also recorded many of my own albums as well as performed as a leader. I am almost anybody's guest pianist.

JW: True. Which brings us to the bigger question: For years, women in jazz have been treated politely but not taken seriously by many in the jazz media. Do you think that’s changing with all of the new female jazz artists on the scene and your own work with Artemis, the all-female supergroup?

RR: Yes. I do feel a change in the weather there.

JW: What’s different about your new album that you hadn’t tried before?

RR: I had a concentrated amount of time to work during the pandemic and lockdown of 2020. Normally, my life is so busy running here and there on tour. And, of course, with two musicians living in the house together, it's difficult to find solitude to work in terms of composing. So the lockdown was something of an unwanted gift that allowed me to work on an entire suite of songs conceived within weeks and months of each other.

JW: You packed a lot in.

RR: It was a more condensed experience in terms of the composing. I had a lot of time to just have fun with it and to think about the musicians I was writing for and imagining what things could sound like, what the possibilities were. And of course, personally knowing everyone who was going to record with me and the addition of percussionist Rogério Boccato was very exciting to me. I love Rogério's playing. I even included a couple of pieces with the Fender Rhodes, which I don't usually play.

JW: And you're singing on a track, a background vocal, which I thought was tremendously exciting.

RR: Yeah, that was fun. I knew we didn't have any kind of budget to bring in real singers. So I thought, well, you know what? Maybe, just, maybe I could do this myself.

JW: Had you done any singing previously?

RR: Not publicly. When I was younger, living in Vancouver, I did sing. But no, not since I came to New York. So to be able to do that was great. I asked Rogério what he thought and if he would sing background with me. He said, “Sure, yeah, we can do that."

JW: Was it hard to do? Did it take many takes? Was there overdubbing?

RR: No, it was really quick. I did overdub a second harmony because it's a three-part harmony and we were just two voices. But yeah, it went by surprisingly quick. I sang the two high parts and Rogério sang the bottom..

JW: So you put that third harmony on at the end?

RR: Yes. I was so pleased with how it all turned out. It got me thinking, maybe I can experiment vocally in greater detail down the road.

JW: Are the songs on the album connected to a single story?

RR: Well, it does have a thread, in that each piece has something to do with love. But I wouldn't necessarily say that the whole album has that theme, even though it's being matched that way a little bit.

JW: Do you prefer recording in the studio instead of live in a club?

RR: Given that my compositions were all new, it would have been challenging to record live in front of an audience. The feeling and the experience of playing for a live audience is very different, of course. It's not the same attention to detail necessarily in the studio. I've never recorded a live album. Maybe one day.

JW: How often have you played with the musicians on the album?

RR: Chris Potter has been playing with me on and off for many years. He's very good, of course, as a leader and as a sideman. So it's difficult to get him. Christian, same deal. So this is more of an all-star band. We haven't recorded with Carl or Rogério before. Chris and Christian did record with me in 1997 for my Blue Note album, As We Are Now. That was a quartet, with drummer Jack DeJohnette. That's one of my favorite records of my own. It was fun to have them reunited with me after so many years. All of us have changed so much.

JW: What happened leading up to recording in the studio? Do you have to explain your music to them or what you're looking for? Or does everybody just show up and you kind of wing it?

RR: We had one rehearsal.

JW: My goodness. One rehearsal?

RR: Yeah, just one. That just goes to show you the level of the musicianship. I have a great amount of trust and I choose specific musicians because I already loved the way they played. I wanted them to be themselves, and I know they're going to be brilliant. So all I really need to do is give them what I perceive to be the basics. Then I allow them to explore whatever possibilities they inherently or innately feel once they hear the music.

JW: Your music sounds so intricately designed. Do you provide them with chord changes, and everybody works on them separately? Then when they come into the studio, everybody's ready to play what's scripted?

RR: The pieces are really pretty much through-composed in terms of the non-improvising parts. Certain pieces have specific baselines, something like Golden Triangle or Passing Jupiter. There are through-composed parts that are played, but then there's also a lot of room for interpretation. I do think the results are even more special when everyone is good friends.

JW: It's miraculous that the group could come together on this kind of material and be at the exact same level as you are, the composer.

RR: I had my breath taken away during the recording more than once. I'm not trying to sound vain or anything in terms of my own playing. I'm just saying the way that everybody was communicating and the fact that we hadn't been playing as much due to the lockdown, the humanity of making music together in a studio was mind-blowing. It was very emotional for me.

JW: I could hear that. I think that's what I was referring to early on, the emotional quality of this music. It moves like the surf. You can feel many currents pushing and pulling under the surface at the same time. Renee Rosnes: I love that.

