Taylor Eigsti

 Jazz is a nebulous thing.  If we were to believe the younger generation, jazz could be anything.  Somehow Jazz, the musical title originally spelled Jass, has become the melting pot.  Jazz is a specific style of improvised, swing-based, American popular music.  This style of music evolved from the early 1900's, like Western orchestral music from the Middle Ages.  European and Soviet style periods have become well known, but he style periods of American jazz are not so defined.  Because America is an immigrant nation, jazz is an immigrant music.  It chose America as its place of synthesis, because Communism would not allow its fruition.  The freedom found in America with its capitalist market enabled the birth of jazz.  Jazz is rife with worldly influences, but the most recognized styles are Bebop, Cool Jazz, and Big Band Swing.  Trumpeter Miles Davis created three including Modal Jazz and Fusion.  While taking the General Exams required for the DMA degree in music composition at Ohio State University, Dr. Ted McDaniel asked me a perplexing question.  He asked if the evolution of jazz over a century was a consistent seeking of freedom.  Did the improviser and his melodic ideas seek freedom from the accompanying rhythmic/harmonic framework?  In other words were your solo improvised lines, melodies, or phrases based upon the chords?  Did you strictly have to adhere to these harmonies, chords, or changes to spin your solo?  Was the evolution of jazz simply a freeing of the solo from the chord structure of the song?  Modal jazz achieves this substituting a mode or scale for complex chord changes.  The "Blues" musically are a mode or scale similar to its ancient Greek Dorian counterpart.  They create a mood.  Gregorian Chant has a specific mood which is contemplative, pensive, and reverent concerning Christ.  Add human suffering and sorrow to this equation and you may get the "Blues."  There are more piano styles found in American jazz than Western music.   Ragtime was first and Stride a close second.  Bebop, Gospel, and Latin all have contributed to the jazz piano vocabulary.  They are well studied and documented in professional and academic circles.  Evidently there is one style that has been missed, and it is the style of pianist and composer Taylor Eigsti.  On Friday evening I attended a "Friends of Music" program at Methodist University and heard Taylor play jazz piano.  I left with no feeling of jazz, and yet this was how the concert was billed.  Mr. Eigsti played some jazz compositions by Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Dave Brubeck, but none of them were played in a rhythmic style that was related to the lineage jazz piano.  Duke Ellington's "Caravan" was his finale, and while fast and virtuosic didn't feel like Ellington.  It didn't  acknowledge Duke Ellington or his musical aesthetic.  Feeling "like Ellington" is an important concept in jazz, because feel is a foundation.  Jazz cannot be played authentically without the appropriate feeling.  Feeling in jazz music mostly is of African-American origin.  Boldly it stems from the oppression of slavery.  White musicians have contributed to the stew, but the vocabulary of American jazz is different from its Western roots.  French Impressionism may be the most similar, but jazz provides the soul and identity of America.  Academics were looking for America's next great composer, and it was George Gershwin, but blacks provided the vocabulary, expression, and artistry of jazz.  I listened intently to Tayor Eigsti's musical content and did my best to understand it.  There were themes in his pieces, but they were disguised by his chosen rhythmic approach on the piano.  He devised a style of his own reminiscent of Pop.  It didn't swing.  There was no clave.  There was the underlying feeling of Aram Khachaturian and the driving rhythms of his piano composition "Toccata."  I heard licks from this piece and several others leading me to believe Mr. Eigsti may be a competent classical pianist, although this concert was billed as jazz piano.  It was not, and calling his program "Jazz Piano" was erroneous and misleading.  He played jazz chords.  He played jazz compositions.  Nowhere in the program was a connection with the history of jazz piano except his choice of songs.  The acoustics in the new Worship Center at Methodist University are cavernous like the Botanical Garden.  Its ceiling is high and vaulted wood.  While they did purchase a wonderful Yamaha C7 piano for this concert space, the echoing acoustics don't do it justice.  Carpet or rugs could be installed to remedy this ailment.  His piano thundered most of the time.  There are Western piano styles that thunder as well.  I see no point in exploiting only one pole of the piano/forte compliment.  That Christofori's unique and groundbreaking mechanical action improving on the limitations of the harpsichord and clavichord emerged in a large modern keyboard instrument gave advent to the ability to play both piano and forte.  Mr Eigsti did settle down later in his program and played more intimately.  Thus the audience was able to absorb his intent with less audible effort.  The storm that ensued mostly was indiscernible.