Stephen Prutsman Swings Bach and the Middle East in Carmel

“What we think of as classical music — there are a lot of classical musics out there — is part of being American,” says pianist Stephen Prutsman, whose solo performance of Bach and Forth, which takes off from the music both of Bach and of Charlie Parker, is at the center of a program called “Bach, Jazz, and the Spaces in Between” at the Carmel Bach Festival. The program also includes Prutsman’s arrangements of jazz standards and, unusual for a Bach festival, Middle Eastern music for string quartet and piano.

"Part of what we think of as classical music is what was written by Europeans between about 1600 and 1920; classical or art music: that was a big part of my upbringing,” Prutsman remarks. Raised in Southern California, he had a varied musical upbringing, from about the age of 4. “I started playing piano by ear. My father, who was an amateur musician — he never had any formal training — liked me accompanying him and family friends singing, mostly standards of the ’30s and ’40s, which is how I became familiar with that material — say, Moonlight in Vermont or All the Things You Are.”

By 14, Prutsman was playing ragtime in a pizza parlor. “Fancy restaurant jobs” followed, and later he played cocktail lounges. “Cocktail music wasn’t jazz,” he notes; “it was meant to be background music, with the rare exception of when somebody came up with a request. Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights: good money for a kid supporting himself!” He was involved, too, with a progressive rock band. “In the ’60s, music had been important in the culture — and still was, then.... I still have the single oscillator synthesizer. I love that kind of music!”

What he calls “a grip on Asian music, music from the Near East” came later, after he moved to San Francisco and started arranging for Kronos Quartet, “in the early to mid-’90s. It came about because of David Harrington’s [violinist founder of Kronos] interest in all things musical. We’d just dive in — say, transcribe an African piece, what we’d call a ‘take-down.’... Notating microtonal music, you have to know where the pitches lie, and so you learn the musical language, little by little. This was the link between those other musics and European art music, classical music.”

Over seven or eight years, Prutsman recalls, he began to discover relationships between types of music from various traditions, something he continues to explore. “My classical teachers never knew about the other stuff I did — and at least one wouldn’t have approved!”

Besides arranging for Kronos (including recordings made with soprano Dawn Upshaw), pop singer Nelly Furtado, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and jazz tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, Prutsman’s arrangements and film-scoring work has included jazz numbers, folk songs, show tunes, Middle Eastern music, and pieces by Kurt Weill.

In Carmel, the program includes: from J.S. Bach, the “Keyboard Concertos” in F and D Minor; both Prelude and Fugue in G Major and in F Minor; Contrapunctus XVIII; Dizzy Gillespie’s Night in Tunisia, John Coltrane’s Naima, and Joe Zawinul’s Birdland; a traditional song from Uzbekistan; plus a composition by Turkish musician Tanburi Cemil Bey, a principal exponent of the taksim improvisatory style in Ottoman classical music.

Prutsman’s own Bach and Forth solo piece includes material from Bach, serialist Arnold Schoenberg, and jazzman Charlie Parker’s Ornithology.

“Stephen’s program is a perfect start-off for sparking the imagination and stimulating conversation,” says Festival Director Camille Kolles, adding that the festival’s incoming music director, oboist and conductor Paul Goodwin, will stage an innovative performance of both Ralph Vaughan Williams’ and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphonies, sandwiching a contemporary piece, A Man Descending, by Mark-Anthony Turnage, which features jazz tenor saxophone star Joe Lovano as soloist.

“I’ve found that the music of Bach, more than any other composer, can be paired with anything,” says Prutsman. “Brahms, say, and Latin music don’t work that well together. With Bach as the anchor, we’ll not only hear music not ordinarily represented on the concert stage, but also hear Bach differently, finding in the musics different harmonies, swing rhythms, improvisation, and — as in both Baroque and Charlie Parker — a delight in ornamentation. This isn’t a puzzle gimmick. There’s an infinite number of relationships in the music I’m still finding out about. If there’s a philosophy for this program, it’s that relationships are the thing!”