Like many of the talented jazz pianists on the scene today, Taylor Eigsti was a child prodigy, who started playing piano at the age of four. For some people, getting tagged with that loaded label can be a burden, but Eigsti has a different take. “I got an early start and I had a lot of people around me telling me I was good at something, which I think is good for any kid to hear,” he explains. “I've become grateful for having those opportunities when I was a kid. Sometimes it's hard at a certain point because you grow out of that and you want people just to take your music seriously. I am fortunate to grow up getting an early start because I figured out what I wanted to do really early on. I know that can be a struggle for a lot of folks in different ways.”
One of Eigsti’s early lessons was about the economics of being a musician. “I think I was eight years old when I realized that I wanted to do this professionally,” he says. “I had asked my dad about David Benoit, who was my favorite pianist at the time, ‘How much does David have to pay each time he performs?’ My dad replied, ‘Well, he gets paid to do that.’ I'm like, ‘All right, well, I'm a musician.’”
After releasing his first record as a leader (Tay’s Groove) at the age of 14, Eigsti would indeed go on to get paid (and to pay other people) for recordings and performances as both a leader and sideman. “I do feel thankful that other than that year when we were all stuck at home, I've just been on the road my whole life with really great musicians and that's got me through a lot of my life,’ he explains. “To know that that continues and I'm always being challenged and inspired by people around me, for me, it keeps me going.”
One of the ironies of Eigsti being singled out early for his individual talent is that the pianist and composer would later become widely known in the jazz community for his gifts as a collaborator. Someone who can make someone else sound better. The list of artists with whom he has not only played with, but truly collaborated with as a pianist, composer and arranger, includes Chris Botti, Terence Blanchard, Lisa Fisher, Gretchen Parlato, Kendrick Scott, Julian Lage and Charles Altura, all of whom except Botti are featured on Eigsti’s latest album, Plot Armor, released on the GroundUP label.
The album consists of 11 original compositions by Eigsti, along with two standards—“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “Nancy with the Laughing Face.” Anchored by his core trio featuring David Ginyard (bass) and Oscar Seaton, Jr. (drums), the recording seamlessly integrates the contributions of his many guests, including vocals from Fischer, Parlato and Stevens, as well as instrumentals from Lage, Altura, Blanchard, Scott, Ben Wendel, Dayna Stephens, Maya Kronfeld and Harish Raghavan. In addition, the album relies on the rich textures of a string section of Stephanie Yu, Corinne Sobolewski, Mia Barcia-Colombo and Jules Levy. It sounds like a lot, but it all comes together through Eigsti’s extensive experience as a composer and arranger.
Eigsti has been working with the dynamic vocalist Lisa Fischer for six or seven years now in a stripped-down duo format. “Lisa is someone that from the second we started playing together, there was just an instant connection,” he says. “She's just a different kind of person than I've ever met. She just kind of lights up the room. Just to be around her, she'll heal your back with a hug. She's a magical human being, and she's one of the most understanding, funniest, most generous, heartwarming, just a genuine, caring, person that I've ever known. For me, people's personalities are so tied to who they are as a musician. When you see the impeccable detail, the nuances and the depths that she goes to as a musician, paired with who she is as a human being, she's truly one of the most incredible people I've ever known. She's the only person I ever performed with where she gets standing ovations after every tune.”
The composition “Look Around You” that Becca Stevens sings on the album is appropriately special. It comes from “Imagine Our Future,” a project originally funded by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation through their 50 Arts Commission, commemorating their 50th anniversary. For this large-scale piece, Eigsti took 100 ideas from different local students in the Bay Area who all responded to the same prompt—Imagine Our Future. The contributions ranged from photography and artwork to poetry and lyrics, as well as other artistic expressions. “The idea with that particular work was that I wanted everyone to know that it wasn't a contest of meritocracy,” he explains. “To do that, I found a way to use every single idea in some small way or a big way. The leeway I gave myself in creating it was that all of the students would know at the end that it couldn't have possibly been the way it was without their contribution in it. We ended up having a performance by an ensemble of 12 people with Lisa Fischer singing everything. It was all synced to a nine-part film that I put together with all of their different artwork that was then animated in different ways.”
As a narrative framework, Eigsti created a protagonist of a time traveler who went back to 2018 in the ancient land of Northern California and whose world was ending in three days, and was thereby reliant on the input from the young people of that time and area. “It was interesting because you could take a cross section of people who live somewhere totally different, like in Jakarta or in Barcelona or somewhere else and it'd be totally different, but there were a lot of themes that were similar,” he says. “There were themes like technology, environment, hope, love, etc.”
