Interview by Joe Montague
Avant-garde
jazz pianist Dave Franks’ humor can sometimes be as surreal as the paintings of
Salvador Dali, whose paintings served as the inspiration behind the song
“Salvador Dali In A State of Grace.”
Frank will joke about where Dali might be now
or about playing a private concert for Picasso. He talks about his own music
using descriptive metaphors.
“Salvador Dali was one of the proponents of the surreal
avant-garde painting movement, taking traditional images and reinventing them.
It wasn’t only in his art it was in his persona. He was such a flashy and whacky
guy, that I have found it interesting to imagine where he went to after he died,
because (laughing he says) where he was when he was here was pretty far out. I
wondered where Dali went after he died, because he must have gone to some
extremely far out place or maybe he created a new one,” says Frank
Referring to Dali as a whacky
guy Frank says, “He was an avant-garde (painter). In the 20th
century, you can see movement toward the avant-garde in all art forms. We can
see it in guys like Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollack. In music, we can see it
(in the compositions) of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. You see very modern
dance compared to ballet. In the 20th
century, art forms tended to go from works with more classical emphasis to forms
that were more avant-garde. “Salvador Dali In A State of Grace” is very atonal,
and it is supposed to give you a surreal feel. That is done by scrapping harmony
altogether. (It is) creating tones that don’t suggest traditional harmony.”
“That piece (“Salvador Dali In A State Of Grace”) starts
with a very short composed theme, and then leaves traditional harmony
completely. I had fun with that piece (because I did) not use piano voicings.
When you are studying jazz on the piano, so much of the emphasis is placed on
learning specific voicings. There are so many, and you need to know how to use
them. In this piece, I tried not to use any voicings that have been played. I
wasn’t thinking this was a C chord or G chord, I just put the chords together
one note at a time, until I got music that sounded like a place that Dali might
be at today,” says Frank.
Frank
is arguably, one of the planet’s better composers for piano music, and a
superbly talented soloist. The creativity and imagination behind his
compositions for his current album
Ballads &
Burners only adds substance to the
accolades he has received over the years from fans, critics and fellow musicians
such as Dave Douglas.
Pat Martino commented, “I was deeply moved by the Power
of the piano, Dave Frank is a monster,” and Charlie Banacos observed, “Dave is
going to make everyone practice! He plays circles around most of the guys out
there.”
Six years passed between the
original conception for
Ballads And Burners
in the year 2000 and its release in 2006. “A lot of
the time lag had to do with the nature of the record business at that time. That
period was the most intense change in the music business and there was no clear
sense for how music was going to be distributed, whether it was going to be
through the internet or hardcopy. It was a real time of flux in the music
business and I just wanted to wait for the right time and place, because I put a
good part of my life into that record,” says Frank.
As the album’s title suggests the songs are comprised
primarily from two groups, those that are considered ballads and others that are
referred to as burners. Frank describes each type, “The ballad sets a calm mood
and explores a lot of harmonies. It is very evocative, sensitive and
harmonically rich. One of the most important things about ballads is the concept
of using space. Many times with ballads, the notes are less important than the
space that surrounds them. The music is just a way to amplify the silence that
comes after it. If you hear silence with nothing, you won’t notice it, but if
you hear slow music and then hear silence between the chords then you will
notice that silence much differently. That is the beautiful part of ballad
playing. Burners refer to the fastest possible tempo that you can play. When I
play rhythms, I usually play left hand walking bass.”
The second track “Rousseau’s World” is one of the
ballads that Frank included on this highly imaginative CD. The charts were
inspired by Henri Rousseau’s oil painting The Sleeping Gypsy (circa 1897). The
painting depicts just as it suggests a gypsy sleeping on the ground with a lion
hover over him.
Frank comments on what captured his imagination about
the painting, “I think that it is the contrast between the sleeping Gypsy and
the lion. The lion had kind of a hungry look on his face. The lion is looking at
him and going hmmm. You don’t know if he is looking at him to protect him or as
his (next) dinner. The background of the painting is very moody and sparse, so
that provided a very nice contrast between the (subjects in the) foreground and
a spacey background.”
The composer/pianist describes the transformation
process for interpreting the painting through his music, “The first thing that
you want to consider when you try to adapt one art form to another is the mood
that you are trying to recreate through a different medium. The gypsy was in
repose and there was a very calm mood to the painting. There was moonlight and
an evocative, calm and sensual quality to the painting. The harmonic sequence is
a kind of harmonic movement called cyclic movement. What that means in musical
terms is instead of the chords moving in fourths, which is a common jazz
movement; the chord movement went in thirds and seconds. I am referring to the
root note or bottom note. Instead of going D to G to C, to develop a more
abstract sense in the music the chords will go from D to F to A flat or from D
to F and down a second to E flat, then up a third to G flat. The different
harmonic mode is what we call rooted left. You aren’t going to that root place
that you would expect so quickly and that makes the music float more. It gives
it more of a modern abstract sense. It is really the harmonic movement of the
chords in that particular piece that was my way of trying to recreate the mood
of the piece.”
Other songs on Ballads And
Burners that were inspired by paintings include, “Shades of Renoir,” a copy of
which hung in Frank’s childhood home, “Portrait Of Manet” viewed in a
“The Mechanization Of America” is a song that cannot
adequately be described but was the piece that most caught my listening ear the
first time I heard the CD. Frank used a left hand boogie pattern with a twist to
create a rhythm suggestive of big machines hammering away at buildings and
construction projects. Frank’s right hand plays a motif that draws images of
hammers against steel beams.
Today Frank operates the Dave
Frank School Of Jazz in
“The
thing that is just so fascinating to me, and I have been doing nothing but
playing the piano since I was four years old, is how absorbing this subject of
jazz piano can be over the period of a lifetime. It is so absorbing on every
level of the psyche. Your brain is working, your body is working, your fingers
are working and your deepest emotions are implied. To be able to have all of
these things working together at the same time and develop music is such an
extraordinary accomplishment. When you think of the great players who have given
us so much great music over the past one hundred years, and the accomplishment
of these people, it is just amazing,” says Frank.