Jon Weber tapped to host new version of NPR's Piano Jazz

For those who love pianist, composer, and musical savant Jon Weber--and there are many, many of us in the Twin Cities, where Weber has been a regular at our annual jazz festival and a favorite at the Artists' Quarter--the news could not be better: Starting in January, Weber will host National Public Radio's "Piano Jazz Rising Stars," successor to "Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz," the longest-running jazz show on NPR.

Jon Weber on quoting

Pianist Jon Weber is a prodigious and profligate quoter. While playing one tune, he’ll toss in phrases from others—sometimes many others, and they're not always jazz tunes. He has a vast library of all kinds of songs stored in his head and I imagine tiny creatures running around up there, pulling volumes from shelves at a furious pace and tossing them down to other tiny creatures waiting at Weber’s fingertips.

While interviewing Weber for a MinnPost profile, I asked, “How do quotes happen?” He said:

“I guess if you’re playing and if you’re familiar enough with a given tune and its harmonic structure and you pretty much know where the 32 bars are going to be and the 12 bars, you know the form blindfolded in your sleep…instinctively, you start to look for more things to do. It’s like I want to juggle an extra chain saw, carry on a conversation, or add another intellectual process. It’s a form of human expression…. Sometimes songs remind you of other songs, you tangentially go from one to the next, and you want to include it…. Imagine a Quote Meter. You want to tempt fate and see if you can add one more. It’s fun. You do it for the other musicians and anybody else who knows and shares your repertoire…. The older and hokier the tune, the funnier it is, if you can sneak something in that’s so silly it doesn’t belong there. A trombone player and I used to have a gig at a Hyatt and we played this game we called ‘That Has No Business Being In There.’ We’d sneak in a quote from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ just enough that people got it.”

Read a review of a Jon Weber show at the Artists' Quarter in January.
Photo by John Whiting.

Stride Piano Night

When: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 • Where: Dakota • Who: Butch Thompson, Paul Asaro, and Jon Weber, piano



For fans of stride piano (think melodies on the right hand, beats on the left; think Fats Waller), there was no better place on the planet to be than the Dakota on Tuesday night during the Twin Cities Jazz Festival. Three great pianists, two pianos, and a full house of enthusiastic listeners.

Butch Thompson opened the first set solo, Asaro the second, Weber the third, but each set evolved into a duo or trio. As he does on his Jazz Originals radio show, Thompson introduced each tune he played by telling us about it—who wrote it and when, plus a story or two. Asaro told us about Donald Lambert (“born the same year as Fats Waller, he never achieved fame except among musicians”). Weber asked us which key we wanted him to play in, which piano we wanted him to sit at, and how many flats he should play. (“Seven? Okay, seven.”)



The songs kept coming: by Eubie Blake, Fats Waller (“Squeeze Me,” “Your Feet’s Too Big”), James P. Johnson (“the Louis Armstrong of piano,” Thompson said), and Willie “The Lion” Smith. We heard Jelly Roll Morton’s “Pearls” (“not stride by strict definition,” Thompson explained, “but one of the building blocks of jazz”), “Jeepers Creepers” (all three men played this one—piano six hands), “A Cheerful Little Earful” by Harry Warren and Ira Gershwin, and George Gershwin’s “Slap That Bass.” A tune called “I Wish That I Were Twins, You Great Big Babykins.” And so many more. Weber told the audience, “You go to a jazz concert, you don’t know what you’re going to get. It’s all spontooneous.”

Two pianos and three men (two quite tall—Weber and Thompson are both well over 6 feet) led to some interesting and occasionally alarming games of musical chairs. All three ran back and forth between pianos. One piano had a bench, and often two men would crowd onto it, one playing the melody and the other playing the beat. The other piano had two chairs, one of which was perilously near the edge of the stage. An alert man from the audience kept going up to make sure neither Thompson nor Weber took the plunge.



During a break, Weber told me, “If all the electricity went out forever, stride pianists would be just fine.” I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that, but I think it had something to do with playing music that makes people happy.

Photos by John Whiting. Top to bottom: Weber and Thompson; Thompson and Asaro; Weber and Asaro.

Totally attuned: Pianist Jon Weber plays ninth jazz festival

Jon Weber by Pat Courtemanche

The 10th-annual Twin Cities Jazz Festival starts this weekend, which means Jon Weber is coming to town. For nine of the festival's 10 years,Weber has been its resident piano player.

