“That’s how I really started my career as a musician, I think. At nine he won the inaugural “Master-Jam” jazz festival, and when he was 10 one of his YouTube videos was spotted by Wynton Marsalis, the nine-time Grammy winner and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who invited him to play in New York. The family realised Alexander’s talent, and by the time he was eight they had uprooted to Jakarta so he could accelerate his learning closer to Indonesia’s jazz scene. His dad, Denny, was an amateur musician, and soon started taking his young son to jam sessions in Bali. Soul Dreamer, the last track on Countdown, was the first song he wrote, when he was 10 years old.Īlexander had taught himself to play the piano – using a mini electric keyboard – four years earlier. “And my dad will record it so I can remember it.”Īfter his dad records his explorations Alexander listens back and refines his work, spending about a month on each song. “I just explore chords and melodies and then suddenly these ideas come out to me,” Alexander says. He declines coffee or tea, although his agent promises him a post-interview tiramisu, and starts to tell me about his songwriting process. He looks like he could be in a very young boyband. He’s wearing a navy blue peacoat, skinny jeans and black sneakers, and has a Beatles-style haircut looming above thick framed glasses. The three of them moved here from their home country of Indonesia two years ago, and have settled in SoHo, a trendy Manhattan neighbourhood.Īlexander looks the part. The Joey Alexander Trio is at the National Concert Hall on July 12.We’ve arranged to meet in a steak restaurant in New York City, where Alexander has been living with his parents for the past two years.I think I am still being normal, you know. But nonetheless, he insists: “I do play video games, I watch movies. Life for young Joey now consists of performing, traveling and recording, with home schooling added in too. It is exciting, for sure, but of course, I am thankful to be able to travel around the world too.” It is the centre of jazz, that’s what people would say. “It’s has a different energy, and there are a lot of great musicians here that I’ve had a chance to work with. “I thought, being in New York, I could express more with the music I was playing than back home,” he says of the big move. Both that record, My Favourite Things, and Countdown, were nominated for Grammys. He played the Newport Jazz Festival that summer, moved to New York, and released an album that made him the first Indonesian to enter the Billboard Top 200. Having shown what he’d got, Joey and his family were soon in demand at the top table of US jazz. “I was a little bit scared of it but I was thinking positively: it was this one opportunity for me to show what I had got.” With the impetuousness of youth, Joey chose to play Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’, and his world changed overnight. In 2014, when he was just 10 years old, Marsalis invited Joey to play the the Jazz at the Lincoln Centre gala. This maturity beyond years was what struck the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who says he’s “never heard anyone who could play like him.” He gave Joey his chance to impress a big American audience. “I think of it as composing the moment, that’s what you are trying to do.” “It’s the freedom to express myself,” he says of jazz improvisation. His playing, especially on his new album Countdown, has a mastery of understanding and expression that any professional player would be proud of. With jazz, precocity usually runs into the brick wall of improvisation, which limits the depth of playing of most young players. The phrase ‘child prodigy’ is common for young pianists, but more in the classical realm than in the jazz one.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |