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Craig Taborn and the Fender Rhodes
BY JON GARELICK
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In the post-everything world of progressive jazz, Craig Taborn has become the go-to guy on Fender Rhodes electric piano. The vintage sounds of the early-’70s-era electric piano shows up more and more these days, and Taborn plays the instrument on albums by Dave Douglas and Matt Maneri — even on an album by the previously keyboard-phobic Tim Berne, The Sublime And (Thirsty Ear). Miles Davis was the first to popularize the Fender Rhodes in jazz, converting players like Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, and Chick Corea to it in the first stages of the jazz-rock fusion revolution. By the time of the "jazz renaissance" of the mid ’80s, the Fender Rhodes was seen as a reminder of the bad old days — and that’s not "bad" as in "good." But now, as Taborn reminds me when I reach him by phone in New York City, in the wake of hip-hop, electric piano is being seen objectively again, as "just another sound." And with the pan-stylistic approach of folks like Douglas, that early-electric Miles sounds better and better. Taborn points out to me that Sun Ra actually pioneered the Fender Rhodes as early as the ’50s, and that Ellington dabbled in it too. If Taborn has been part of the Fender Rhodes revival, it’s in part because he gives it as distinctive a sound as he does his acoustic playing. Although Miles planted the Fender Rhodes virus, by the late ’70s the sound had become generic — a straight-ahead player like Freddie Hubbard would employ a Fender Rhodes in his band simply because it was fashionable, without otherwise changing his music a whit. Taborn, however, has as much personality on the instrument as Chick, Herbie, or Keith ever did. A Detroit native, he’s a thoughtful player who came up in James Carter’s bands playing acoustic, and on his own Light Made Lighter (Thirsty Ear), a trio CD from 2001, he plays acoustic exclusively, essaying various moods and modes in his original compositions, from Monkish motifs to the Paul Bley–like broken melodic lines, outside harmonies, even a version of "I Cover the Waterfront." On the surface, it’s a much different sound that Taborn gets on his electric dates — but is that just a matter of the ear being fooled by a different timbre? The answer is yes and no. "Ultimately, it lends itself to a different kind of performance technique," he says of the Rhodes. For one, the Rhodes is naturally a lot louder than an acoustic piano. "You can do a lot less and still get certain sounds out of it, because it’s such a big, round, woofy sound that playing stacked chords is not always the thing to do. You can do more with two notes in a chord on a Rhodes — it just sounds bigger. And it depends on the Rhodes. When you’re talking about a Fender Rhodes, you’re talking about an instrument that had 10 to 15 years of development, and the sounds changed. It got a lot bellier and a lot more sort of controlled later on in the ’70s, where you get to that kind of Bob James Taxi-theme bell-Rhodes sound as opposed to the first versions of the Fender Rhodes, which were a lot raunchier." Taborn prefers those earlier models, and you can hear the raunch when he’s playing with Berne or Douglas, where he provides dissonant color and plenty of rhythm. He never over-specifies the harmonies, and he can create spooky, driving windstorms of sound of the kind Miles used to produce by setting three pianos at once on stage, or he can simply hint at adjacent harmonies. All of which, he says, isn’t that different from how he’s played acoustically with acoustic-jazz adventurers like Carter and Roscoe Mitchell. "I play some of the same chords on the piano, but there are definitely things I would do on the piano because it’s a more transparent instrument that I wouldn’t do on the Rhodes. I want to make sure I’m really accompanying and not dictating. The Rhodes is so strong that when you play something on it, it really can dictate, because it’s louder and the timbre is much more opaque. So you leave more holes. On the piano, I would maybe play more sustain chords and stuff, which are lovely on the Rhodes but they definitely go: ‘Okay, here is a specific harmonic space.’ I just try to hint at harmonic space and explore voice leading as opposed to plunking out specific chords." The other thing Taborn reminds me about is that, unlike the synthesizer, the Fender Rhodes is an electro-mechanical instrument, with levers and hammers and tines, just like a "real" piano. And so issues of tuning and voicings come into play just as they do on a piano, as does the action, which varies from instrument to instrument and can affect rhythmic attack. "It makes you swing in a different way." He adds that for a long time, the Rhodes had a stigma, "right before the coma of jazz. For guys who came out in the ’80s, the Rhodes is that thing they wanted to get away from — that ’70s thing." But for Taborn, who’s 33 and has played with electronica man (and fellow Detroit native) Carl Craig, it’s a matter of "let’s use this because it has its own sound."
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