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ELDAR'S TRIBUTE TO OSCAR PETERSON
Friday night at Carnegie Hall's Tribute to Oscar Peterson was monumental. Eldar really rose to the occasion and shook up the house playing Oscar's "Place St. Henri" with Christian McBride and Lewis Nash.
ELDAR ON CBS SATURDAY EARLY MORNING SHOW JUNE 30th!
Eldar and his band will appear on "The CBS Saturday Early Show" to be broadcast nationally on Saturday June 30th. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements
On re-imagination, recorded last December, Eldar, then six weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, had something more ambitious in mind. He conceived the project as a sort of suite, weaving together nine originals, the songbook standard Out of Nowhere and Oscar Peterson..s rollicking Place St. Henri into a narrative arc. Joining him are three different trios (bassists James Genus, Carlos Henriquez, and Marco Panascia and drummers Terreon Gully, Ali Jackson, and Todd Strait), while guitarist Mike Moreno and turntable guru D.J. Logic augment the sonic palette.
..This is the first record I..ve done where I focus more on composition than playing standards or working in the standard setting of a trio,.. says Eldar. ..Unlike anything I..ve done in the past, it..s a very personal statement rather focusing on a certain tradition or vibe, or on genres or labels. It's more an enhanced version of a piano trio that..s just making music...
..Of course, it..s a very pianistic record,.. Eldar adds, ..It states certain things that only a piano player would say, because of the way piano is laid out..horizontally, like a symphony orchestra..and the way the ideas flow. Compositionally, I didn..t want to restrict myself. I wanted to write in a more rhapsodic way, compositions with freer forms where you make the puzzles fit within a free-flowing expression.
..Many jazz records are made as a snapshot, a document of a moment that..s been captured, and because of their intrinsic honesty and expression they become classics that people listen to for a long time. I wanted to cross the lines..to present very organic tunes, things with a more produced sound, and also some solo piano songs. It..s meant to be a journey, not a departure...
Eldar accesses a wide range of references to tell his stories. As always, he draws on the legends..Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and Benny Green for orchestral swing and impeccable technique, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Kenny Kirkland for harmonic palette. But Eldar..s heady 21st century brew incorporates information from a broad range of late 20th century sources. Among the pianists he cites as heroes are Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Danilo Perez, Brad Mehldau, Bill Charlap, Esbjorn Svensson, and Jason Moran. Composer-improvisors like Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, and Kurt Rosenwinkel enter the mix. So does the jazz-hiphop synthesis of Roy Hargrove; the sophisticated pop of Radiohead, Bjork, Sting, Soulive and the Beatles; the classical pianists Evgeny Kissin and Arcadi Volodos.
Eldar..s path from Bishkek to the United States is the stuff of jazz legend. At nine he performed at a jazz festival Novosibirsk, in Siberia, and impressed the late Charles McWhorter, a New York based jazz patron. McWhorter obtained a scholarship for Eldar to attend summer camp at the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, where he spent each summer between 1998 and 2001. In 1998, he and his parents moved to the U.S., beginning their new life together in Kansas City.
During these years, Eldar continued to develop and impress everyone who heard him. Marian McPartland invited Eldar to appear on her NPR series Piano Jazz after McWhorter sent her a tape of his playing. Dr. Billy Taylor encountered him at a Charlie Parker symposium in Kansas City and booked him for an appearance on CBS..s Sunday Morning. Also in Kansas City, Eldar played for the Jazz Musician Foundation, before Michael Greene, then head of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, who booked Eldar to play on the 2000 Grammy Awards telecast. In 2001, Eldar participated in the jazz piano competition of the 2001 Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival and won the top prize. The following year, he won first place in the Peter Nero Piano Competition.
From then until now, Eldar has performed on the international festival, club, and concert circuits, while pursuing his education in jazz harmony and improvisation with Kim Park and John Elliott. His family moved to San Diego in 2003, and in Fall 2005, he matriculated at the University of Southern California, where he studied improvisation with pianist Shelly Berg.
Now a full-time musician, Eldar is happy with the trans-genre approach. ..I..m not looking at labels,.. he says. ..I..ve never heard music as one style or another..as bebop or swing, or the Romantic or 20th century period of classical music. It..s more about whether music connects, whether it has a message. The message is the most important thing. I want to be a musician and I want to be an artist..not just a piano player.
