Most people today know Bob James as the pianist from the super group Fourplay, but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface on his storied career.  He has been writing, playing, and producing music since the 1960’s, both for his solo career, and for the many collaborative efforts he has done with some of the top musicians in the genre.  Smoothviews had an opportunity to talk with Bob James about his latest project, Altair & Vega, a four hand piano collaboration with fellow pianist Keiko Matsui, which released September 2011.

Smoothviews (SV): When I previously interviewed you, (Bob James Smoothviews interview 7/05) one of the topics we discussed was the four hand style of piano playing.  Can you please explain what that is for our readers that may not be familiar with it?
Bob James (BJ): It really became a popular thing in the era when people, primarily from small towns, or who weren’t in a position to be able to hear a full symphony orchestra play, still wanted to get to know some of the famous symphonic works.  The publishers started releasing the big symphonic pieces in a reduced rearrangement form, which turned out to be four hand piano.  There were so many elements of a symphonic recording that it was a little bit too much for one pianist to cover all of that.  Oftentimes, it was the composer himself who rearranged the symphonic music.  Sometimes they did it just to do a demo version that could be played to show a new orchestra what the music was like before they went into full dress rehearsal.  As soon as the recording of orchestras became the normal thing in the 20th century, a lot of that reason for having four hand music disappeared and the composers and the composers of more recent works were not as inclined to arrange their pieces for that idiom, and so it became kind of an obsolete thing.  I always thought it was a lot of fun, and, it was an opportunity to share ideas and techniques with another pianist, which is normally not the case.  In the normal jazz band instrumentation, there’s only one piano.  I get a chance to play with a lot of drummers, bass players, guitarists, saxophone players, etc., but it’s rare that I have the opportunity to play with another piano player and get to know them, see the difference in their technique, and so forth.  So that was a big motivation for me, and how the project with Keiko got underway.

SV:  This release, Altair & Vega is a two disc set; it contains both a CD, and a DVD.  I listened to the CD and I tried to picture the two of you at the piano together.  I can picture it to a certain extent, but it definitely adds more when you get to see what’s actually taking place on the DVD.  That’s great.
BJ: I was happy when E-One agreed to do the separate DVD because four hand piano’s kind of hard to understand when you just listen to the audio.  We were playing only one piano, and it’s impossible to know who’s doing what.  When you see it, you can really understand the moves that we have to make, and a lot of the cross hand stuff that is not obvious on just an audio recording.  I’m glad you watched it.  I should mention that the DVD is in the same jewel box as the CD, and if you’re not looking carefully and just take the CD out, you may not necessarily realize that the DVD is behind it.

SV: In the previous interview, when we discussed the four hand work you did with Keiko a few years ago, one thing that struck me about what you said was that she was always more bulletproof than you were. (Laugh)
BJ: I kid her about that.  Maybe it’s a Japanese thing, maybe they’re a little more disciplined than Americans are, I don’t know.  I think it was a challenge for both of us because you get a team spirit going and you don’t want to be the one to put a flaw on.  You can feel if the performance is going really, really well, and you’re five minutes into the piece, and, if somebody makes a little blunder, it’s distracting.  I can even feel sometimes if I make some kind of mistake, and Keiko hears it, it throws her off, and so she’s more inclined to make a mistake that follows that.  Sometimes there’s a trickle down, a tumble effect, where one mistake will lead to another mistake, back and forth.  That kind of breaks concentration a little bit.  We’re very motivated to try and keep that to a minimum.  And, when you’re performing that close to someone else, there’s definitely no place to hide.

SV: At the start of the DVD, you mention that you and Keiko have been doing this off and on for nine years.  I didn’t realize that it had been that long. 
BJ: It was frustrating because a lot of different things happened with both of us contractually.  We had very good intentions after we did the tour.  It really started off with me writing the two pieces for Keiko on my Dancing on the Water album.  She really enjoyed the experience.  We had a good time doing it.  She decided that she wanted to reciprocate and wrote a piece for me.  It could have ended right there because we didn’t really have a project or anything, but we got this opportunity to tour over in Japan.  We thought that it would be fun to do a very pure, just simple acoustic piano show, on stage, no band, because at that time, Keiko and I had separate solo careers, and when we performed, it was with some kind of band, either a quintet, sextet, or whatever.  In this case, it was a very simple thing.  There was a lot less overhead for one thing.  All we had to do was get in a good piano and the two of us.  That was it.  So, we did this tour, and in order to come up with enough music to make the tour, we had to create some new pieces, which we did.  By the end of it, we had a repertoire, and we had the intention at that time to make a record, but many things seemed to get in the way of it happening.  Since we both had our careers going, and, I was also involved with Fourplay, it just never happened.  We kept talking about wanting to do it, and fortunately Koch, which has now become E-One, supported the idea and we finally brought it to fruition.

