#Joey jazz piano prodigy how to#

#Joey jazz piano prodigy how to#

He will have all those experiences in the years to come, and he’s well positioned to incorporate them into his music, because he already knows how to build drama out of conflicting themes and temperaments on the piano. So you don’t get the darker emotions and lustier rhythms you hear in a more mature musician, but that’s not Alexander’s fault. Of course, it’s the experience of a 12-year-old kid who has never had his heart broken, his pride dented by an employer or his confidence shaken by failure. He understands that jazz is not an Olympic competition where the gold medal goes to the athlete with the fastest fingers, but rather an effort to convey one person’s internal experience to another. It’s this maturity, this refusal to overwhelm the listener with technique, this willingness to seduce the listener with suggestion and substitution, that make Alexander such an atypical prodigy. Soon he was comping sympathetically behind Russell Hall’s upright bass solo and playing triplets with the right hand against the 4/4 chords in the left. A hard-bop number in the 1950s vocabulary that Alexander prefers, the pianist began by banging out the blues changes, but he quickly shifted the dynamics downward to contrast the assertive opening with a quieter passage. He started his trio set with “Ma Blues,” the one original tune on the debut recording. Though he tossed off the occasional brief flurry of velocity, this diminutive keyboardist displayed a restraint that’s all too rare, even in thirtysomething musicians. But that wasn’t Alexander’s approach at all. We’re all used to young hotshots who build a reputation on just two aspects of a musician’s skill set: speed and accuracy. When he started playing, however, he was nothing like the usual jazz prodigy. Once he climbed onto the bench (cranked up high), his blue tennis shoes didn’t reach the pedals. But he was all business as he prepared for the set, giving the stage crew very specific instructions on how to position the mics within the piano. With his baby-fat face, thick mop of dark hair, black-frame glasses and white T-shirt stitched with the motto “Enjoy Being Fun,” he looked closer to 9 than 12. Jazz fans may become blasé about 19-year-old virtuosos from Berklee and Juilliard-not to mention 54-year-old alumni of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers-but a 12-year-old prodigy from Indonesia? That they’ve got to see.įor those lucky enough to squeeze into Storyville, two things were surprising about their first encounter with Alexander. He was still 11 when his debut album, My Favorite Things, was released on Motéma Records in May, an event recognized by a front-page feature story in the New York Times. Who were these people so desperate to see? Joey Alexander, the Indonesian-born, now New York-based piano prodigy who had turned 12 five weeks earlier.

People were standing in line for seats they would probably never get. When I arrived, I assumed that the building hadn’t opened its doors yet, but no, the venue was already full. 1, a long line snaked from Storyville’s entrance all the way to a distant row of food vendors.

It was tucked inside a brick building outside the walls of the 19th-century stone fortification. In August, the Newport Jazz Festival added a fourth venue, the 100-seat Storyville Stage, at Fort Adams State Park.