Ethan Iverson
Christina Hur: I know you actually talk about classical music, too. How did you come to be interested in both classical and jazz?
Ethan Iverson: Yeah. Well, I was a jazz fan first. And when I was even quite a little boy, 10 or something, I was trying to play jazz and so forth, but I guess I was always pretty good at reading music. And when I was exposed to more classical music, I got more interested in it.
Christina Hur: Mhm.
Ethan Iverson: Most of us play a fair amount of classical music as a kid. I did, too, but actually in high school—or even by junior high—I quit taking lessons, because I thought having classical lessons would be bad for me as a jazz player. I now regret that. I wish I’d stayed with the classical lessons, but you can’t change history. Anyway, since then, because of various interests in my life, things I’ve done… I mean, if you’re a piano player and if you can read music, you can work. Society still needs piano players, somehow. Despite everything. If you can accompany singers, if you can play for dance classes, if you can do wedding gigs, all this sort of stuff actually involves the printed page.
Christina Hur: Mhm.
Ethan Iverson: So, I’ve always been able to do any of those kinds of jobs to stay alive. And then classical music is sort of the ultimate version of the score. And what really is interesting about classical music is that you can command duration. Things happen over 5 or 10 minutes that you can’t do as an improviser. I love jazz. I wouldn’t say jazz is lesser than classical music. I think the greatest jazz and the greatest classical music are at the same space, but if you wanna inflect events—if you want to control what happens—using a score and classical music is the way to go.
Christina Hur: Mm-hmm. I personally really enjoy both classical and jazz. I discovered jazz only maybe 3 years ago, and I’ve really liked it since then, but I feel like classical—you know, as many others do, I’ve been playing it since I was a little kid. That’s really common, huh?
Ethan Iverson: Playing it on what?
Christina Hur: The piano. Yeah.
Ethan Iverson: Okay.
Christina Hur: Do you have any favorite artists or composers?
Ethan Iverson: Nothing would be too surprising. I’ve checked a lot of stuff, you know. I remember when I was your age, I was trying to read through some Beethoven sonatas, for example. You know, fantastic. I can’t regret that. Reading through Beethoven Sonatas is what it’s all about, really.
Christina Hur: Oh, okay.
Ethan Iverson: You know, in my 20s, I really got into Stravinsky. Then I really got a big crush on György Ligeti, the Transylvanian composer, so I listened to all of his stuff. There’s a British composer named Thomas Adès.
Christina Hur: Don’t know, but…
Ethan Iverson: Yeah, he’s just a few years older than me, and when his music hit just before the turn of the century, just in the late 90s, it really had an impact on me. But I also love Bach, of course, we all love Bach. I love Brahms, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of standard stuff. I’m a piano player, so I love Chopin. If you’re a piano player, you’ve got to love Chopin, you know, so…
Christina Hur: Yeah.
Ethan Iverson: It’s a wonderful world of music, for sure.
Christina Hur: Yeah, it’s interesting you emphasize Stravinsky, because I also really love 20th century classical music. I mean, I’m the biggest Prokofiev fan, if you know Prokofiev.
Ethan Iverson: Oh, nice.
Christina Hur: And Bartók, Scriabin, and… recently I’ve been wanting to get more into Stravinsky. I don’t really know much about him other than the Rite of Spring, Firebird, and Petrushka, but I think he’s really interesting, too.
Ethan Iverson: You know, the Bad Plus recorded the Rite of Spring.
Christina Hur: Wait, yeah, I’ve listened to that.
Ethan Iverson: So, I mean, in a way, I like that record because I don’t improvise. See, a lot of jazz pianists would feel they have to improvise. But I can play the Rite of Spring and just let it be. It still doesn’t sound like classical musicians playing Rite of Spring, especially the drums, but even the way the piano and bass go. So you know, I’m interested in a new kind of music where you can draw on the best of all the traditions.
Christina Hur: Mm-hmm, interesting. This is gonna shift towards a different direction, but what do you think it means to be a true jazz musician? Like if you were to describe one…
Ethan Iverson: I think it’s easiest to talk about specific musicians. Louis Armstrong comes to mind. Duke Ellington. You know, there’s nothing I play that isn’t connected to Thelonious Monk. Now, for some people, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell are very different. One is almost a rejection of the other. And I think the more you know, the more you can see how that’s true. Thelonious Monk plays a very specific collection of riffs and idioms all the time. And Bud Powell improvises these long, bebop threading melodies.
Christina Hur: Mhm.
