He hid his love of jazz from his classical teacher, now he has a vocal album - and what's all this about a novel? The remarkable Stefano Bollani talks to Ray Comiskey
When Stefano Bollani was studying classical piano at the Florence conservatory (from which he graduated in 1993), within the sacred precincts of the academy playing jazz was as anti-social as a secret vice. True, it wouldn't make you blind, but in his case he had been hooked since he was 11, and his professor was so strict he was never tempted to confess his artistic onanism and seek absolution. It wouldn't have been forthcoming, anyway.
"He was coming from the Neapolitan school of classical piano, which is very important," explains Bollani. "And very serious. He had a stick and when I made a mistake he would go with the stick on my hands. Nobody thinks I'm telling the truth, because if you see me playing it looks like I'm not classically trained. I always move. I jump on the chair. But, really, he was extremely serious to me.
"I didn't want him to know I was playing jazz. He just discovered it at the very last moment - and now, 12 years after my diploma, he came just one month ago to see me play and he was delighted. I couldn't have imagined that; he would have thrown me out of the room."
Nobody would be tempted to throw him out of any room now. This 33-year-old is one of the finest players to appear in Italian jazz for years. Blessed with prodigious technique - the stick must have worked - and freewheeling imagination, he's a maverick talent nourished by an astonishing range of sources. Old standards, ragtime, Beach Boys songs and pop music generally, free improvisation, 20th-century classical masters such as Prokofiev, Ligeti and the French school of Ravel, Debussy, Milhaud and Satie - they're all grist to his commodious mill.
In jazz his earliest loves were bop or bop-derived pianists such as Bud Powell, Horace Silver and Oscar Peterson, yet it would be difficult to hear any traces of them in his playing now. He has some of the poetic feeling Bill Evans was able to summon up on ballads, but there the resemblance largely ends.
As for his harmonic language, particularly on his leader debut on ECM (Stefano Bollani: Piano Solo, out on August 28th) it's a constant delight in the way it resolves the tension between the logical and the unpredictable. Where does he get it from? "Well," he says, "I'm in love with a lot of music. Probably harmonically, in this case, I was thinking very much of all the classical music of the beginning of the 20th century, because this record should have been, in my idea, a kind of tribute to Prokofiev. Then, after 20 minutes of improvising on some tunes by him in the studio, I decided that the cage was too big for me.
"So I just stopped that and started improvising on other things. I didn't choose the repertoire before recording. I was supposed to make a totally different record, so probably I'm playing differently. For one month before the recording I had been listening only to Prokofiev's music. But it's not only his influence, probably, because I'm in love with all the French ones."
Like Ravel and Debussy? "Yes. It's not so original for a jazz pianist, because they were the favourite French ones for Bill Evans, and they are very, very close, harmonically speaking, to jazz music. But I'm in love with that period, so that's what probably comes out from the record."
On the new CD there are several spontaneous improvisations where there is no predetermined theme or musical architecture, yet they all have an organic sense of structure. And that sense of structure, even when he plays free, has been one of the more striking characteristics of his playing throughout his professional career.
How does he explain this - if it can be explained? "You know, I love structure. Even if I can improvise freely like I did in this record, I'm building a structure while working. I'm building cages for me, and usually my compositions are some kind of cages.
"I mean," he adds, and the wry sense of humour in his voice is unmistakeable, "the composer named Bollani is building some cages for the player called Bollani, but it's always a kind of football match, because the piano player would prefer easy cages. The composer, of course, as any composer in the world would, wants to build incredible cages. I recorded an album for symphonic orchestra and jazz trio [Concertone on Label Bleu in 2003] and that was a big cage. It was almost impossible to find a way to improvise a different thing each night, but this is what thrills me.
"This is what I like, even in literature, when I read books like those of Italo Calvino, or Raymond Queneau, or the South American ones, where you feel the structure, but inside the structure there's a lot of things happening that you don't expect." People like Jorge Luis Borges? "Exactly. But also, you know, Julio Cortázar or Jô Soares. And most of all I should say Calvino, because he's the one who really was building precise structures to let his fantasy play inside the structure."
IF THERE IS a shared trait among the writers he mentions, it's that they're all serious mavericks. Their work is often humorous, witty, wildly imaginative, replete with a sense of the ridiculous, full of the unexpected. Yet there's often a formal logic there and the tension between it and writing's capacity to surprise can be absorbing and satisfying. Just like Bollani's music - except that, as an improviser, he doesn't get the same chance to revise that a writer gets.
