Jason Yeager Finds His Time.
Framingham native, Berklee professor, and NYC-based pianist/composer Jason Yeager is returning to atac to celebrate the release of his seventh album, Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite on October 28th. We had a little chat about jazz, collaboration, activism, and the record.
Can you talk a bit about the relationship between jazz and political activism?
Black American Music, or jazz, by its very origins, has been political from the start. It’s also not an either-or…music can be danced to, can be entertaining, can be artistic, while at the same time being political. Duke Ellington’s Black Brown & Beige, premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943, strikes me as one of the great early examples of music that engaged with social activism. Ellington premiered a large-scale suite about the multifaceted experiences of African Americans in the US at the most prominent American concert hall dedicated to European concert music. That is not just political, that’s revolutionary! Charles Mingus’ Fables of Faubus and Maria Schneider’s recent masterpiece Data Lords are other great examples where breathtaking music also has a political message.
How does that spirit and tradition find its way into your own work?
In 2019, I released an album of political songs from Latin America, the nueva canción tradition, combined with original compositions inspired by that tradition. This album, New Songs of Resistance, was the result of my master's thesis at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute (artistically directed by Danilo Pérez), in which I researched and arranged nueva canción repertoire and studied its historical context. I’m aware that music is no panacea for the massive problems we face— it can’t stop climate change, or feed over a billion hungry people, or end racial and economic injustice—but through my study of the nueva canción movement in 1960s and 1970s Chile and Argentina, I learned that music can have massive impacts on collective action and activism, effects which continue for generations. In a very small way, I’m trying to build on that. For example, a portion of every sale of New Songs of Resistance is passed on to RAICES, a powerful grassroots immigrant rights and legal aid organization.
What’s it been like having Danilo Pérez as a mentor? Both musically, and personally.
Danilo has boundless creativity, energy, and empathy. When I first studied with him at New England Conservatory, it became clear that his playing, composing, teaching, and activism were all unified. He didn’t see any part of his musical life as separate from any other, or from life itself. Here is one of the top pianists in the world, giving back through his teaching and through his Danilo Pérez Foundation–which serves some very underserved populations in Panama. Danilo pushed me and encouraged me, helped me believe I could make a life of music. He also showed me it’s possible to make a life in music while making the world around you a little bit better.
You performed in Wuhan just before China shut down the city’s airport in response to the initial COVID-19 outbreak. Because of the pandemic, Wuhan is a place American’s mostly think of negatively; either from the conspiracy theory end of things or just for its relationship to the pandemic. I’m wondering if you can talk a bit about your experience performing there; musicians you met — to cast a broader light on the region’s culture.
Wuhan is a great city, and I’m grateful I got to know it before the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s sort of a crossroads of China, and has a Chicago-like role in the country’s economy. It’s right in the middle, and has regional cuisines from Sichuan, from the east, from Canton. The food is tremendous, and much more varied and interesting than what usually passes for Chinese food in the US. Wuhan is considered a second-tier city, because it “only” has 11 million people! So that throws into sharp relief the massive scale of China.
In Wuhan there are always new skyscrapers going up. They also have a state-of-the-art, massive concert hall called Qintai. One of the last gigs I played in China was at Qintai Concert Hall, for a crowd of 1,000 in January 2020! I think the global pandemic hit the newspapers the next day…Fortunately, I never got sick and tested negative for antibodies a few months later…I’m not patient 0! I can’t imagine what a traumatic period Wuhan and the rest of the Chinese population went through in the months that followed, with much more severe lockdowns than we experienced in the US. And the lockdowns and other impacts of the virus were certainly traumatic here as well.
Preeminent nueva canción musician Mercedes Sosa, with Félix Luna and Ariel Ramírez. (Wikimedia, Public Domain)Back to the USA. Best three jazz clubs in NYC and why..