The song “Look Around You” came from the environmentally conscious submissions. “I created that song [as] a personification between a little girl, a fish, a bird, and a rock. They're all talking to their mother.” Becca Stevens was originally supposed to sing the lead vocals on that song for the project, but she had a child and was unavailable. Stevens did sing the vocal lead on the album version. “The tune is about recognizing and acknowledging the little things around you,” he says. “I just wanted to have everything reflect that we don't get clarity from everything we do in life and in all corners of our life. Sometimes there's certain things that are deliberately blurry. I wanted things to reflect a certain sense of humanity in that way, throughout the record.” The animator Isabella Marconi created a music video now “Look Around You,” which was a first for Eigsti.
Another important collaborator is the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard in whose band Eigsti played for many years. As a fellow composer and bandleader, Eigsti has been inspired by Blanchard, whose diverse work extends beyond the e-Collective band that Eigsti has been in. A prolific film score composer, as well as the composer of operas for the Met, Blanchard is also the artistic director of SFJAZZ. “Terence is really inspiring to be around, for all of us in the band, because he's so prolific,” he says. “He has his hand in a lot of places but one thing that's particularly inspiring to me is the fact that he plays as a sideman in Herbie Hancock's band. I've always looked at my career as I've been blessed to be able to create my own music and do my own projects. But a massive part of who I am is being a sideman in groups of people that I really care about. I hope that in my whole entire career, when I get to be an old man, I'd be able to do my own shows. And I hope I'm still playing in these groups of other people that I love because for me, when you're playing with family, you can kind of take ego out of the picture.”
The guitarist Charles Altura is also like family to Eigsti. The two met and started playing together when Eigsti was just 10 years old and attended the Stanford Jazz Workshop camp with him. The two have a long musical bond not only in their own groups but also in Blanchard’s band. Altura takes a remarkable solo on the album’s first track “Let You Be.” Eigsti wrote the tune about dealing with his own real fear of bees. “I was having a sandwich outside one day and there was a bee that wouldn't leave me alone,” he explains. “I decided to just let him do his thing, whether I get stung or not. That tune is about appreciating the things that you can't do and shouldn't control. Charles takes this incredible solo at the end where he becomes the bee experiencing the freedom from my condescension.” Indeed, Altura’s buzzing guitar tone and flurry of notes throughout the track fits that description.
“I wanted this to be the first album where Charles Altura was happy with his solos,” Eigsti jokes about his perfectionist friend. “During Tree Falls, my previous record, we'd be on day four or five of tracking. The string quartet was in there and or it'd be a woodwind day and Charles would come back and he would come into the room and say, ‘I would like to rerecord all of what I played.’”
Recorded shortly after the death of Eigsti’s mother Nancy, the album has as one of its themes, grief and resolution. “My mom had dementia over the last five to 10 years of her life and when it got really bad, her personality had kind of left her,” says Eigsti. “To plan her service, I needed to get to know her again and I did that by going through a lot of her writings—her journals and old emails. I found a lot of things that my mom meant for me to find which were some of her writings. She always wanted to have her stories and her words published. She was really talented. I took a combination of all of those things and I turned it into lyrics, to tell the story of a frustrated writer aware of her deteriorating mental condition. Lisa was the only one that I wanted singing that song (“Fire Within”) and Julian Lage playing it because I consider both of them like family. It was a really special experience to have Lisa channel my mom's emotions. I wanted to do something to honor my mom and publish her words." He also recorded the standard “Nancy with the Laughing Face,” written by Jimmy Van Heusen and, yes, the comedian Phil Silvers. The song popularized by Frank Sinatra was a favorite of his mother’s, and he performed it as a solo piano piece in her honor.
The other non-original on the album is the Rodgers & Hart standard, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” which Eigsti said he wanted to feel different than the usual romantic rendition. “Everyone sings those first couple of verses in ‘Bewitched,’ like someone who is so fascinated by someone. But then you get into these later verses and you have ‘My eyes at last, wise at last, are cutting you down to your size at last, bewitched, bothered and bewildered no more.’ I'm like, ‘This is someone getting over someone else.’ If at the end of the story, there's a resolution here, then why not do an arrangement of the song that would honor that? [Laughs.] Also, I have more experience with the breakup side of things than being bewitched all the time.”
