Music Video Lesson: Student of Robert Estrin: Bijan Taghavi – Jazz Artist

ROBERT: Hi, I'm Robert Estrin, and I am so pleased today to have a special guest, Bijan Taghavi, Bijan Taghavi. Bijan was a student of mine from the time he was eight years old until after high school when he went to the Manhattan School of Music as a piano major. Now, he studied classical music and played concertos and accompanied metropolitan opera singers, but all along he also played other styles of music. And today I'm proud to announce that he is coming out with a second album with Trio Gram, his trio. There's so much to talk about as European and Asian tours. Welcome, Bijan.

BIJAN: Hey, thanks, Bob, for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

ROBERT: Yeah, so tell me the latest with what's going on with you, and then we'll go start from the beginning and talk about your metamorphosis in music. I'm sure everybody's interested in this.

BIJAN: Yeah, I'm actually in town visiting Cleveland now, so it's actually worked out because I'm playing at the Treelon, which is a new jazz club opening where they got the piano from you actually. And they're literally like a two -minute walk from here in the Waterloo Arts District in Cleveland. So I'm going to be playing here, and then we're off to Europe for a Europe tour for our first album, which came out a few months ago. And then pretty soon thereafter, we're going to be going to LA doing our second Trio Gram album. It's a jazz piano trio with myself, led by my friend, great bassist, Will Lyle. And we're going to be actually having a special guest drummer who played with the Bill Evans Trio, Joe LaBarbara. So I'm so excited about that. It's going to be great.

ROBERT: That's really exciting. Now, this is your second European tour, is that right?

BIJAN: My second international tour. I did a Bijan Tagavi Trio tour back in 2018 in Japan, actually. Which, by the way, Japan is an incredibly vibrant, I was going to say music scene, but it's actually a perfect situation where the musicians aren't necessarily as great as they are here. But the audience is actually, they love jazz over there. So it's a perfect problem. There's more demand than supply. So when we go there, they absolutely love it and venues are packed. And it's a lot of fun going out there.

ROBERT: Fantastic. Well, now you're teaching at Hillsdale College. And you could talk a little bit about your academic background. But I think people would be really interested in how you started off in classical. But from the very beginning, you'd come in with blues and Elton John tunes. And I always worked with you on these other styles. And you were like spearheading Major Concertos, Tchaikovsky B flat minor, or Rachmaninoff, and then suddenly, boom, you had a pivotal event that shifted everything. And talking about that difference between classical and jazz, what was it like for you to make that shift? And was it like an "aha" moment? Or how did this happen?

BIJAN: Well, if I go back a little bit further, when I switched to studying with you is really when I became really serious with the piano. Before that, I had just gone to the Yamaha School of Music. I was there maybe five years or something. I started when I was three and a half. Elton John was actually my inspiration. So that's probably why later on, when I first started venturing outside of classical music, I started just exploring with some Elton John tunes. But then I went to a, you probably remember this, I went to a performance of yours. And do you remember where I sat in relation to you?

ROBERT: Yes, yes. This is very early on. And he was just a little kid. And I was playing a private concert in a beautiful home in Huntington Beach. And this little kid comes over and he sits like, his head is like right here on the edge of the keyboard. And I said, well, can you go to the other side? Because you'd be blocking the audience.

BIJAN: Completely block the audience.

ROBERT: And the entire performance, you were just riveted. And for like such a young kid, that was really pretty shocking. And then I heard you play and I could hear that even though you were elementary, that you had a lot of talent and so much enthusiasm. And I always enjoyed working with you. And the interesting thing was from the very beginning, you'd spend your allowance money on sheet music. How many kids do that?