The jazz and classical pianist and composer, Misha Mengelberg, he recalls, once told him that to be really creative as an improviser you can't play for more than 30 minutes. "'After 30 minutes', he said, 'you're playing routine, because your mind, any mind, is not able to really improvise more than 30 minutes. It's a question of concentration.' Of course, he's a funny guy, so you never know when he's joking or not. And also, talking about free music, I don't really understand sometimes how they can play the same thing for an hour and a half or two hours. Because, in a way, free music was interesting for everybody - for us also - but sometimes it's not free, because you are not free to play melody, for example, you're not free to play tonal, you're not free to play a song form. So, in a way, it's not free because you are obliged to have no structure.
"It's not being free for me at all, so in a way nowadays it seems strange to me to listen to a free music concert. It's very important, historically speaking, but the fact for me is that it's old. Sometimes a lot of people present this idea of totally improvised music as if it was new - like a lot of contemporary written music they try to present as new things, but then you listen to something by Ligeti in the 60s and you find that that was much more modern than the new one."
But being free takes many forms. The great Polish trumpeter, Tomasz Stanko, for instance, who is one of the most liberated improvisers in jazz, as well as being one of the greatest, has a gift of knowing when a performance with his Polish quartet reaches a point where the music has an emotional or dramatic need for him to come in. And, without breaking the structure or the arc of a performance, he sends it in a new direction, or just invigorates it.
"Yes," agrees Bollani. "When you have a band that can support it, that's fantastic. That's how jazz was in the beginning. It wasn't a question of the tune, your solo, my solo, drum solo, and the tune again. In fact, when you were talking I was thinking about another band nowadays doing the same thing, with a different result, which is Wayne Shorter. When you hear him playing with the band, they're all playing together; you don't understand who is soloing and who is comping. And that's fantastic, but it's so difficult to do."
It was another trumpeter, Enrico Rava, a seminal figure in Italian and European jazz, who was one of the crucial encounters in the pianist's career; like Stanko, Rava has his feet in both the formal and the free. After graduating, Bollani spent several years playing in Italian pop bands until Rava heard him 10 years ago and, recognising an exceptional talent, invited him to join his band.
It led to encounters with players as idiomatically and stylistically diverse as drummer Han Bennink, saxophonists Gato Barbieri, Phil Woods and Lee Konitz, guitarist Pat Metheny, trumpeter Paolo Fresu and accordionist Richard Galliano. With Rava, who has described him as "a genuine keyboard poet" who "amazes me every time he plays", he has made almost 20 albums in various settings.
CONSIDERING HIS background in Italian pop, maybe it shouldn't be a total surprise that he has made a vocal album. He laughs like a schoolboy caught raiding the fridge. "I always wanted to be a singer," he says, "so I did it for the Japanese market!" When the laughter had died down, he explains the circumstances a little more. "I sing sometimes when I have a solo concert, one song for each night. The producer listened to me singing and said 'wouldn't you like to make an entire album singing?' And, of course, my ego was so happy about that that I did it. But I'm not so convinced. I like the album but I cannot listen to it."
That's not the only surprise about him. Word on the grapevine is that he has written a novel. There is a precedent. The late Artie Shaw, who was married eight times (to Ava Gardner and Lana Turner among others), turned his back on musical and Hollywood celebrity, laid down his clarinet and became a writer. With Bollani, however, it's different.
"I wrote a novel," he admits, "because as a piano player I cannot play when I'm travelling. So when I'm in my hotel room, what can I do? And I started writing in my computer a story. And then a publisher came and now it's being published in Italy in September. I hope it will be translated into other languages. It's called La sindrome di Brontolo. In English it's like The syndrome of Grumpy - the Angry One."
Is it a comic novel? "Yes, most of all. It's surrealistic. It's the story of five characters hanging around in the city for one day and meeting each other, without knowing each other beforehand at the beginning of the novel. You have a feeling that everything can happen - and nothing happens. The idea is funny, but it's also cynical, because you pretend, during your life, that all the encounters will change you life. And in this case nothing is changing at all."
Anything less like his own life would be hard to imagine.
Stefano Bollani performs at St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny as part of Kilkenny Arts Week on Sunday, August 20 at 8pm. Misha Alperin performs at 3pm, and John Taylor will perform at 5.30pm (see panel). The concerts are sponsored by National Irish bank
