Pianist Kiefer Shackelford — who records simply as Kiefer — has spent much of his career moving between musical worlds.
He came up studying jazz piano in Southern California, but first became widely known through the Los Angeles beat scene, eventually producing for artists including Anderson .Paak and playing on Drake’s “Knife Talk.”
Now, with the release of Memory Bomb, his first solo album for Blue Note Records, those different parts of his musical life have come together. But the path from jazz pianist to beatmaker wasn’t exactly planned.
In his early twenties, Kiefer was preparing to audition for what was then called the Thelonious Monk Institute when he injured his hand.
He remembers, “It was so bad I couldn't make a fist and bend my wrist on one hand. I stopped playing piano for probably six months. And I was like, ‘Well, let me just focus on this other art form that I'm into musically, which is beat making.’”
He could still use his other hand enough to make music. And without the piano to occupy him, he started concentrating on things he hadn’t thought as deeply about before.
“Let me just train my ear in this other world, like work on my sound design and my mixing and my grooves and my micro timing of how I fit in the cracks rhythmically and try to figure that thing out,” he says.
By the time his hand recovered, Kiefer had made most of an album. And he had discovered something else.
He says, “Then I realized like, ‘Oh my God, I love this. I love all of these other artistic objectives.’ Like, I love making albums. I didn't know that about myself. I love mixing. I didn't know that.”
The experience also changed the way he thought about playing the piano.
Instead of extending his playing through increasingly complicated harmony or faster tempos, Kiefer became interested in how much could happen inside a small amount of musical space — through simplicity, phrasing, and tiny variations in rhythm.
He explains, “If you're working with the most fundamental elements and that is where your tweaks are made — for example, if you're flying a plane and in the first couple minutes of the flight, if you change your direction by one degree, you'll land a thousand miles away.”
That approach fit naturally into the beat scene developing around Los Angeles, where Kiefer came up around Low End Theory and a generation of musicians and producers moving freely between jazz, hip-hop and electronic music.
But years later, he realized that some of what he thought he had learned through beat-making went back much further. One of the records Kiefer’s father played constantly when he was growing up was Sonny Clark’s Cool Struttin’.
“I made a whole entire body of work, like four or five albums, just with just back phrasing everything. And then you go back and you listen to Sonny Clark, you're like, ‘I probably got that from listening to Sonny Clark.’”
And now Kiefer has released Memory Bomb, his own debut for the same label that made Cool Struttin’: Blue Note Records.
Earlier this year, he appeared on the label as part of FATHERS, with bassist CARRTOONS, drummer Nate Smith and producer Kenneth Blume.
For Kiefer, what matters about the Blue Note tradition isn’t a particular recording sound or period. It’s the individuality of the musicians who made those records.
He says, “The thing to me is individuality. I think in jazz there have been thousands of great recordings, and I think the Blue Note ones — you gotta bring your thing.”
Kiefer’s thing has been shaped by jazz piano and hip-hop, by beat-making and sound design, and by learning to hear what can happen in the smallest spaces inside the rhythm.
Memory Bomb, Kiefer’s solo debut for Blue Note Records, is out now.