Ethan Iverson: They’re quite different, but, you know… I can be influenced by both, as most people are. You know, so what is really jazz? I mean, I don’t really know. I can tell you Thelonious Monk is, I can tell you Bud Powell is. For my money, Ornette Coleman is. You know, some people would say Ornette isn’t really a jazz musician, because he never played changes the right away. I don’t care; I love Ornette Coleman.
Christina Hur: Mhm.
Ethan Iverson: They file him in the jazz department at the record store, so that’s fine.
Christina Hur: So your biggest influence… would you say is Thelonious Monk, or…
Ethan Iverson: Probably.
Christina Hur: Okay, yeah. Do you think your background in any way influences your music?
Ethan Iverson: I hope so. You can’t change where you’re from. I’m a white guy from Wisconsin, born in 1973. There should be a sound in my music that is my own folklore. You know, I can’t pretend I’m from New Orleans in 1904. So, you know, I really like Masabumi Kikuchi. He was a great jazz pianist. He was a friend of mine a little bit. I didn’t know him that well, but I even had a lesson or two with him. We knew each other anyway, and he passed away, sadly, but… there was definitely Japanese in his music. I can’t tell you exactly what.
Christina Hur: Mhm.
Ethan Iverson: But it was Japanese. I have another friend, Benoît Delbecq, he’s an influence on me. I mean, he’s so French. He lives in Paris, and there’s something in his jazz that I’m like, yeah, that’s definitely French. It probably has to do with some of the French composers, like Messiaen and so forth, but it also has something to do with something else, you know? The Bad Plus has had success, partly because we were influenced by… we sounded like indie rock a little bit.
Christina Hur: Mhm.
Ethan Iverson: Indie rock was the big sensation for all of us when we were teenagers. So we didn’t reject that sound—we allowed that sound in. And no matter what I’m doing, I always try to remember who I am. I might imitate Thelonious Monk, or I might imitate Stravinsky—I do it every day. I imitate these guys every day. But I also try to do them if they were me, if that makes any sense.
Christina Hur: Oh, okay. That’s cool. So when you’re improvising, do you have a certain aim, or do you just play?
Ethan Iverson: Well, if it’s slow enough, I try to play a melody. If it’s faster, then I’m probably playing more of just… you know, lines and something spontaneous… hopefully, you know, letting Tristano be an influence. There’s something about Tristano. It sounds like he’s improvising almost all the time. That’s a little different than Charlie Parker or Bud Powell, even though Charlie Parker and Bud Powell are also improvising. But there’s something that catches me about that Tristano—shock, the shock of a certain way a Tristano line will turn out—and I try to go for that if it’s at tempo or moving fast. Slower—then you’re trying to play the blues, you’re trying to play something pretty, you’re trying to play a melody. At least that’s the way I think about it.
Christina Hur: Okay. Do you have any thoughts on what makes “good” improv, or “bad”?
[Looking back, I realize this question was too broad and too “black and white,” especially for someone who has previously faced controversy over things said in his own interviews. His answer was valid and agreeable, but my phrasing likely prompted a “correct” response. It’s very possible he was playing it safe—my wording may have suggested there was a “right” answer, so instead of sharing his unfiltered view, he offered a balanced response that couldn’t be taken as controversial.]
Ethan Iverson: Well, you know, I think each to their own academy. Sometimes you say free jazz, but the people that are the great free jazz players… they all play their very specific languages. You know, Cecil Taylor is incredibly distinctive. Cecil Taylor plays the same stuff all the time. Ornette Colman plays the same stuff all the time. Albert Ayler, the same thing.
That’s also true of Miles Davis, and it’s true of John Coltrane. They play what they play—they play their languages. Probably anyone who’s great… they improvise, but it’s really contained within a quite tight aesthetic framework.
Christina Hur: Right.
Ethan Iverson: So I mean, a lot of the stuff, it’s hard to… it’s hard to… describe it unless you… you sort of know it when you hear it. When you hear a great jazz player, you’re like, yeah, that sounds like the right stuff. What… what is it? I don’t know—it’s probably different for everybody, too. That’s one of the great things about music. You can’t really say what it is.
Christina Hur: Okay. Do you play with the same people, or do you try to play with new people?
Ethan Iverson: I’m more attracted to developing relationships.
Christina Hur: Oh, I see.
Ethan Iverson: And in fact, if you look at my discography, I don’t have so many bass players I’ve played with, for example. There’s not so many drummers.
It’s a pretty tight grouping. Some people really like that first date feeling, and that can be fun, too. I mean, I don’t… sometimes I tour with a local, play with local rhythm sections. And it’s fun, you know, like you meet someone, and you have a good time playing for a gig.