JW: Why is Silk dedicated to pianist-composer Donald Brown?

RR: Silk is Donald’s nickname. I've been a fan of his writing and his playing ever since I first became aware of him. I first heard him with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers back in Seattle in 1981 or so. I began to follow his career. I think he's a very underrated performer and composer. When I was writing that piece, I heard some of Donald’s spirit.

JW: Does he know that you dedicated it to him?

RR: He does, yes. I sent him the track in Nashville just so he could hear it. He was overwhelmed and flattered. He said he loved the track and asked me for the music, which I sent to him as well.

JW: What a thrilling, amazing thing that must've been to hear from you and to hear the song.

RR: Well, he's one of the greatest composers. There's one album he made that I really loved, called Cause and Effect, with Ron Carter, Joe Henderson, and Carl playing drums. I think Kenny Washington is also on it, And James Spaulding. Actually, on my very first Blue Note album, in 1989, which was eponymously titled, I played one of his compositions called Playground for the Birds.

JW: And Kinds of Love, it's a ballad. Is there any significance to it?

RR: I haven't actually told this to anybody. When I was writing that piece, I was singing the melody and I was imagining I was Antonio Carlos Jobim. I'm a big fan and I especially love the vulnerability in his voice. It's so charming. You don't even care if there are a few notes that aren't totally on pitch, because the whole thing is just so attractive. As I was writing it, the melody was coming out not on the piano so much as in my voice.

JW: In Time Like Air—you were inspired by a bird singing outside?

RR: In the spring of 2020, every time I was out in the yard at our home in New Jersey, I kept hearing a bird sing this little line. I could never find out where the bird was. Since then, I’ve downloaded a bird app so I can hold it up and know what type of bird it is.

JW: Did the bird return this year?

RR: No. I was so sure the bird would return and I would hear it. I kept listening and waiting. I hoped that before we recorded I’d hear that song and identify the bird, but no such luck.

JW: Golden Triangle is fabulous. Of course, that was the name of the Village Vanguard when it was a former speakeasy in the early 1930s, when Max Gordon bought it and later renamed the club the Village Vanguard. Are you feeling the club as you’re playing?

RR: I love playing the Vanguard. I was just looking for a good title and Golden Triangle spoke to me. I also have a bit of a Chick Corea vibe as I’m playing.

JW: Evermore has a classical, funerary feel, almost like a pavanne. What did you have in mind there?

RR: During the pandemic, I was practicing a lot of classical music just for my own enjoyment and technique. I played a fair amount of Bach, and Evermore was inspired by a Sarabande from one of Bach’s English Suites. I was playing it one day and I just was enamored with the melody and began to improvise on the melody. I realized there was something special that could be further developed into a composition.

JW: Passing Jupiter—the planet or a favorite restaurant?

RR: [Laughs] No, no, the planet. I wondered what it would be like to fly through space. I'm a bit of an astronomy buff. I took university classes on the subject. I follow news about space and enjoy reading about it. If you look over the titles of my other albums and my original compositions over the years, you'll see I’m inspired by the universe. I wrote pieces called Black Holes, Orion's Belt, Malaga Moon and other titles like that. The seed of this piece actually came from a small phrase Lester Young played on “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” on Count Basie at Newport in 57. It was just a pretty little phrase that I wrote down.

JW: Life Does Not Wait for Me also has a Chick Corea feel, yes?

RR: Sure. I hear that, too.

JW: Why did you include the Portuguese translation in parenthesis?

RR: A Vida Não Espera is a lyric line from one of Jobim’s songs—Olha Maria. I wrote the piece and sent it to Rogério, who is Brazilian. He said the rhythms I'd written were connected to several dance groups from northeast Brazil. I think he said the Coco, the baiao and the xaxado. So he sent me various samples of those groups from different recordings and also some YouTube links. What I wrote was just from my heart, but then he was telling me, “Well, what you've written is this and that." So I was intrigued with all that. He mentioned that during the percussion solo he takes, the rhythmic underpinning of that is something called the Merakatu groove.

JW: How did he articulate that on percussion?

RR: He was using this low pitch drum called the zabumba. You write something and then all of a sudden you're learning, oh, wow, all these different things. I’m a fan of Brazilian music and many different Brazilian musicians. At one point, I recorded with the wonderful singer, Joyce. So it's definitely in my heart. One day I hope to fully explore that. I would love to make a whole record of Brazilian composition. Not just Jobim but Milton Nascimento, Edu Lobo and so many others.

JW: Is Swoop something beyond the obvious?

RR: Not really. Kind of just felt like the four of us playing a game of ball.

JW: Blessings feels modal. Is it?

