Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I am so pleased to have a special guest today, Bijan Taghavi! Bijan was a student of mine from the time he was eight years old until after high school, when he went to the Manhattan School of Music as a piano major. He studied classical music, played concertos, and accompanied metropolitan opera singers, but all along, he also played other styles of music. I’m proud to announce that:
He is coming out with his second album with his trio, TrioGram!
Robert: Welcome, Bijan!
Bijan: Thanks for having me, Bob. I’m so happy to be here.
Robert: So tell me the latest. What’s going on with you? Then we’ll start from the beginning and talk about your metamorphosis in music. I’m sure everybody’s interested in this.
Bijan: I’m actually in town visiting Cleveland now because I’m playing at the Treelawn, which is a new jazz club. They got their piano from you, actually. It’s literally a two-minute walk from here in the Waterloo Arts District in Cleveland. So I’m going to be playing here, and then we’re off to Europe for a tour for our first album, which came out a few months ago. And then, pretty soon thereafter, we’re going to be going to L.A. to do our second TrioGram album. It’s a jazz piano trio with myself, led by my friend, the great bassist Will Lyle. We’re going to have a special guest drummer who played with the Bill Evans Trio: Joe LaBarbera. So I’m so excited about that. It’s going to be great!
Robert: That’s really exciting! This is your second European tour, is that right?
Bijan: It’s my second international tour. I did a Bijan Taghavi Trio tour back in 2018 in Japan, which, by the way, has an incredibly vibrant… I was going to say music scene, but it’s actually a perfect situation where the musicians aren’t necessarily as great as they are here, but the audiences actually love jazz over there, so it’s a perfect problem. There’s more demand than supply! So when we go there, they absolutely love it. The venues are packed, and it’s a lot of fun.
Robert: Fantastic!
You’re teaching at Hillsdale College.
We could talk a little bit about your academic background, but I think people would be really interested in how you started off in classical, but from the very beginning, you’d come in with blues and Elton John tunes. I always worked with you on these other styles, but you were spearheading major concertos by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and then suddenly you had a pivotal event that shifted everything. Talk about the difference between classical and jazz. What was it like for you to make that shift? How did this happen?
Bijan: When I switched to studying with you, that was really when I became serious with the piano. Before that, I had just gone to the Yamaha School of Music. I was there for maybe five years or something. I started when I was three and a half. Elton John was actually my inspiration, so that’s probably why later on, when I first started venturing outside of classical music, I started just exploring with some Elton John tunes. But then I went to a performance of yours, and do you remember where I sat in relation to you?
Robert: Yes, yes. This was very early on, and you were just a little kid. I was playing a private concert in a beautiful home in Huntington Beach, and this little kid came over and sat with his head right on the edge of the keyboard! I said, “Can you go to the other side?” Because you were blocking the audience!
Bijan: Completely blocking the audience!
Robert: The entire performance, you were just riveted! For such a young kid, that was really pretty shocking! Then I heard you play, and I could hear that, you know, even though you were elementary, you had a lot of talent and so much enthusiasm. I always enjoyed working with you. The interesting thing was that, from the very beginning, you’d spend your allowance money on sheet music. Not many kids do that!
Bijan: At the time, I remember you weren’t taking students, or at least that’s what you said. Maybe you just didn’t want to take the elementary level first. But then, once you heard that I was spending my allowance on sheet music, that showed you that I was really committed to doing something with the piano, whether it was professional or not, and that I was taking it seriously. You know,
Studying with you—it’s not hyperbole to say it really changed my life in terms of my trajectory.
First of all, with the piano, I figured out how to practice, which I’m sure people who watch your YouTube channel know is a big concept that you emphasize in your lessons and everything. I learned everything I know about how to play the piano, piano technique, how to get a good sound out of the piano, piano tone, etc., from you. I did all those main classical works, as far as even playing solo piano concerts at your old Art District Concert series.
You even prepared me to play the Grieg Piano Concerto with the South Coast Symphony.
But then I made the transition. It was really sort of two main catalyst events for me that made me switch. The first thing was that I had a concert with a Latin jazz flutist, Néstor Torres. That was the first true sort of jazz experience that I ever had. At that time, even though I had spent, like you said, some allowance money on rock songs, Billy Joel, Elton John, and a little bit of blues, I didn’t really know how to read chord charts. So that was the craziest thing for me to look at. They were looking for a jazz pianist out of the high school group because he came to our high school, and I just said I could play jazz piano. Then I was handed, over the summer, this stack of like 20 lead sheets. Now it might be easy for me because I’m so used to that, but at the time, reading a lead sheet was like the craziest thing. I didn’t even know what I was looking at!
Robert: I remember you coming into your lesson with this book. We had done some theory, but to realize an entire concert’s worth of lead sheets? There’s no way there would be time during a lesson! We just scratched the surface, but somehow you assimilated all those scores! And that was when you were still in high school.