This is not the most groundbreaking list, but two of my favorite jazz clubs, the Jazz Standard and Cornelia Street Cafe, closed down in recent years. So my favorites, of the remaining NYC venues, are as follows:
The Village Vanguard, because of the acoustics, the history, and the programming.
Birdland, because of the vibe, two stages, history & programming.
Smalls, because of the community, the earthiness, the swing.
You’ve collaborated musically with the award-winning vocalist Julie Benko, who also happens to be your partner. How did you two meet and what’s it like working creatively together?
Julie and I met in a Starbucks. Really! Completely by chance, and we had no friends in common. She struck up a conversation with me because she overheard me identify myself as a pianist to a singer I was speaking with on the phone, and she needed a pianist…I couldn’t believe my luck! We were friends for about a year before we started dating, and then we got married last year. In August 2022, we released our first joining album together, called Hand in Hand, on Club44 Records.
Collaborating with Julie is one of my favorite things. She’s one of the greatest singers around, and a consummate professional in every way. And during the height of the pandemic, we were each other’s sole musical collaborator, and our weekly “Quarantunes” livestream events eventually led to the recording of Hand in Hand. I really feel our relationship and marriage influences our musical life, and vice versa. The longer we’re together, as partners and as collaborators, the more intuitive we become in really listening to each other and taking care of each other, both in life and in music.
You’ve been teaching at Berklee College of Music for about a decade now; how has that process impacted your own writing and creative practice?
Teaching in the Piano Department at Berklee is a dream job. I’m privileged to get to share and teach what I most love doing with aspiring professional musicians from around the world. I learn so much from my students as well, including about new artists and repertoire. Some of my students go on to global touring careers, and others pursue meaningful paths on Music Therapy, Education, and Film Scoring. Almost all my students are pianists, but they have a huge range of interests and goals. It’s very gratifying.
Berklee’s Office of Faculty Development has also been very supportive of my artistic work—their Faculty Recording Grant supported my 2017 album United with Jason Anick, and their Faculty Development Grant contributed to the production of Unstuck in Time.
Are there any Berklee names you wanna drop? Some heads who have been particularly inspiring?
My Berklee faculty colleagues are among the best musicians in the world. I am so inspired by their work. I am also grateful to perform with several of them regularly, like Ayn Inserto, Jason Anick, Mark Walker, as well as Fernando Huergo and Mark Zaleski, both of whom are joining me on October 28.
As we’re celebrating the release of Unstuck in Time, give us a preview of what this project is about.
Unstuck in Time: the Kurt Vonnegut Suite is being released by the famed independent jazz label Sunnyside Records on November 11, 2022, Kurt Vonnegut’s centennial. This project is the culmination of almost a decade of composing, arranging, and performing for me. And I’m so excited and honored that the very first release celebration will take place as a concert at atac, where I played some of my first professional gigs growing up in Framingham!
The music is lively, vibrant, and contemporary. Each piece is inspired by a character from Vonnegut’s fiction, which is darkly humorous and funny, quirky, and heartfelt. I think these characteristics come through the music as well. Some pieces use actual words as points of departure, and others are more like an imagined film score cue for a scene in the movie that played in my brain when I read a particular Vonnegut story. Aside from Vonnegut, I feel that Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, and Charles Mingus are prominent influences in the writing on this record.
Smalls in NYC. CC BY-SA 2.0 Zhang Yu, 2012How’s it translate to being performed live on stage?
The album features my septet: three horns, vibraphone, piano, bass, and drums. At atac we’ll be sporting a leaner configuration: woodwinds master Mark Zaleski, electric bass wizard Fernando Huergo, and the virtuoso drummer Jay Sawyer. Many of the pieces I wrote were developed in a trio or quartet setting, so I know and love how they work with a smaller ensemble like this. In some ways, while we have fewer colors and tambres with which to play in the quartet, we also have more flexibility and spontaneity in a smaller group. And in addition to my compositions from the album, we’ll play a couple favorite jazz standards that are connected to Vonnegut in some way. We may also have another special guest join us, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy…
