Herskowitz at home in jazz, classical worlds

For pianist-composer-arranger Matt Herskowitz, melding jazz and classical music is natural.

It wasn’t always so. It wasn’t until his teenage years that the classically trained pianist started studying and playing jazz.

A look at his resume reveals solo albums featuring a concerto by Alexander Glazunov and works by George Gershwin. His first trio, MaD Fusion, put out “Forget Me Not” in 2005, which featured jazz, classical and improvisation. It drew attention. As Dave Brubeck wrote, “This is the final straw. I’d better retire now.”

He didn’t, however, think about bringing jazz flavors to the classical repertoire. It was when he was asked to perform a Bach prelude in the style of Glenn Gould for the soundtrack to “The Triplets of Belleville,” the Oscar-nominated French animated feature, that it came together. As he told the Julliard School alumni magazine in 2008, during rehearsals he started playing around with the piece, doing a jazz improvisation. “Bach a la Jazz” ended up in the movie.

From there, people would ask him to adapt a piece or two. When a violinist he knew asked for an entire album of jazz arrangements of classical works, he knew there was something there.

“The reason that I gravitated toward this was not because I thought, ‘Gee, I’m going to do something that’s different than anybody else, and I’m going to prove them all wrong and show them that these two can be mixed.’ It wasn’t like that at all,” he said. “I have an intimate experience and thorough experience with both classical and jazz, which makes me more able to see how they can come together and imagine it.”

It’s been an evolution to get to this point.

“This has happened after years of concerts and albums and composing, classical, contemporary style, then jazz songs, and finally they start coming together in a natural way,” he said.

It’s still a hard concept for some listeners to grasp. When he tells people he is equally a jazz player as he is a classical player, “Nobody believes me.”

While he’s making is first visit to Spokane, Herskowitz knows Northwest Bach Festival artistic director Zuill Bailey from their days at the Julliard School. The trio has played gigs at Bailey’s two other festivals, the Sitka Summer Festival in Alaska and El Paso Pro Musica in Texas. They have an established chemistry, Herskowitz said, adding, “Most of the stuff Zuill is playing with us, it will be the first time we’ve played it together.

“It’s going to be amazing to play with Zuill.”

He loves playing chamber music festivals, he said, especially the festivals “where you can play classical then go play in a jazz club, then do some more classical. It’s fantastic.”

On Wednesday night, the Herskowitz Trio (which features Mat Fieldes on bass and David Rozenblatt on drums) and Bailey open the Bach Festival concert season with a sold-out performance of Herskowitz’s jazzified arrangements of a Robert Schumann transcription of a piece by J.S. Bach. On Friday, in a program titled “Chopin XXI,” they’ll play a selection of etudes by the Polish Romantic composer, as well as his second Sonata, and a couple movements from Claude Bolling’s Suite for Cello and Jazz Piano.

“I’m really enjoying the Chopin,” he said. “It’s a great challenge. I honestly didn’t think it would work as well as it works. It’s hard to take Romantic music and do this. It would be difficult to imagine doing this with Schumann or Schubert. But Chopin for some reason really works.”

It’s not something he thinks he can do with every piece in the classical repertoire. There is a hallmark he looks for.

“The pieces that have an innate groove, or that you can pull either a groove or vibe out of, and transform it into a very personal ambiance,” he said. “Something that plays off of something already in the piece. … That’s what I look for in all the arrangements.”