Denny Zeitlin: With a Song In My Heart: Exploring The Music of Richard Rodgers

Musical memories from childhood have a way of sticking. For some, it might be an encounter with Beethoven from a dusty stack of old albums packed away in the parental record collection. For others, it might be the (then, 1954) modern surge of Bill Haley and the Comets shaking, rattling and rolling into the kitchen to make some noise with the pots and pans. Or maybe a chance discovery of 78 RPM records in the garage containing Al Dexter's 1942 hillbilly honky tonk tune "Pistol Packin' Mama" (Okeh Records). It is different for everyone.

For pianist Denny Zeitlin, one childhood musical memory that would not let go came from a trip to the playhouse with his parents to see Richard Rodgers' Oklahoma!

Fast forward to 2025. Jazz pianist Denny Zeitlin—who doubles as a professor of clinical psychiatry and also as a psychiatrist—has established an annual ritual of playing solo recitals at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, California. All of these shows have been recorded, most of them released as albums, including tributes to Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and George Gershwin.

Zeitlin's early encounter with Oklahoma! brought the pianist to a 2021 examination of the composer's music, recorded at his home studio and at the Piedmont Piano Company. The result is With a Song in My Heart: Exploring the Music of Richard Rodgers.

Zeitlin has honed the fine art of interpretation and re-examination of the standards to a razor-sharp edge. Rodgers wrote lovely tunes, some of the most covered music in existence. Zeitlin chose eleven of these and dove in. He proves himself again as one of the jazz world's most adept and daring interpreters, working with the established melodic frameworks and taking them to unexpected places, going 'out there,' sometimes wildly out there, while maintaining threads, sometimes tenuous but always present, to the melodic themes written by the composer. Nobody does it better, as Carly Simon once sang.

"The American songbook divides," Zeitlin explains in his liner notes, "into love 'lost' and love 'found.'" The universality of these themes, combined with Rodgers' compositional acumen, is what makes these songs classics. The title tune that opens the set combines both the lost and found themes, opening with a wistful improvised reverie, motifs from the original score floating in like butterflies. Then the main theme steps out front in a stately manner, reharmonized with rhythmic shifts and an eventual evolution that moves to a freewheeling improvisational verve, the fingers on the keyboard sounding as if they are giving off sparks. And this serves as a summation of Zeitlin's approach to all of these interpretations.

Zeitlin, a multi-talented man, could have taken many individual paths in life: psychiatry, teaching, jazz, movie scoring—his futuristic electro-orchestral soundtrack to the 1978 remake of the sci-fi movie classic Invasion of he Body Snatchers says he could have immersed himself in writing for the movies as a lifelong affair. However, his decision to pursue multiple paths and excel in each one has worked out just fine. More than fine.

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