BIJAN: I was going to say actually, because at the time, I remember you weren't taking students, or at least that's what you said. And maybe you just didn't want to take the elementary level first. But then once you heard that I was spending my allowance on sheet music, I remember that showed you that I was really committed to wanting to do something with the piano, whether it's professional or not, but that I was taking it seriously. And studying with you, it's not a hyperbole to say it really changed my life in terms of my trajectory. First of all, with the piano, I figured out how to practice, which I'm sure people who watch your YouTube channel know that that's a big concept that you emphasize in your lessons and everything. So I learned everything I know about how to play the piano, piano technique, how to get a good sound out of the piano, piano tone, etc., from you. And like you were saying, I did all those main classical works as far as even playing solo piano concerts that I remember your old Art District concerts. And you even prepared me to play the Grieg piano concerto with the South Coast Symphony. But then I made the transition. So the first, it was really sort of two main catalyst events for me that made me switch. The first thing was I had a concert with Latin jazz flutist Nestor Torres. And it was the first true jazz experience that I ever had. And at that time, even though I had done, like you said, some allowance money on rock songs, Billy Joel and John, things like that, explored a little bit with blues, I didn't really know how to read chord charts. So that was the most crazy thing for me to look at. I just said they were looking for a jazz pianist out of the high school group because he came to our high school. And I just said I could play jazz piano. And then I was handed over the summer this stack of 20 lead sheets, which for now it might be easy for me because I'm so used to that now. But at the time, reading a lead sheet was the craziest thing. I saw all this A flat seven sharp 11 flat nine. I didn't even know what I was reading.

ROBERT: I remember you coming into your lesson with this book. And I was like, well, we had done some theory. But to realize an entire concert's worth of lead sheets, there's no way it would be time during a lesson. I just like squashed the surface. And somehow you assimilated that, all those scores. And that was when you were still in high school.

BIJAN: Yeah, I was still in high school. And so basically I took that whole summer. And I remember my guitar teacher, who also helped me a lot in sort of helping me make the transition as well as you. He gave me, I remember, just for the purposes of guitar chords and things, he had given me this sort of cheat sheet, which had every single chord on it. And there were unnecessary chords, too. It was maybe a stack of 25 chords written on this page. Add the chord, and then it had the formula, major seven nine sharp 11. So it would write out one three five seven nine sharp 11. Or minor seven, it would say one flat three five flat seven. So I didn't really understand how there's only four chord families, and you don't need that list of 25. But I went through each chord methodically in the lead sheet, and I figured out what the chords are. So it was a lot of work. But I almost sort of temporarily quit my foray into jazz after that. And the thing is, in retrospect, Nestor was right. But he told me something that sort of depressed me a little bit about the possibility. He said, look, kid, you know, you got a long way to go, you know, and particularly with my improvisation and things like that, because I didn't have much jazz language then, even though I was experimenting with things. But, you know, that's something, an area where you were really encouraging to me. And that's something that I'm indebted to you forever for that, which is to encourage me to keep going and to explore more and more. And then the second catalyst for me was then I heard Oscar Peterson, great late pianist Oscar Peterson. And just hearing his music, you know, when I first transitioned to jazz and I got into that, you know, I didn't really have a jazz teacher for the longest time. You would help me out a lot. But I didn't study with a jazz teacher until I went to Manhattan School of Music later. So I had sort of a year period where it was really just Oscar Peterson. I actually didn't like jazz, which is the funniest thing. Some of the greatest jazz pianists like Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner and them. For me, my ears weren't even ready for that yet. But I was lucky enough that Oscar was able to draw me in. Now I can appreciate all those artists and I've taken so much from those other pianists as well. But those were the main two catalysts for me.

