Charlap Speaks

As articulate with words as he is at the piano, Bill Charlap gave a talk preceding his concert at the Earshot Jazz Festival in Seattle the other night. He spoke about the music that he, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington were about to perform, songs of George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein. In conversation with Seattle Times jazz critic Paul deBarros, Charlap contrasted Gershwin with Beethoven. Beethoven was a development composer, he said, and demonstrated how Beethoven married melody and harmony as he developed beyond the opening theme of his Fifth Symphony.
“With Gershwin,” Charlap said, “the melody and the harmony were not welded together, but they were cast.” He illustrated with the harmonic structure of “A Foggy Day” and Gershwin’s chord choices. He used “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” to point out Gershwin’s use of the seventh interval, “so American, so forthright.”
Asked where the standard songs of thirty-five or forty years from now will come from, Charlap pointed out that the musical theater that produced Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Kern and Arlen no longer exists, that Bernstein was the last of it. Stephen Sondheim’s songs “don’t quite meet our needs,” he said, “nor do the chords of Bob Dylan and R.E.M.”
The trio’s concert was splendid. I covered it for Jazz Times. I’ll let you know when the review is up on the JT website.
DeBarros mentioned Charlap’s recent duo CD with his mother, the singer Sandy Stewart, and came up with a question that turned out to be a straight line:

DeBarros: How many pianists get to accompany their moms?

Charlap: How many singers give birth to their accompanists?