Besides being a gifted pianist, composer, bandleader, educator and co-writer of imaginative jazz musicals for children, New York City musical maven Eli Yamin is a devout, globetrotting evangelist for jazz and blues as a universally healing and unifying communal catalyst, an inspiring historical and cultural force that he calls “the heartbeat of the American experience.”
Practicing what he preaches about his profound faith in the power and the glory of jazz and blues, he has spread the jazz and blues gospel by performing and proselytizing (in the friendliest manner) everywhere from India to China, from premier concert halls and clubs to command performances at the Obama White House. “I learned from my mentors that the purpose of jazz and blues is to make people feel better, to be a healing balm for the struggles that everybody goes through in life,” Yamin said of how his beliefs came to be formed.
“Delving into history,” he said from his home in Manhattan, “you see that the music comes from the black American experience, and how it was always a tool to deal with really horrendous things. Because that’s where the music came from, it has the capacity to really help heal what ails you, whatever your background is.”
Yamin, a Steinway piano artist, brings his celebratory/missionary brand of jazz and blues to town as he leads his quartet at 3:00 pm on Sunday, January 4, at the grand opening of the enormously popular, admission-free 2015 Baby Grand Jazz Series in the scenic atrium at the downtown Hartford Public Library.
Yamin will be jammin’ with his tight-knit, working quartet grooving on classics ranging from Duke Ellington to Thelonious Monk, to original pieces, some off of his recordings, which are celebrations of the spirit of jazz and blues. Besides himself on the library’s iconic baby grand as well as vocals, The Yamin Jazz Quartet features the red-hot alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, bassist Jennifer Vincent, and drummerCraig Haynes, a son of legendary jazz drummer Roy Haynes.
Although Yamin’s parents aren’t serious musicians, and didn’t own a giant jazz record collection, his childhood home was filled with the sound of other kinds of music, including classical and folk. It seeped into his consciousness, creating a kind of critical standard for judging quality in music. “My parents didn’t really know jazz, but they knew the music of the folk revival of mid-20th century -- Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and others,” he said. “So I heard that music, especially [folk/blues musician and singer/songwriter] Elizabeth Cotton, who had a great influence on me…. She and Pete Seeger created a vibration that established itself somewhere in my consciousness, and made me really curious to learn more about music.”
Yamin’s parents dabbled a bit in playing, but he was the first serious musician in the family. His father, a physicist who works at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, played the piano a little bit. His mother, a historical archaeologist, played recorder. “Music, for my parents,” Yamin said, “is like their religion, like their God... I absorbed the idea that music can play a central role in your life, as it does for my parents.”
Young Eli began taking classical piano lessons early on, until about age 12, when his musical world got dramatically turned around when he first heard the blues. “I got the blues through Jimi Hendrix and the music of Woodstock, some ten years after the fact, followed by rock and roll bands, leading to B.B. King and Taj Mahal,” he said. “I went through folk/blues, with a little window for rock, before I found my way to Count Basie. Once I heard Basie, I really got hooked on jazz. That was it.”
Jammin’ the blues became a magnificent obsession, Yamin recalled. “A friend of mine who played guitar and I would get together and jam all afternoon on a shuffle beat on a single chord, and just play and groove, and make up lyrics,” he said. “We’d look up at each other, and then jam on another chord. It wasn’t about the blues form at all. It was just about that vibration that I think flowed through me from Elizabeth Cotton, Jimi Hendrix, and Taj Mahal, just the desire to create that blues feeling.”
Yamin is quick to thank a litany of his many supportive mentors, including the late drummer Walter Perkins and the poet/playwright and critic Amiri Baraka, along with such great piano practitioners and pedagogues as Barry Harrisand Kenny Barron. He gives thanks not just for his success as a musician, who has toured the world as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department, and as an influential teacher in educational programs at Jazz at Lincoln Center, but also for his jazz gurus having instilled in him a profound awareness and appreciation of the music’s roots and the legacy of its great masters.
One of Yamin’s early inspirational guides was the celebrated saxophonist/bandleader Illinois Jacquet, who first crossed young Yamin’s path while the pianist was gigging with drummer Walter Perkins’s house band at the Skylark Lounge, a soul food restaurant in Jamaica Queens. In a kind of seventh heaven, the starry-eyed apprentice pianist got to back many famous guest soloists, including Basie band members.
"After I met Illinois Jacquet there," Yamin said, "I started working with big bands, including a three-month stint playing 29 cities around the country with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. I realized that Illinois was the best, and that I really wanted to play with him. So I saw him one night and just went up to him and said, ‘Man, I’d love to work with you.’ He called me a month later, and I went to his house. He hired me, but told me, ‘You’re not ready, but I’m going to give you a chance.’ I played with his band for two years, touring all over Europe. It was phenomenal how he led his group and the amazing consistency of his solos playing One O’Clock Jump every night, always new and exciting. It was really something. One O’Clock Jump was my Bible. For my mother, it’s the Brandenburgs. For me it was One O’Clock Jump.”