The album was released on the GroundUP label run by Snarky Puppy bandleader and bassist Michael League, who’s produced recordings for a multitude of artists. Eigsti met League more than 10 years ago and over the years has performed both with Snarky Puppy and in a trio with League and drummer Eric Harland. Eigsti said that he was attracted to the label not just because of League’s talents, but also because of the diversity of the artists on the label. “All these different people that I really love being around are on the roster of this label. I think they really embrace the fact that I've played straight ahead jazz my whole life. But I think whatever weird combination of things my music is, it kind of fits their family of folks pretty well. I think it's a whole label of people who you have a hard time pinpointing exactly what their music's about. I'm inspired by everything and then whatever blend comes out is, is just a mixture of trying to emulate everyone else. I tell students that sometimes you hear your own sound when you fail in emulating other people and over time these influences just kind of get assimilated and comes out. I think where the music is headed in a lot of ways is a big combination of those things. I think GroundUP is at the very forefront of where music can be headed. They're an incredible team of people that have been so embracing and welcoming of me. It's an honor to be on their label.”
That diversity of sounds in his music is not just confined to the jazz sphere. Eigsti has a long history of composing for classical orchestras and ensembles. “I started collaborating with the Peninsula Symphony in the Bay Area in 2006,” he explains. “We would do shows together and they would let me design the show and premiere some new things which was an opportunity when I really started doing that.” Eigsti will be doing two new shows of his music with the Peninsula Symphony on October 5 and 6, 2024, including material from Tree Falls and Plot Armor, and as well as from Rhapsody in Blue. “Over the years I've written probably around four hours or so of symphonic music and a lot of people in the jazz world don't know that it's something that I'd love to do more often. They are such big events that take a lot of planning and time.”
However, Eigsti’s unique ability to write for an orchestra did come into play for the two most recent albums. “Part of why both Tree Falls and Plot Armor have a layered orchestra on them is to basically have some of that sound on a record because it's something that I've learned a lot from just diving into that. I've had a chance to work with so many orchestras, both with Terence [Blanchard] and Chris [Botti] over the years. My favorite instrument to play with is 80 people that think in one brain. It's just a really special experience. I ended up making these records that are hard to fully tour for, because they have so many components on it.”
Despite a long career performing both as a leader and a sideman, Eigsti thinks of himself primarily as a composer. “I really do live and breathe composing. It's something that you have to practice, just like playing music. [It] involves just getting some bad ideas out along with the good and being okay with that and not getting too down on yourself that you created a terrible idea because if you expect that it's going to happen, then it's not a surprise. You're like, ‘Okay, maybe the good idea will pop in tomorrow.’ You just never know. Sometimes it really saves me to be able to compose, because there's just been a lot of traumatic life events so to be able to create stories out of it and put it into song is healing.”
He said that he learned something from working with Gretchen Parlato over the years. “She taught me that sometimes you could have a personal story embedded in your lyrics and that once you create the tune, you let it evolve into an actual song, then it doesn't have to be personal anymore. It just turns into a character and a story. I always found that really inspiring and a relief in a way because it meant that I could put more of my personal emotions into tunes and then allow that to be a part of a healing process for me and letting that escape.”
He also was inspired by the last time he saw his mentor, Dave Brubeck. “I believe it was maybe a couple months before he passed away, and it was at his house in Wilton, Connecticut. He was sitting at the dinner table. He was 90 or 91. He had a little Casio keyboard sitting there at the dinner table. He's still working out ideas, even when he was too frail to be able to go out and perform at shows at that point. He still had ideas coming out of his head. That was something that stayed with me. For me, one of the coolest things that I've been fortunate to do is to be able to write, record and perform my own music. It feels authentic. While I love playing other tunes and standards and other people's music, there is something really extra special about playing tunes that you composed and created and went through a battle to get there.”
Listen to our conversation, above.
Eigsti will be performing with the Gabe Terracciano Group at the Zinc Bar in NYC on May 8.
He will also perform with the Harish Raghavan Quintet (w/Walter Smith III, Lage Lund, Kendrick Scott and Raghavan) at The Jazz Gallery in NYC on May 31 and June 1.
And he'll perform with vibraphonist Christian Tamburr in a set paying tribute to Chick Corea & Gary Burton at Dizzy's in NYC on June 12.
Finally, he'll appear with the Terence Blanchard Sextet at the upcoming Saratoga Jazz Festival on June 30.