SV: As I listen to it, it’s so beautiful.  And it just magnifies it as I watch the DVD, the beauty of the music, the simplicity of just the two of you playing with just the piano and the rose onstage.  Is it harder to write music for the four hand style?
BJ:  Yes, in many ways, it is.  There are so many physical things that you have to consider that are different than writing piano music for one person.  [Consider] the fingering; if you are too much in the mid range of the piano, there’s a big risk of bumping into each other and stumbling.  And the aspect of there being only one sustain pedal, these are just the obvious things.  You have to bear in mind when you’re writing these arrangements so that you don’t have collisions, and so that each person has a clear understanding of what their role is going to be in the piece.  I found it really a lot of fun to have that challenge to write and I really look forward to the opportunity to do more if we have the chance.

SV: This was released at the end of September (9/27/11.)  Are you looking to do a tour to support this project?
BJ: Yes, we are.  We have only been talking about a few dates so far.  We don’t have anything completely organized yet.  I think Keiko’s still in the middle of a big tour.  I bumped into her, actually, in the Ukraine.  She was performing the previous night, and Fourplay was performing the next night, so all of us, the guys in Fourplay, went to see her show.  She was embarking on a five week tour of all Russian cities – very ambitious.  I think she’s now on the end of that tour and hasn’t gotten back yet.  But I’m definitely hoping that we will tour in support of this record.  We’re going to have to seriously get our schedules lined up and try to figure out when there’s some daylight to put another tour together.

SV: I think it’s funny that you go all the way to the Ukraine to run into someone you know, but such is the life of a musician. (Laugh)  Listening to some of the songs on CD before I played the DVD, some of it sounds so complex and so intricate, especially where they’re building up to the crescendos.  I pictured the two of you playing, because I had not seen the DVD yet.  It’s amazing to me how you can do this.  It’s great.
BJ: You can imagine it’s really fun.  It’s almost like a sporting event, or a dance.  There’s definitely more of what I call choreography; the emotions, the physical way that we have to play when there’s two of us on one bench at the piano.  It’s very different than just being able to be free with just you.  Just that change alone, and being conscious of somebody else.  It is in some ways like learning a dance step or learning a sport.  We both felt that, and as you prepare to know that you have to do a live performance, and, as we talked about it previously, and you mentioned today, in a duo, you don’t want to be the one to mess it up.  There’s a little bit more pressure to practice and to be well prepared.  Both of us are in a jazz field.  A lot of jazz musicians improvise, but there’s so much flexibility in it.  If a piece doesn’t go exactly in the way you want it to, you shift gears and take it in another direction, or, if it’s a note that might be construed as a mistake, there are many ways that you can improvise and take that note, or that mistake, and turn it into something that seems like it was more deliberate.  In the four hand world, that’s quite a different problem.  I would say a much higher percentage of the music in this four hand project is written out; partially out of just necessity of knowing that there are two people, and you really want to know what the other one is doing so that you can adjust.

One of my favorite performances on the record is the version that we did of “Altair & Vega,” the title song.  When we originally recorded it on my Dancing on the Water album, it was a very written out piece.  There was a little bit of improvisation in the middle section, but it was almost composed in the same way that I would do a classical piece, written out.  [Since] we had already done that version, we didn’t want to do the same thing over again, so we took a very loose, much more improvised approach to that piece to make it different.  I really loved the way that turned out.  We didn’t plan very much.  We had the score in front of us when we were playing, but we just let the music flow more like it was a jazz improvisation.  Keiko played great and inspired me a lot.  I’m just very happy with the way it turned out.

SV: It’s very nice.  I’m going to have to listen to both versions back to back one day to hear the differences.  I like “Divertimento.”  I like the way it just builds up.  It’s a beautiful piece.
BJ: It was a piece that definitely grew out of interest in the history of four hand piano literature.  I have in my home many, many four hand piano classical pieces, some by Franz Josef Haydn, the great Baroque era classical composer.  There was one piece that he had done, and the title of it was some translation of “The Professor & The Student.”  The fun of this piece was supposed to be the trading back and forth of one phrase between the teacher who plays the piece first and shows the student how he wants it done and the student answers and responds.  I actually took Haydn’s basic theme and then wrote my own set of variations that was kind of a story which the student starts out very simply being very obedient to the teacher, but as the piece unfolds, the student becomes more and more adventurous, better and better, and by then end of the piece, the teacher is the one who has a hard time keeping up.  As a result of that piece, my nickname with Keiko has remained “The Professor.”  Every time she writes me, it’s always “Hi Professor.”  She has remained the student.