Studying with pianist Jaki Byard, the remarkably free-spirited, encyclopedic stylist, was another deep learning experience for young Yamin, which crystallized the importance for him of knowing the history of jazz piano and becoming fluent in all its styles
“Although Jaki embraced the history of jazz, there was no question that he was avant-garde,” Yamin said. “This idea that in order to be avant-garde you need to throw away the history just made no sense to him. His advice was, ‘Embrace the whole history from Jelly Roll Morton to Cecil Taylor, and just be yourself.’ ”
Amiri Baraka, a firebrand critic, social activist and author of the seminal jazz and cultural writings collected in Blues People and Black Music, was another powerful, mind-expanding influence and supportive friend. They first met when Yamin was 18 while either an undergraduate at Rutgers University or when just beginning his eight-year on-air stint at WBGO-FM, the well-known Newark jazz radio station.
“Amiri would invite me to hang out at his house, where we’d listen to Duke Ellington records until two in the morning,” Yamin said. “When I was about 19, he had me come over with my quartet. We’d play and Amiri and his wife, Amina, would do poetry. He was an inspiration and supportive. He’d even send me faxes in the middle of the night with tips about music or encouraging words. We remained friends right up until his death last January. He was the first black writer who really embraced black culture as the source of jazz, and being quite specific about that. He helped me really understand the connection.”
Making his Hartford debut, Yamin launches the 16-concert Baby Grand Jazz Series, which features free Sunday jazz matinees through April 26 in the atrium at the Hartford Public Library’s flagship headquarters at 500 Main Street.
“I’ve played many times in libraries,” Yamin said. “I love it because the books jump off the shelves and start dancing. And from what I’ve heard about Baby Grand Jazz, it sounds like one of those great communal events in a public square, except, of course, it’s held indoors.”
In just the last few years, the series, which is celebrating its 12th season, has exploded in popularity, frequently drawing crowds of 500 or more. (Translation: a turnout of 500 for a jazz concert in downtown Hartford on a wintry Sunday afternoon in a library was about as likely as seeing a unicorn walking down Main Street.)
In its earlier years, in fact, Baby Grand Jazz drew small, almost baby-sized, certainly far less than grand turnouts, usually attracting the same hardy handful of devotees from week to week.
Now Baby Grand’s devoted Sunday congregation is both large and diverse, including young and old. And to the delight of visiting performers, it is both attentive and appreciative. An audience that comes to listen and enjoy, it’s an ecumenical mix of seasoned true believers sitting right alongside neophyte listeners making their first communion with jazz.
What’s happened is that Baby Grand Jazz, which is made possible by The Charles H. Kaman Charitable Foundation, has phenomenally morphed into the ideal soundtrack for the multiple innovations that the library’s visionary CEO Matt Poland has brought about to bring the venerable institution into the digital age as a place relevant for one and all, a public forum and learning and knowledge center alive with communal spirit.
Its future is even brighter this season thanks to the generosity of the Kaman Charitable Foundation, a longtime supporter (sometimes anonymous, sometimes public), which has provided an extended three-year sponsorship totaling $50,000. It’s the once relatively low profile series’ best and most extended funding ever.
Among this season’s bonus attractions is online live streaming of concerts for folks who can’t make it to the library that day. At the library itself, there will be a coffee kiosk set up in the atrium by the Kitchen at Billings Forge where coffee, snacks and refreshments will be on sale. Kiosk service is set up at 2:00 pm to accommodate concert-goers who arrive early to stake out front row seats, check out a book or visit the library’s various special exhibitions while awaiting downbeat time at 3:00 pm.
To view the concert live online, visit the library’s website, hplct.org. During the Sunday concerts, a link on the homepage will take you to the live stream viewing. After the concert, the library posts video of the performances on its YouTube page, so that, even if you miss a concert entirely, you can still watch it a few days later.
In a special event for the series, opening day also features a meet-and-greet kick-off opening reception after the concert, to be held from 4:00 to 5:00 pm in the library’s Hartford History Center on the third floor. Over light refreshments, you can chat and snack with the performers in the Eli Yamin Jazz Quartet. Reception tickets: $20.00. Tickets on sale at www.hplct.org or can be purchased at the door. Proceeds benefit the library.
Thanks to Baby Grand’s extraordinary success—the mini-miracle on Main Street -- Poland’s progressive philosophy of what a 21st-century urban public library should be -- an ecumenical feast of the cultural and the communal -- is celebrated every Sunday (except Easter Sunday) right through the wintry blahs and into the rites of spring.
Presented by the library in partnership with the Hartford Jazz Society andWWUH-FM, the series features a variety of regional and national talent, embracing Hartford favorites, established musicians and young, promising performers just starting to make their mark. It includes, among many other acts, the noted trombonist Steve Davis and group, Hartford’s widely heralded Curtis Brothers, the genre-crossing vocalist Jolie Rocke Brown, piano virtuoso Laszlo Gardony with his trio, and a first-class chamber jazz duo featuring the acclaimed guitarist Joshua Breakstone with the noted Nutmeg pianist Noah Baerman. Information and complete schedule: hplct.org.
Please submit press releases on upcoming jazz events at least two weeks before the publication date to omac28@gmail.com. Comments left below are also most welcome.
