Jazz trio says art of improv is in playing Canadian group hones boogie-woogie style

When boogie-woogie pianist Michael Kaeshammer and his trio performed last Friday at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono, the audience was wowed by the speed with which Kaeshammer’s hands moved across the keyboard. His fingers were a blur of motion. He whipped out jazz melodies with his right hand – and his left hand moved at twice the speed. Then he would play feathery, tender phrases that were so tiny and fragile that even he would have to lean into the piano to hear them. After the show, Kaeshammer and his fellow Canadian musicians, bassist Simon Fisk and drummer Damian Graham, spoke with me onstage about their history as musicians and as a group, about understanding improvisation and education, and about their lives on the road. The following excerpt from that discussion includes a few important questions from the audience. For the complete online audio interview, go to www.bangornews.com and click onto the Back Talk icon. – Alicia Anstead

Alicia Anstead: You’re playing a musical form that is essentially American. Do you think that as non-Americans, you come at it with a particular skill or perception?

Michael Kaeshammer: My dad used to play ragtime and he showed me some baselines when I was a kid. So I was always surrounded by that kind of music, even growing up in Germany. It didn’t matter for me where I grew up.

Anstead: When the three of you play on stage, do you think of it as a conversation, or as a team sport, or as a battle?

Kaeshammer: Sometimes it can be a battle. Sometimes it’s team sport. For me, it’s always having fun because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else that would be as much fun for me. … I love playing with these guys. It’s more like playing off each other than having a conversation.

Anstead: I think of jazz music as being club music or house music. You played in a very formal hall tonight. How does venue affect how you play the music?

Kaeshammer: It’s nice to play different venues. This is a beautiful concert hall. It’s also nice to play clubs. If you can get the best of both worlds, it’s nice.

Damian Graham: I think we have a lot more fun playing in small theaters because you have a different dynamic range you can achieve. When you’re at a club, you have to play at a volume so everyone can hear you. In the halls, you get to explore some of those quieter things that might get lost in a club.

Anstead: You each spoke about coming from a musical family, what advice would you give someone who doesn’t come from a musical family but finds himself or herself musical?

Graham: Find more people that are like you and play with them. The best advice I ever had from a teacher was: “Just go play with people. Play with people. Take your drums and set them up and play with everyone you can possibly play with.” Whenever people phone me for work, I always play with them, because that’s how you improve as a musician. Probably for anyone, that’s the best thing to do. No matter what you’re doing, find some like-minded individuals that want to do or pursue the same avenues as you. Playing with people is the best way to learn. With music, at least with jazz and blues, it’s more of an oral tradition, per se, as opposed to one written down in stone, especially for the boogie stuff. You learn most of it by ear.

Audience member: How much formal training has each of you had, and how much of it just came natural to you?

Kaeshammer: I had six years of classical piano. Then I quit and haven’t had lessons since I was 13. But that doesn’t mean anything. I learned all of this by ear and trying to figure it out myself. Now I wish I would have stayed in classical longer.

Simon Fisk: I think the grass is always greener. I went to university and got a degree in music and I look back on it and I didn’t actually learn to play until I got out of school and started to play with people. Now I have $30,000 in a student loan to pay off. So I wish I would have gone the other way.

Graham: As far as education goes, it’s really up to the individual. It’s a matter of being on top of it, forcing yourself to practice and listening to people you like. We’ve all had private teachers and every year we each have a lesson or two from people we still think are good teachers. There’s always stuff to learn.

Audience member: I’m a mediocre jazz musician, or used to be. The one thing that used to terrify me was improv. It was not my strong point. You guys sounded fantastic. My question is: Do you practice improvisation?

Kaeshammer: Yes, of course. You can sit down at home and play. That’s how I practice. You have to have some kind of vocabulary to start improvising. You listen to records and you copy some things.

Fisk: When you’re improvising, there’s really no such thing as a mistake. We screw up all the time. If you take a solo over a tune, like I did tonight – if that scared me, then it becomes a mistake. You [have to] trust the people you are playing with, and if you don’t know them very well, just play together all the time and learn to trust each other. We are a team. When I screw up, these two guys help me back on course.