Alan Broadbent

Every Time I Think of You ecard

'Round Midnight ecard
ALAN BROADBENT BIO: There's a purity and heartfelt intent to pianist/arranger Alan Broadbent's music. It's steeped in emotion and a romanticism that's infused with anguish and melancholy. On Every Time I Think of You, Broadbent's third recording for Artistry Music, he delivers a 10-song collection of standards and originals that express beauty with an underlying drama.

“I want to be moved and I want to hear every note,” says Broadbent, who is joined on the album by acoustic bassist/producer/label co-owner Brian Bromberg, drummer Kendall Kay and the Tokyo String Section. “For me it's not about what you play, but what you say. It's how every note is heard and felt that's important. It's like singing. Bud Powell would get into an alpha state of mind when improvising. And so would Lennie Tristano, who I studied improvisation with. His first question after a lesson was, how do you feel?” Broadbent says that he's taken those lessons to heart on the new CD: “My improvising repertoire is from the American standard songbook, and I compose songs in that fashion too.”

A virtuoso called by the All Music Guide to Jazz “an unsung hero of the acoustic piano,” Broadbent has been widely recognized for his sideman and arranging work. He is a member of Charlie Haden's Quartet West, now celebrating their 20th anniversary with a tour of Europe and the US this summer ('07). When Diana Krall does orchestra dates he is her musical director and most recently he's been conducting the major orchestras of the US and Japan for Elvis Costello supporting his CD, Live With the Metropole Orkest: My Flame Burns Blue. Broadbent, a New Zealand native based in Los Angeles, has an impressive resume working in bands led by Woody Herman, Nelson Riddle and Henry Mancini as well as on Grammy Award-winning albums (he won best arrangement honors in 1997 for the song “When I Fall in Love” by Natalie Cole and in 2000 for “Lonely Town” by Quartet West with Shirley Horn). As a solo artist, he has recorded widely, including the noteworthy Live at Maybeck Hall solo piano album in 1991 for Concord Records and has been twice Grammy-nominated for Best Instrumental Solo on You and the Night and the Music, and ‘Round Midnight on Artistry Music.

As for Every Time I Think of You, Broadbent says the album “combines my playing and my writing with that most expressive of instruments, the string orchestra." He feels it works like a collective fourth person on the disc. “Usually the strings sweeten songs with the chords playing in the background,” he says. “But I like using the strings expressively like how Eddie Sauter used them on Stan Getz's early '60s album Focus.”

Every Time I Think of You comprises five classics that Broadbent re-envisions with his trio plus strings. He romances on “Bess, Oh Where's My Bess” (from the Gershwins' musical Porgy and Bess), a song sung by Porgy. “This is about the loss of the other,” Broadbent says. “It's not just a Gershwin tune, but a way for a jazz musician to express that sentiment. It's miraculous how these little songs, over the course of 70-80 years, have been reharmonized and molded every which way, all in the service of a performer's musicality and feelings.”

Broadbent says “Blue in Green” from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is “a silent dedication to my favorite composer, Mahler, patterned after one of his autumnal songs. I know every score Mahler wrote,” says Broadbent, “and I love every note”. Broadbent says “Lover Man” is “a paean to one of my heroes, Billie Holiday,” and his haunting take on Harold Arlen's “Last Night When We Were Young” is “a painting of a memory in a misty light.” Rodgers & Hart's “Spring Is Here” is Broadbent's sumptuous response to the challenge: How do you put Lorenz Hart's words into music without words? Broadbent's five originals on Every Time I Think of You warmly complement the standards.

The album opens with the sublime “Autumn Variations” that he says “represents the struggle to break loose from oneself.” He elaborates: “This song is about the struggle to get to the other end, beyond the conflict of one's work, the conflict of the piano versus strings playing a chorale. This culminates in a drum solo and then the mood collapses into a lament.”

The drama-fueled “East 32nd Elegy” is a tribute to Tristano, whose spirit, Broadbent says, “still hovers over the Manhattan skyline.” He adds, “I studied with him for three years. Every weekend I went down to New York from Boston where I was attending Berklee. I don't play like him, but I do [cherish] the values he gave me. I miss him and his world.”

Likewise, Broadbent misses and pays homage to Herman on his reflective “Woody 'n' You.” He says, “Woody was a great man who was hardworking and who cared about you as well as the music. This is an ode to my 'Road Father.'”

The title track opens with two minutes of lush string orchestration before Broadbent enters on piano. He says the piece describes that moment, frozen in time, when you see “that face” before you. “This is about me, again,” he says with a smile. “The strings are at their most expressive here.”

The most upbeat tune on the CD, “Nirvana Blues” is a 12-bar blues rendered in a bossa style, with three-part counterpoint at work. “It's a traveling tune,” says Broadbent, whose image is a drive along the Big Sur coastline in central California. “This song is about getting into a car and going somewhere, anywhere,” he says. “It's meant to be pictorial.”

Broadbent feels strongly that “the glory of the music” entails an artist being able to “give you an urgent message.” That's the summation of Every Time I Think of You, with its earnest renderings of standards and originals. “It's within this framework that I've been given the opportunity to bring together the improviser and the composer/arranger in me,” says Broadbent, “to express something deeper, hopefully, than just the notes.”