Nashua composer explores movements in ‘The Narrative’

Thursday, February 4, 2010

By JEN O’CALLAGHAN

Correspondent

Ben Geyer has come home.

The Nashua native is back in the Gate City to work, play and promote his new CD, “The Narrative.” He and his band, The Ben Geyer Sextet, will play a CD release party at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11.

The composer and jazz musician selected the pieces that make up “The Narrative” because they’re multi-movement.

The first selection, “The Slip,” was originally a modern dance piece developed with choreographer Annie Now. Rather timely for a winter performance, it’s a piece about ice written in three movements: “Hydrogen,” “Oxygen” and “The Happening.”

The second selection is Geyer’s “East of Eden Suite,” which tells the biblical story of Cain and Abel in four movements and is based on the John Steinbeck novel.

Geyer says he likes the way the multi-movement pieces give the album unity.

“It gives it a more powerful climax and structure when music develops over a long period of time,” he says. “I’d like to move my band toward that concept, even if it’s not a story, but if I am threading pieces that are conceptual.

“These two pieces had enough in common and I liked them enough that I felt that they belonged on an album together.”

Geyer’s sextet will play selections from the album at his Studio 99 gig, and he plans to perform at least portions of the album at every Ben Geyer Sextet show to introduce audiences to these larger-scale pieces.

“I’m very proud of the album, and I think it does stand out from other acts that are out there.”

The concept of narrative music isn’t unfamiliar to the classical music scene that began Geyer’s career in music. He grew up listening to classical music, took classical piano lessons since he was 8 and even entered college as a classical music major.

“It’s a part of the fiber of my musical experience,” he says.

But jazz has become the style for which he’s perhaps best known.

“I write jazz because that’s how I express my ideas,” Geyer says. “That’s my language. It’s what I play the most and it’s what I’m most comfortable writing.”

Piano was a natural first instrument for Geyer. Growing up in the Gate City, many of his friends had pianos in their houses. His grandmother taught piano. Another grandmother lived in a nursing home that had a piano.

“There were just pianos around me,” he says. “You could just sit down and start playing. The accessibility was the first thing that drew me to it.”

Two of his grandparents were musically inclined, but Geyer says the desire to play skipped a generation. However, his parents exposed him and his brother to a wide variety of music – from the Beatles to opera to everything in between.

“We used to sing in the car on road trips, which sounds very ‘Partridge Family,’ ” he says.

When his parents saw him constantly at the piano, they enrolled him in piano lessons to feed the fire.

When Geyer discovered jazz, he had a reasonable grasp of music theory. It was the next step for him in figuring out how music worked. It also allowed for more individuality than he felt he had in classical music.

“As a classical pianist, there is a lot of pressure on you,” Geyer says. “There are a million classical pianists. Anything you play has been played perfectly a hundred times on recording, so you’re constantly being compared just on the basis of the notes you play.

“Jazz gives more room for individuality. You’re judged less on how perfectly you execute something and more on what you sound like, what your style is. You’re not just playing the notes, you’re choosing the notes. That leads directly to composing.

“Improvising is composing on the spot. You’re choosing the notes.”

As he has evolved as a musician, Geyer says he has become interested in pairs: classical music and jazz. Jazz and modern dance. He likes to explore what the pairs have in common and how they can feed off one another.

Because jazz was initially a dance music in the big band era, he feels jazz works naturally with modern dance, as in “The Slip.”

“Modern dance and jazz are both modern branches of their art form,” he says. “They’re abstract to a certain extent and I think they pair very well together.”