He calls himself the festival's "utility infielder." Festival executive director Steve Heckler calls him "one of the top pianists in the country."

Weber isn't famous, as he'll tell you himself, but he should be, and if there's any justice he will be. He has a vast library of songs in his head, any of which (whole or in part) can travel to his fingertips in an instant. Hum a jazz or pop tune and he'll tell you the title, composer, and year it was written. He has perfect pitch; ping on a glass and he'll play a song in that key. He can solo, back a singer, or lead a group.

In the words of jazz pianist and Sirius radio host Judy Carmichael, "Jon is one of the most imaginative musicians in the business, equally smitten with all styles of jazz."

Chicago Public Radio host Steve Edwards once asked Weber how many songs he knows. 40,000? "Nowhere near," Weber demurred. "I made a list a long time ago ... I think it was 20,168. But I didn't say I knew 20,168 good tunes."

Weber's passion for music began at age 3, when his father brought home a toy organ. While other kids stacked blocks or crashed toy trucks, young Jon went to work on that organ, spending hours picking out tunes and playing his own versions of songs he'd heard on his Dr. Seuss and Bugs Bunny records.

When his grandmother gave the family her old player piano and piano rolls, Weber played along, following the moving keys with his fingers. By age 6 he had learned almost 2,000 standards.

Early scribbles lead to No. 1 jazz CD

As a teen he scribbled musical ideas on scraps of paper, envelopes, and in the margins of his textbooks. Some were multi-clef orchestrations. Many later became the songs on "Simple Complex," the CD he released on his own label in 2004 that was named the No. 1 Jazz CD of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, Swiss National Radio, Norwegian National Radio, Estonian National Radio and BBC Online.

By age 19, Weber's jazz quintet, playing all original music, had opened for Pat Metheny, Buddy Rich, Freddie Hubbard and Stanley Turrentine at various jazz festivals. He has since toured the world, performed to a sold-out Carnegie Hall four times, written arrangements for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, scored extensively for television, and penned 1,200 jingles, 20 of which aired during Super Bowls.

He composes and arranges music for the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which condenses epic works like Shakespeare's plays and the Bible into short, sharp comedies. He does not own a television, preferring to trust his own observations.

In February 2006, when Weber was performing in Florida, Dave Brubeck wandered in and left a signed note saying "There's nobody in the world who plays like this guy."

In sum: Weber is a former child prodigy mad genius jazz pianist, but affable, and very much a crowd-pleasing entertainer.

At this year's jazz festival, Weber is scheduled to play four gigs. He could easily end up playing more - if another pianist bails, if there's a gap in the program, if someone asks him to sit in. "Whatever Steve wants me to do, I'm there," he says.

"I can't say enough about Jon," Heckler says. "He has saved [the jazz festival] a few times. ... Here's a prime example. We had a trumpet player and his brothers come up from Alabama. Jon was already booked for four sets, and the brothers showed up short a piano player. I looked at Jon, he had just gotten done with a set, he walked up there, they called a tune, and he played it. Even with their original stuff, he felt it out, made it work and never complained. ... People love the guy. He's a decent guy. A fun person to hang with and work with."

Weber holds Heckler in equally high esteem. "He's the ideal jazz fest manager," he says. "He pretty much takes whatever live grenade is handed to him and turns it into something magical. ... He knows how to make everybody feel willing and eager to participate. I can't wait to come back every year."

The reason Weber didn't play the first Twin Cities Jazz Festival is simple: He and Heckler didn't yet know each other. In 2000, year two of the festival, the Global Harmonica Summit came to Minneapolis at the same time. "Weber was their resident piano player," Heckler recalls. "At the jazz festival, he and [harmonica player] Howard Levy ended up on stage with Jack MacDuff. Jack would call a tune and Weber would play it. As I watched him, I realized he could do just about everything. He could back up anyone."

Now based mostly in New York, Weber will arrive in the Twin Cities on Tuesday, June 24, where he'll play stride piano at the Dakota with our own Butch Thompson and Paul Asaro, a pianist from Champaign, Ill. Weber has played with Asaro before but never with Thompson. Heckler hopes to have two pianos on the Dakota stage.

