By Ella Powell
Pianist/composer Dan Tepfer says his earliest memories on the keys are of improvising as a toddler. “It seemed like a very natural thing for me to do, to just make up music,” he says. “My classical piano teachers would say, ‘don’t do that,’ but I knew it was okay because granddad did.”
During the early days, when Tepfer was creating his own alternate versions of “Jingle Bells,” his jazz pianist grandfather served as a musical inspiration. Now, Tepfer collaborates with icons of the form like Lee Konitz, and composes for musicians such as the highly accomplished French-American vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvantl.
An artistic force, Tepfer goes beyond jazz, creating compositions for symphony orchestras and performing with them on occasion. “One of my favorite performances was recently, at the end of June,” he says. “I did two concerts in the U.K. where I performed the Ravel Piano Concerto in G with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. As a jazz pianist, that was a big growing experience for me.”
When Tepfer makes his first of two appearances at The Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival on September 8 at The Paramount Theater, he will take the stage with his multimedia improvisational composition Natural Machines, released in 2019 as a video album.
In Natural Machines, Tepfer’s acoustic Disklavier piano plays all on its own in a phantasmic experience. The magical sounds and visuals accompanying the album are a direct response to the pianist’s computer programming and his live freestyle on the keys. In the song “Tremolo,” for example, Tepfer’s chosen algorithm allows otherwise impossible musical techniques to be accomplished in real time.
He describes music as “the intersection of the algorithmic and the spiritual,” which speaks to his obsession with achieving harmony between concrete rules and whimsical expression. His discography of 12 studio albums is deeply explorative and honest, and connects to the senses. After 29 years of playing, the pianist continues to defy conventions and bend genres in solo projects like his 2011 performance and improvisation of Bach’s masterpiece, Goldberg Variations/Variations that won him international acclaim.
On September 9, also at the Paramount, Tepfer performs Inventions/Reinventions, another improvisation on Bach. He goes into it without any premeditated melodies, just a creative process to develop ideas. “It kind of feels like I’m both a child who just has crazy ideas and can run around freely, and the parent who’s supervising the child and who is going to keep the child from falling off the cliff,” says Tepfer. The piece converses with Bach in a way that brings the prodigy back to life as Tepfer fills in the nine “missing” keys not included in Bach’s 15 original inventions.
Always looking to connect with audiences, he hopes a project that revitalizes a 300-year-old composition will build an affinity for his style of music. With each improvisation, he shares a meaningful story just as Bach intended to do through his own compositions. “Bach’s music is a magnet for me that never seems to lose its allure, which isn’t uncommon for jazz musicians,” says Tepfer. “There’s a lot of kinship between the musical approach we take in jazz and how Bach was thinking about music.”