ROBERT: You know, with all my students, you know, I give a solid background in the three macro skills of memorization, sight reading and improvisation. One of the things I do from the earliest stages is I just have students play a very, very simple chord progression. And first I will go on one side of the piano and comp and let the student play all white keys. I'll do a Dorian mode and then I'll switch it and let the student comp. And then I go, okay, now the hard part. See if you can comp with your left hand, keep that going and solo with the right hand. And there's varying degrees of success. Some of these people just start playing methodically up the keyboard, one note at a time. And I say, hold some notes longer than others. Try to get some variety. When the very first time you did it, it's like, I couldn't believe it. You were able to do it the first time you tried. And that's when I realized that you had an incredible affinity for this. The other thing was that your sense of rhythm with popular styles, you had a really, you had a great groove, even as the youngest kid, in addition to being able to play Beethoven and Chopin Scherzos and all of that. But getting back to triogram, triogram. Now, what is the whole concept of triogram? I understand that you're doing on your albums, it's all original music and how much of it is yours? Tell us a bit more about your trio.

BIJAN: It's a lot of original music. Triogram, it's an association of myself and Will Lyle, my great friend, one of my best friends, Will Lyle, great bass player who, we're both from Southern California actually, although we never met there. We met afterwards when we were both in college and we found out we're both from there. But him and I had worked a lot together in the past and we always meant to do a project together. And we thought, what better way than to do a piano trio? And a piano trio is really the main setting that, first of all, as a pianist, it really is one of the premier settings to feature a jazz pianist because you're in control of everything. You're playing the melodies, you're the main soloist instrument, although the bassist can solo as well. So it really features the pianist. And it's a lot of fun, but it's also kind of intimidating at the same time. But it was this project him and I put together and basically it was just the end of last summer in 2022. We were both incredibly busy, but we thought, let's do a record together at the end of a month. So we only gave ourselves a month. And then naturally him and I both got busy. I'm doing a lot of work in Michigan. He's doing a lot of work in New York. And then our drummer actually mistakenly thought we were still going on with the project and we didn't because we decided to stop it. And he just did this little post on Facebook. He said, hey guys, I'm going to be in town doing this recording session. And I was like, hey Will, did you not tell Kofi that we're not going to be doing this anymore? And then we talked about it and we decided maybe we should go ahead and do it. And so it was really actually last minute. It put together, like we just decided the tunes last minute, we wrote the tunes last minute. But it turned out a lot better than we expected given how last minute was put together. But it was great. We did a lot of original music. He did some original tunes. I did some original tunes, one of which was dedicated to you actually, Changes.

ROBERT: Yeah, a great tune by the way. And we'll have links for you so you can check out some of Bijan's music. And the last thing I want to ask about is your upcoming album. You've got another drummer featuring on this album. Tell us about that because that's a real exciting development.

BIJAN: So after we did the first record, Will and I did a series of tours and we did one in the West Coast where we went to Mexico and did a series of shows there. By the way, what incredible audiences in Mexico. They were so supportive of all our music. And then we went to California and Arizona. And in California we played, we would have featured special guest drummers with us. And in LA, that's the home of the great drummer, Joe LaBarbara, who was one of the drummers for the iconic Bill Evans Trio. And the second we played with him, I remember we had the rehearsal and I'm really picky with musicians and drummers because there's a very particular thing that I want or works great with me. And Will is the same way. But after the rehearsal, him and I went outside and we just started dancing like a bunch of old Iranian women. We were celebrating. It was the most incredible thing. I had never played with a drummer where I felt so good and comfortable. He knew how to support you and play under you. And the sound he gets out of the instrument, I could go on forever. His time feel is just so incredible. And so we have another tour coming up. And we're going to be playing with Joe LaBarbara in California, both in San Francisco on July 26th at the Black Cat and July 27th at Campus Jack's Jazz Club in Orange County. And we thought, since we're doing these gigs with them and we're going to be in California, let's do another record with them. So we're going to be doing another album with Joe LaBarbara and I'm so excited for it.

ROBERT: Well, we'll have links to your website. And once again, it's great having you here. And I know you've got to get to your gig, like up the street in about five minutes.

BIJAN: I'm going to change and run over there.

ROBERT: So great. Thanks again for coming. And once again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is livingpiano.com.

BIJAN: Thank you, Bob.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/student-of-robert-estrin-bijan-taghavi-jazz-artist/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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