Christina Hur: Mhm.
Ethan Iverson: Nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think that’s a good thing to be able to play your thing with a local rhythm section with no guaranteed chemistry. But a lot of the music I like the most… there’s linkages between the players, some kind of history, some sort of… agreed aesthetic meeting point that could develop over time, that has some obvious chemistry that will keep developing, hopefully.
Christina Hur: Mm, okay, I see. These days, what do you aim to do?
Ethan Iverson: Well, I guess I have a lot of stuff I’m trying to do—maybe too much—but I just led my sextet at the Village Vanguard, which was quite successful, actually. So that’s 3 horns… that was the first time I presented music with horns at the Vanguard, really. It was pretty much all original music.
[I had actually planned to hear his sextet at the Village Vanguard for my birthday, but an emergency came up and I unfortunately couldn’t make it.]
I still will keep playing trio. I like playing with legends, and so… in February, I’ll be playing with Buster Williams and Billy Hart at Birdland. That’s about as legendary as you can get in terms of rhythm section.
And I would say those are working from the opposite sides of the coin. In the sextet, I’m presenting my music, my compositions, and a certain idea about the future. When I’m playing with Buster and Billy, I’m thinking about… how do I keep learning from those true masters?
And then I’m also a composer, and in fact, this weekend I’m presenting new chamber music I’ve written with no improvisation. And then I’m also writing. I write on the Internet, you probably know. You know, I have a sub stack and all that. I have 10,000 subscribers…
Christina Hur: Wow.
Ethan Iverson: I can’t seem to stop. Also, I’ll keep writing more books. My first book is out. I helped Billy Hart write his memoir, Oceans of Time, which is quite good, if I say so myself, and then I’ll probably write a history of jazz piano—that’s probably next.
Christina Hur: Oh, okay. Yeah, you sound like a really busy person. I mean, I think it’s a great thing. I feel like you’re very balanced. I read your interviews and essays, and I think you’re a really great writer, and it’s very admirable.
Ethan Iverson: Well, you know, I’m happily married, and… we decide not to have kids, so I pretty much get to do whatever I want every day, and that tends to be just to work on music.
Christina Hur: Mhm. Okay. What do you think about jazz education today?
Ethan Iverson: Well, the good thing about jazz education—it’s a place where we can argue about, “What is jazz?” You know, the bright minds have a place to go and sort of try to think about it. Like everybody else in jazz education, there are problems with jazz education. It has to do with folklore and black music and all this sort of socioeconomic power dynamics that are not sorted—they’ve never been sorted.
You know, it’s better than it used to be, but… you know, the magazine Downbeat, there weren’t black musicians allowed on the cover until the late 50s. You know, it’s this huge institutional racism, there’s all these issues with jazz.
That’s one of the reasons, you know, the Black audience left jazz behind. They went straight into Motown and eventually soul and hip-hop, because it was clearly black-owned. The industrial complex of jazz education is totally white-owned, and it’s always been, like, sort of square. And a way for a lot of people to make a lot of money off the history of the music.
You know, as we know, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis and Duke Ellington—they did not do any teaching. And you almost get the feeling they didn’t anybody to learn the secrets.
So, there are secrets to this music, and uh… very few of them are found in average jazz education. But at the same time, I mean, it’s what… it’s where we are now. You can’t go back and redo it all… just stuck with where we’re stuck.
And so… uh, there are a lot of great things about jazz education. I think probably the greatest thing is simply young people who are bright and love the music get to meet each other and form peer groups and ignore the teachers.
But you need a place to do that, so jazz school’s a good place to do that.
Christina Hur: So, on the topic of jazz education, what do you think is the best way to teach jazz?
Ethan Iverson: Well, you just need to look at the real master musicians. And try to figure out what they’re doing. It’s no… there’s no real secret.
You know, a lot of times, teachers in any discipline—by the way, this is not just jazz, any art discipline—they teach what they do.
Christina Hur: Yeah.
Ethan Iverson: And actually, I think that’s… a mistake. They should teach the masters. The masters are… there’s some universal truth there. The teacher… they might be great. Maybe they’re even a master themselves, but one focal point there is… it almost can be too powerful, I think. Then someone with a lot of disciples, you know… there’s a guru, and then all these people that go, “You know, well, this is what the guru said…”
Actually, the only way to learn how to do anything as an artist is to imitate who you like, you know, whether you go to school for it or not. That’s what it is. And you know, one thing that is really encouraged at the jazz education level is transcribing solos.