RR: There's a section of it that you would call modal, but I don't really think in those terms. It has a darkness to it, but I also feel that there's a feeling of hope in it as well. It’s pandemic related.

JW: You grew up in North Vancouver?

RR: Yes.

JW: Did being adopted as a child make you more introverted and soulful growing up? Or does it play a role at all?

RR: I don't think being adopted played a role growing up. I grew up with two older sisters who also were adopted, and I always knew I was adopted. I didn't have any kind of big moment where I learned later on in life. I always seem to have known.

JW: Were you able to track down your biological mother?

RR: I did, in 1994. My mother, Mohinder Kaur Randhawa, came with an extended family, which was wonderful because now my son, Dylan, who is 23, grew up with my biological family as if I had grown up with them. What was most surprising about meeting my mother and her family is that they are Punjabi. They're Sikhs, so there was a whole new culture there to discover and become a part of. I'm grateful for that.

JW: Was it an emotional reunion?

RR: Yes. It turns out she isn’t musical. Whatever talents I was born with may come from my biological father, who passed away. I just figured this out over the last two years. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but he has several relatives in Scotland, England and Ireland who were quite talented in the arts. My great-uncle was a renowned political cartoonist. He went by the name of Gabriel but his real name was James Friell. His family was Irish. So I’m half Irish, half Punjabi.

JW: What was the most special aspect of reuniting with your mother?

RR: I've gained five more siblings. I'm the sixth, and I'm right in the middle in terms of age. I have three older siblings and two younger siblings, and that was just fantastic. One of them, Sheila, my sister, has a son I'm very close to—interior designer Aaron Aujla. He is marrying designer Emily Adams Bode. But it gets a little more amazing. Bill [Charlap], as you know, is distantly related to Dick Hyman. Dick has a grandson named Adam Charlap Hyman. He's also an interior designer. He's a young man in his 30s and he was mentoring my nephew, Aaron. Aaron had no idea he was related to Bill [Charlap]. In recent years, during a duet performance at 92Y by Dick and Bill, Adam put up a picture on Instagram that said, “Here's my granddad and Uncle Bill playing together." Aaron is very close with Adam. He saw this and said, “What? How that be? That's my Uncle Bill."

JW: Why did you start playing piano so young, at age 3?

RR: My mother says my two older sisters were taking lessons and I was just trying to imitate them because they were practicing and I wanted to do what they were doing. So I was getting up on the piano bench to try and imitate them. She thought, “Well, she's doing that. So let's start her now. Let's see if the teacher will take her." The teacher did, and that's why I started so young. Each of us played a string instrument as well. So, I played the violin from the age of five to age 18 and was also a member of the Vancouver Youth Orchestra. That was a big part of my musical life growing up.

JW: Were you a loner as a child?

RR: I feel much more like an introvert as an adult. I realized during the pandemic that I'm quite fine on my own. That was a bit interesting to me that people were missing other people. I do miss my family and I haven't seen everyone still for a couple of years. So it is difficult. But in terms of just being content on my own, I'm very happy to be on my own working. But as a kid, no, I think I was involved in a lot of activities. I was just a normal kid with a fairly outgoing personality involved in a lot of things. Our parents had us in skiing lessons and gymnastics and ballet and swimming. I even had elocution lessons, which is hilarious.

JW: You were turned on to jazz by your high school band director?

RR: Yes, he recruited me for the jazz band fully aware that I was a classical pianist at the time. He asked if I'd like to become part of the jazz band in school. I had no previous experience with jazz, nor had I heard it before. My parents didn't listen to jazz outside of accidentally hearing it on the radio.

JW: How did you figure it out?

RR: Bob Rebagliati, the band director, began giving me recordings to listen to. I had good ears. I had perfect pitch. In fact, both my older sisters had perfect pitch. I think that might've had something to do with us starting lessons at such a young age. We were just taught, that's an F sharp and that's a B flat, as if it were red and blue.

JW: Like a language.

RR: Yes, it was natural for me to play by ear, and before I played jazz or began to learn jazz, I was taking pop songs off the radio and playing them for friends. So playing by ear wasn't foreign to me, but certainly, the rhythms and the harmonies of what I was hearing were different and turned me on right away. I said to myself, “Oh my God, what is that?"

JW: at the University of Toronto, you studied classical, but then jazz became more important, yes?

RR: Well, yeah. I went to college in Toronto because I knew there was more jazz in that city than Vancouver, even though Vancouver actually had a very healthy jazz scene when I returned there before I came to New York. But yeah, I think it was during those years at university that I realized that jazz was my passion. I enjoyed it so much.

JW: After college, you moved back to Vancouver?

RR: Yes. I was there for about four or five years gigging. Then I moved to New York at the end of '85.