SV: That’s very clever and kind of sweet too.  I can’t interview you and not discuss Fourplay.  You saw what Chuck Loeb had to say [Chuck Loeb Smoothviews interview 11/10) when I asked him about becoming a member of Fourplay.  I’d like to hear your perspective on Chuck Loeb’s addition to Fourplay.
BJ: We’re about one and a half to two years into it now.  It still feels to use like the honeymoon phase.  Chuck has been an incredibly great addition to the group.  It’s sometimes a bit difficult to make the compliment about Chuck without making it seem like a criticism about Larry [Carlton] or Lee [Ritenour] who preceded him, but we feel very much like we’ve had the good fortune of having three very different, brilliant guitarists give us their own personalities.  Chuck probably has the hardest challenge because there was so much more history, so much more repertoire, and the fans had an expectation about the group.  We had to really cheer lead him and encourage him to understand that we did not want him to have to sound like Lee or Larry, that we wanted him to be himself, even on the old pieces that had been created by the former guitar guys.  We thought that it was not only okay for Chuck to reinterpret them, but it was a great thing to have those pieces take on a new life, and have a different sound and a different approach as a result of what Chuck brought to the table.  Out of the three of them, all great talents, the one thing that stands out probably the most to us is that Chuck is an awesome team player.  He’s very, very humble, and very respectful of the history of the group.  Things have gone so smoothly with him.

In addition to being a great guitarist, he has a long list of very successful credits as a producer, so he’s extremely comfortable in the studio working as a support system for other artists.  If there was one of my compositions, or one of Harvey’s, or Nathan’s, Chuck instantly understood what was required of him, and how he could be the most supportive.  There just haven’t been any issues at all.  We’ve had a wonderful time.  As I’m talking to you, I’m just back from a three week tour of Europe where we were in a different city almost every day, a different country almost every day.  We went from the Ukraine, to Istanbul, Turkey, to Germany, to Holland, to Italy, to London, England, all over the place.  You really have to have a strict self discipline to get through that kind of schedule and still be in a good mood by the time you get to the end of it.  We were all trying to make sure we kept our health.  Sometimes, even on our travel days, we were still doing two shows at night.  It’s a grind, but when everyone gets along, when the spirit is there, music is flowing, and we can feel it coming back to us from the audience, there’s nothing better, at least for me.  I can’t imagine having any better time than that.

SV: What can we expect in the future?  We discussed that you’re trying to organize a tour with you and Keiko at some point, and you’ll be continuing your work with Fourplay.  Do you have anything else in the works that you’d like to discuss?
BJ: There’s one thing that’s a little bit of unfinished business when I did this Dancing on the Water album that gave me the opportunity to meet Keiko.  I hedged my bets on a solo piano project, and it ended up only being about half solo piano music and the rest of it was more duets with other artists.  I’d like to take that challenge one step further and really do a complete solo piano project.  I’m working on that in my home studio quite a bit over the last six months, trying to come up with my own version of how I would approach playing solo piano.  It’s an especially difficult challenge for me having just had 99% of my history playing with other people; especially having the opportunity to play with great rhythm sections.  That means to me, with my left hand, I don’t want to be getting in the way of Nathan East when he’s playing bass, or Harvey Mason or Steve Gadd when they’re playing drums.  My left hand has become a bit lazy.  Having played stride piano, or boogie-woogie piano, or the kind of piano style where the left hand is grinding out the rhythm and working all the time, I deliberately developed a technique that was very right hand oriented, very much sparse with the left hand.  It was a conscious thing, but you can’t really do that in a solo piano setting.  You’ve got to put your left hand to work.  More than anything else, I’ve been trying to catch up a little bit with my left hand, figure out what it is that I want to do’ have my left hand take the place of what a bass player and a drummer would otherwise be doing.  So, that’s what I’m working on.

I also have, the last year or so, been playing some duets with a really great guitar player named Howard Paul.  I made a record with him called Just Friends, and we performed a little bit live.  I’m hoping to do some more music with him next year.  He lives in Savannah, GA, where I spend quite a bit of time during the winter.  When I play with Howard, I play mostly standards in a very straight forward, relaxed, swing style.  Getting together with him is always a lot of fun.  It’s not like we’re trying to reinvent the wheel, or trying to be the worlds fastest, or the worlds craziest, or anything else like that.  We just have fun playing great songs.  I’m definitely looking forward to doing more stuff with him.

There’s also a Fourplay album in the works.  We may be going into the studio as early as January, we’re still trying to schedule that.  We have a definite plan to make a new album, and we also have broken the ice with a symphony orchestra project.  Last December, we played in Tokyo, Japan with the Japan Philharmonic.  I wrote a lot of new music for that with Fourplay with the symphony orchestra.  We’re planning on writing some more music.  We’ll hopefully have a DVD from that live performance that will be available soon.  We don’t know exactly how quickly yet because it’s still being edited and worked on.  Those are all things that are sort of in the works.

SV: That sounds good.  It sounds like you have a very full plate.  I thank you for chatting with me this morning.  This has been great.  It’s a real pleasure and I thoroughly enjoy talking with you.  Thank you so much, and have a happy holiday.
BJ: Well thank you.  Same to you.  I appreciate your interest in the music.  I hope to see you in the future.