But here’s a conundrum. Did John Coltrane learn any solos? Probably not. Thelonious Monk? McCoy Tyner? No.
So what, how do they do it? They learned the repertoire. They all knew 1500 songs. They all listened to the records of the best people that came before them. So, I think what I try to teach is a bird’s eye view. Well, this is sort of how it happens. You learn something of classical music, you learn something of the blues, you learn something about Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and you learn a ton of standards.
You know, some jazz teachers, for example, don’t want to teach standards. I think that’s crazy. There’s one thing you should teach. You should teach standards, because that’s how they always learned. That’s literally any great jazz record from 1940 through 1970 is the dictionary, the Bible, the encyclopedia, the source was the American Songbag.
[I was a little confused at this, because I know it to be the American Songbook.]
Christina Hur: Mhm.
Ethan Iverson: You learn the Songbag, and then you add blues and swing. That’s jazz. If you want a definition of jazz, I could even say that much. Although, Ornette Coleman or Carla Bley or some of my other favorites wouldn't fit this, so I don't like it.
There's an exclusionary side to it that I don't like, but I would say that if you put a gun to my head and say, well, what is jazz? I'd say it's the great American Songbag plus blues and swing, You know, so that's what I sort of think jazz teachers should teach, because that's what they always used to do. You can hand someone an assignment, like, go learn this.
The student can spend 6 months trying to really learn an impossible Coltrane solo. I mean, these things are so hard to play. You know, and the student will have learned something, but it'll be this really tight focus, they'll just have learned this Coltrane solo, and it's like, well, what about 1500 tunes and something about the blues and swing? It'd be a lot more fun to learn all that than be in the practice room practicing a John Coltrane solo, which at the end of it, you play one Coltrane solo, that's all you know. It’s not necessarily the way to do it, in my opinion.
It also gets the teacher off the hook. The teacher can be like, did you learn the Coltrane solo yet? Student says, no, I haven't, it's too hard. He's like, keep at it, see you next time. It's like, well, that's… nice work if you can get it. Not much teaching there, though.
Christina Hur: Mhm, okay. When I was looking for a jazz teacher, whether or not my parents disapproved of lessons, I think I was looking more from people who would teach from, you know, the jazz standards. I remember looking at this academy, and it had a bunch of teachers and their descriptions. I think only one of them talked about the Great American Songbook and I was like, oh, I want to learn from this guy.
Ethan Iverson: Mhm.
Christina Hur: Yeah, and in my free time, I try to learn as many standards as possible, so I can just recognize them right away.
Ethan Iverson: I mean, this is the way they always did it. You know, there’s a lot of great jazz being made today, but some of it, actually, I feel is a little… it’s all too recent-sounding. There’s not enough depth in it. That said, one of the things a teacher can’t teach is how to be hip and current.
All teachers are old fogies, that’s the way it was built. So, if you’re a talented student, the first thing you gotta learn to do is ignore your teacher, because you actually know what’s hip.
You should build your style on what you and your friends like. Today, literally today, what’s happening? That’s your job if you’re gonna be a creative, innovative artist, you know—ignore the teacher. The teacher’s job is to be like, well, do you know any standards yet?
Christina Hur: Mm.
Ethan Iverson: That duality is classic.
Christina Hur: So do you think you kind of went that route?
Ethan Iverson: Yeah.
Christina Hur: Hmm, okay.
Ethan Iverson: I learned every standard, and then the Bad Plus almost had nothing to do with standards. But I still knew every standard.
Christina Hur: Mhm, yeah. Okay. Do you have any projects or works that you’re really proud of and want to share?
Ethan Iverson: Oh, well, I’ve been very proud of my association with Billy Hart, who is a true master. Not like me. He is a true master, and so there’s a new book, Oceans of Time, and there’s also a record coming out called Multidirectional. It’s his band with Mark Turner, Ben Street, and myself, and… I think it’s the first album I associate with that might be a jazz classic.
Christina Hur: Hmm…
Ethan Iverson: We’ll see. That’s up for posterity. But if I was forced to choose one of my records to try to say, this could be a classic, I would choose this one.
Christina Hur: Okay, I’ll look out for that.
Ethan Iverson: Alright.
Christina Hur: Thank you for talking with me.
Ethan Iverson: Alright, good luck with convincing your parents to lighten up a little bit and let you do more jazz.
Christina Hur: Thank you.
Ethan Iverson: Alright, take care now. See you down the road.
Christina Hur: Bye-bye.