JW: You arrive in New York and Joe Henderson brings you into his band for his Punjab album. Was it recorded at Bradley's in San Francsico?

RR: Actually, before that, I worked with Out of the Blue, also known as  OTB—the band of young New York musicians assembled by Blue Note Records after their original pianist, Harry Pickens, moved on to other projects. Shortly thereafter, Joe Henderson hired me to join his quartet and was the first to take me to Europe on tour. Actually, that record is a bootleg recorded in Paris. There was no such club known as Bradley's in San Francisco.

JW: Where did you meet Bill Charlap?

RR: We were acquaintances on the scene for many years, but we really became friends during a trip to Japan on a 100 Gold Fingers tour in 2003. There were 10 pianists booked, along with bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Grady Tate, performing several concerts over the course of two to three weeks in Japan. Bill and I played a duet together and realized we had a very nice simpatico at the two pianos.

JW: How did you realize that? When you're playing piano as a duet with Bill for the first time on that tour, are you feeling something more than the music? Is that communicating? Could you hear through the music that there was something more there than just a colleague?

RR: Yes, but we waited a few years. Both of us had to recognize what was going on and then decide what we wanted to do about it and was it something that absolutely had to be done. In 2006, Billy Drummond and I divorced. Our son, Dylan Drummond, is now a guitarist and singer-songwriter in his early 20s. In 2007, Bill and I were married. Bill has two daughters from an earlier marriage—Sophie and Vivian. My stepdaughters are in their early 20s.

JW: How many pianos do you have at home?

RR: Two, both Steinways, nestled in the living room.

JW: Do you have to sign up for the space, as if  you’re reserving a tennis court?

RR: [Laughs] In normal times, we're both on the road a lot, so that's not an issue. We work it out. But during the pandemic and lockdown, there was so much time, it wasn't even an issue.

JW: Do you have your piano and he has his? Do you change pianos because they have different personalities?

RR: Bill changes pianos. I don't. I like my piano and I prefer to play my piano. I rarely play his piano, but he often plays my piano.

JW: Are they that different or are they both seemingly identical?

RR: They're identical, but they do have different, subtle characteristics. I'm used to mine.

JW: When you play duets, is it competitive or collaborative?

RR: Absolutely collaborative. It's always in service of the music.

JW: How does that work?

RR: It's a conversation, so it can go any direction at any given moment. We're very attuned to one another and we love each other's playing. And we do share the solo time, which is very helpful. Fortunately we have similar concept of where the beat is. So that just makes it that much easier to play together and stay buoyant within the music. Harmonically, any clash is a good clash. We're always orchestrating and listening to how we can complement each other. Sometimes that means changing range on the piano or playing with one hand instead of two. There's all sorts of ways of doing that.

JW: Are you and Artemis planning another album?

RR: Yeah, we'll be doing another one probably in the first half of next year. We have a new tenor saxophonist—Nicole Glover. She's wonderful.

JW: Raising a family used to knock women out of their discographies for years at the time. Not so today with you. What's the secret there?

RR: I don't know what the secret is. I always had room for both. My ex-husband, Billy Drummond, is a great father. We married in 1990 and he was obviously busy, too. But we were able to work out our schedules between the two of us so that Dylan was always cared for in the right way. Now Dylan is following in our footsteps, career-wise. He also was on the road with both of us. He came to Japan, he went to Thailand with me and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band when he was very small. So, it's a different kind of upbringing, too. I know other women musicians with children who take them along. It's not unusual to see Ada Rovatti with her beautiful little daughter, Stella Brecker, going on the Jazz Cruise together. It's the new normal.

JW: It's a different world today, isn't it?

RR: For sure. We've done Artemis rehearsals where Ingrid Jensen's daughter and Allison Miller's two kids are there playing together with a nanny while we rehearse. It's interesting and quite fascinating actually. We seem to work it out somehow. You fly by the seat of your pants and pray and do the best you can. What's different now is that this is accepted. Then again, I think kids today are more integrated into the parents' lives compared with back in the '80s or earlier, when you wouldn't have done that.

JW: I also think many husbands are more cooperative now. By virtue of where we are today, a couple has to work out a system where nobody's life or career is being sacrificed or compromised.

RR: Yes, absolutely.

JW: Which is great for women in jazz. She's able to continue on with flexibility rather than give up a career passion and regret that later on. 

RR: It's also great that women don’t just break off from the family and work. They are always connected to their kids. On tour with Artemis in Europe, Ingrid was FaceTiming her daughter every day in the dressing room before we went out on stage. Technology now allows you to have more intimacy with those you love, no matter where you are or what you are about to do on stage. You come off and pick up where you left off.