Bijan: Yeah, I was still in high school. My guitar teacher, who also helped me a lot in making the transition, gave me this sort of cheat sheet that had every single chord on it. And there were unnecessary chords too. It was like maybe a stack of like 25 chords written on this page. It had the chord, and then it had the formula. I didn’t really understand how there are only four chord families, and you don’t need that list of 25, but I went through each chord methodically in the lead sheet and figured out what the chords are. So it was a lot of work. But I sort of temporarily quit my foray into jazz after that. In retrospect, Néstor was right. He told me something that sort of depressed me a little bit about the possibility. He said, “Look, kid, you’ve got a long way to go.” Particularly with my improvisation and things like that, because I didn’t have much jazz language then, even though I was experimenting with things. That’s an area where you were really encouraging to me. I’m indebted to you forever for that. You encouraged me to keep going and to explore more and more.
The second catalyst for me was when I heard the great late pianist Oscar Peterson. When I first transitioned to jazz, I didn’t have a jazz teacher for the longest time. You would help me out a lot, but:
I didn’t study with a jazz teacher until I went to the Manhattan School of Music later.
So I had sort of a year-long period where it was really just Oscar Peterson. I actually didn’t like jazz, which is the funniest thing. Some of the greatest jazz pianists like Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, for me, my ears weren’t even ready for that. But I was lucky enough that Oscar was able to draw me in. Now I can appreciate all those artists, and I’ve taken so much from those other pianists as well. But those were the main two catalysts for me.
Robert: With all my students, I give a solid background in the three macro skills of memorization, sight reading, and improvisation. One of the things I do from the earliest stages is just have students play a very simple chord progression. First, I will go on one side of the piano and comp and let the student play all white keys. I’ll do a Dorian mode. Then I’ll switch it and let the student comp (and I solo). Then I say, “Okay, now the hard part. See if you can comp with your left hand and solo with the right hand.” And there are varying degrees of success. Sometimes people just start playing methodically up the keyboard, one note at a time. I’ll say, “Hold some notes longer than others,” to try to get some variety. But right from the very first time you did it; I couldn’t believe you were able to do it the first time you tried! That’s when I realized that you had an incredible affinity for this. The other thing was your sense of rhythm with popular styles. You had a great groove, even as the youngest kid, in addition to being able to play Beethoven and Chopin scherzos and all of that.
But getting back to TrioGram, what is the whole concept of TrioGram? On your albums, It’s all original music. How much of it is yours? Tell us a bit more about your trio.
Bijan: Yeah, it’s a lot of original music. TrioGram is an association of myself and one of my best friends, Will Lyle, a great bass player. We’re both from Southern California, actually, although we never met there. We met afterwards when we were both in college, and we found out we’re both from there. But he and I had worked a lot together in the past, and we always meant to do a project together. We thought, what better way than to do a piano trio? First of all, as a pianist, a piano trio is one of the premier settings to feature a jazz pianist because you’re in control of everything. You’re playing the melodies; you’re the main soloist instrument, although the bassist can solo as well. So it really features the pianist. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also kind of intimidating at the same time. But it was this project that he and I put together. Basically, it was just the end of last summer in 2022. We were both incredibly busy, but we thought, let’s do a record together at the end of a month. So we only gave ourselves a month. Naturally, he and I both got busy. I’m doing a lot of work in Michigan, and he’s doing a lot of work in New York. But our drummer mistakenly thought we were still going on with the project even though we had decided to stop it. He just did this little post on Facebook. He said, “Hey guys, I’m going to be in town doing this recording session.” I was like, “Hey, Will, did you not tell Kofi that we’re not going to be doing this anymore?” Then we talked about it and decided that maybe we should go ahead and do it. So it was really put together at the last minute. We decided the tunes last minute, and we wrote the tunes last minute, but it turned out a lot better than we expected. It was great. We did a lot of original music. He did some original tunes, and
I did some original tunes, one of which was dedicated to you, actually. It’s called “Changes.”
Robert: A great tune, by the way. We’ll have links for you so you can check out some of Bijan’s music.
The last thing I want to ask about is your upcoming album. You’ve got another drummer featuring on this album. Tell us about that, because that’s a really exciting development.
Bijan: After we did the first record, Will and I did a series of tours. We did one on the West Coast, where we went to Mexico and did a series of shows there with incredible audiences. They were so supportive of our music. Then we went to California and Arizona. In California, we had featured special guest drummers with us, and in L.A., we played with the great drummer Joe LaBarbera, who was one of the drummers for the iconic Bill Evans trio. We had the rehearsal, and I’m really picky with musicians and drummers because there’s a very particular thing that I want, and Will is the same way. But after the rehearsal, he and I went outside, and we just started dancing like a bunch of old Iranian women! We were celebrating! It was the most incredible thing. I had never played with a drummer where I felt so good and comfortable. He knew how to support you and play under you, and the sound he gets out of the instrument, I could go on forever. His time feel is just so incredible! We have another tour coming up.
We’re going to be playing with Joe LaBarbera in California, in
San Francisco on July 26 at the Black Cat and on July 27th at Campus Jack’s Jazz Club in Orange County.
And we thought, since we’re doing these gigs with them and we’re going to be in California, let’s do another record with him. So we’re going to be doing another album with Joe LaBarbera, and I’m so excited for it.
Robert: Well, we’ll have links to your website, and once again, it’s great having you here! I know you’ve got to get to your gig up the street in about 5 minutes.
Bijan: I’m going to change and run over there!
Robert: Thanks again for coming. And once again, I’m Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com.
Bijan: Thank you, Bob.
You can find Bijan’s music and tour dates at BijanTaghavi.com.
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