On Wednesday, it's off to Christ the King Lutheran Church in Bloomington, where Weber will join Connie Evingson and the George Maurer Group on the front lawn. "Connie requested Jon," Heckler says. What's on the program? As usual, Weber is open. "I pretty much know everything Connie has ever recorded, and I told her it's all good -- do whatever you want."

On Thursday, it's back to the Dakota with bassist Adam Linz (of Fat Kid Wednesdays) and drummer Joe Pulice. On Friday, the trio moves outdoors to Peavey Plaza.

Between planned and impromptu gigs, there should be time for one of Weber's favorite Twin Cities destinations: Hell's Kitchen. According to Heckler, "He loves the peanut butter."

Originally published at MinnPost.com, Friday, June 20, 2008

Jon Weber

When: 1/27/08
Where: The Artists' Quarter
Who: Jon Weber (piano), Gordy Johnson (bass), Kenny Horst (drums)

Weber is one of my favorite piano players. Self-taught, he can play anything, and he seems to know everything about music. He has perfect pitch and total recall; by age 6, he had memorized 2,000 standards from his grandmother's piano rolls. He's a riveting performer, a brilliant composer, and an imaginative improviser. Why he isn't more famous is a mystery. Maybe he's just too scary smart in a profession that requires more brains than most people realize.

Weber splits his time between New York and Chicago (six days a week in NYC, one day in the Windy City) and rarely comes to Minneapolis/St. Paul except for the annual Twin Cities Jazz Festival in June, where he's a beloved regular. This weekend, he played a private event in Minneapolis on Saturday, leaving Sunday free for the AQ.

Because Sunday was Jerome Kern's birthday (Weber appears to know—and quite possibly really does know—every composer's birthday, date and year, and when every song was written, and what movie or musical it came from, if it did), the first set at the AQ was devoted to the music of Jerome Kern: "Long Ago and Far Away" (from the 1944 musical Cover Girl), "Nobody Else But Me" (a tune Gordy Johnson recorded on his Trios Version 3.0 CD), "All the Things You Are," "The Song Is You," "I'm Old Fashioned" (from the movie You Were Never Lovelier), and "Old Man River" from the musical Showboat.

But that's not all we heard. Like most jazz artists, Weber never plays just one tune. Between statements of the melody (so we have some clue what we're hearing), he improvises. And Weber's improvisations are wild rides through pretty much everything musical. All jazz artists quote from other songs, but with Weber, the quotes are so diverse and they go by so fast you've barely figured one out before he's already three ahead. It's as if each improvisation is an opportunity for Weber to mine the vast and astonishing wealth of music in his head, and he does it at warp speed. I found myself holding my breath so I wouldn't miss a thing.

A lot of things I recognized but couldn't name flew by. A few I could: Bits of Mozart (Weber calls him "Zart;" the 27th was his birthday, too) from "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" and more. Snippets of "Hooray for Hollywood" and "Chicago" (that toddlin' town). John swears he heard a phrase from an old Woolite jingle ("You'd look better in a sweater washed in Woolite"). Nothing was off limits and it all fit.

Between tunes, Weber talked, filling us in on what he had just played and preparing us (sort of) for what was to come, peppering us with facts and stats and stories. "Here we are in the second century of jazz," he said, "and you don't know what you're going to get.... It's the flying trapeze jazz act without a net."

The second set left Kern behind and chased the rest of jazz: "Swanee" (stride style), James P. Johnson's "Worried and Lonesome Blues" (Weber: "Someday I'm going to dedicate a whole show to songs with 'and' in the title.... 'You and the Night and the Music' will be a double"), "I'm Beginning to See the Light," Oscar Peterson's "Riff Blues," "Alone Together," "Very Early" (written by a 19-year-old Bill Evans), Charlie Christian's "A Smooth One," and "Sonnymoon for Two" by Sonny Rollins.



Introducing "Sonnymoon," Weber mentioned that Rollins was one of seven surviving jazz artists in the famous "Great Day in Harlem" photograph taken by Art Kane in 1958, a copy of which hangs on a wall at the AQ. Weber named six survivors but couldn't come up with the seventh, so after the set he and Kenny Horst and Davis Wilson and a few others gathered around the photo to try to figure it out.

Photos: Top: Jon Weber by John Whiting. Bottom: L to R: "Great Day in Harlem," Kenny Horst, HH, unidentified man, Jon Weber, Davis Wilson.