Never mind wondering what country he’s in, Aaron Parks is waking up these mornings and thinking, what band am I with? The Seattle-born pianist, who makes his Scottish debut this week with a trio featuring the legendary drummer Billy Hart and bassist Ben Street, is currently on a series of consecutive tours that range in style from a duo with violinist Adam Baldych to the high energy, state-of-the-art jazz quartet James Farm.
“I’m either going to be absolutely buzzing and wishing I could just carry on forever at the end of the run or am I’m going to be completely sick of music,” he says down the line from Innsbruck, where he’s enjoying a rare travel-free day. “Equally, I might be so sharp that I’ll have improved out of all recognition or it’ll all go down in a horrible spiral and I’ll sound awful.”
There seems little likelihood of this last scenario being the case. Since 2008, when he released Invisible Cinema, his first album on the definitive jazz label, Blue Note, but the fifth of a recording career that began when he was sixteen, Parks has been one of the most consistently intriguing musicians of his generation. He is as assured in solo piano performances like his 2013 recording, Arborescence, as he is inspirational in his work as an accompanist, a role that he talks about with great enthusiasm and for all that he jokes about burning out on his current schedule, his appetite for music comes through unmistakably in conversation.
Parks grew up in a small village on Whidbey Island just off the coast of Washington State and he has, he says, made two giant leaps in his life. The first leap came when he moved to the city of Seattle to study at the University of Washington at the age of fourteen through its early entrance programme and the second when his family – mum, dad and sister – upped sticks for New York two years later because he had been selected for the Manhattan School of Music.
“I came from one very small, sparsely populated island to another, completely different kind of island, Manhattan Island, in quite a short space of time,” he says. “It was a huge culture shock and more than that, about a year after we moved to Manhattan we woke up to 9/11 and something horrendous happening just a few blocks from our apartment. So that was quite hard to deal with but the energy in New York I found quite invigorating. It was completely different from anything I’d ever experienced.”
By the age of twenty, Parks was touring and recording with trumpeter Terence Blanchard, formerly with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers but already a major figure in his own right as both a bandleader and film music composer, and his reputation began to grow from there. Trumpeters Christian Scott and Ambrose Akinmusire, both recent poster artists for Edinburgh Jazz Festival, and singer Gretchen Parlato are among the musicians who have called on Parks’ talents. Then Blue Note Records cottoned on.
Parks is charmingly self-deprecatory about the first fruit of that partnership.
“I wanted Invisible Cinema to be a balance of formal structure and human imperfection and to have the kind of detail that you get in the best novels but I might have taken the detail a bit too far,” he says. “My favourite number has always been five - we have five fingers on each hand and there are five letters in each of my names – but when the album was finished, I was quite pleased with the result but I discovered it was fifty-five minutes long and it was five hundred and fifty-five megabytes on the disk. So I don’t know, a psychologist might have a field day with that sort of information.”
There are three, rather than five, musicians in the group Parks brings to Edinburgh and he’s not altogether sure that the piano, bass and drums format is right for him. He is certain, however, of the company he’ll be keeping, bassist Street being a mentor of his and drummer Hart being an inspiration.
“I go to see Billy at every opportunity when he’s playing in New York and I always sit as close to the stage as possible because his enthusiasm for the music pours from him,” he says. “He’s always checking out the new young players on the scene and what I love about him especially is, he’s the same person off the drums as he is on the kit. I don’t know about playing trio. I actually like providing harmony and working with a guitar player or a saxophonist or a singer. So it’s a challenge but there’s a lot of beauty to be found in it too and if you’re working with the right musicians – and I will be – then that’s the right group to be playing with.”
Aaron Parks Trio plays the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh tomorrow.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here