Jazz is back for another season at the Walton Arts Center starting on Sept. 20, with a concert featuring Brazilian pianist André Mehmari. The virtuoso, who composed his first piece of music by age 10, joined Shades of Jazz host Robert Ginsburg to talk about his life, inspiration and how he blends disparate worlds through music.
The 33rd season of the Walton Arts Center’s Starrlight Jazz Club series will kick off on Sept. 20 with a rare opportunity to hear one of the most beloved and respected jazz and classical pianists from Brazil, André Mehmari. André’s solo piano concerts and his remarkable improvisational skills have been compared to those of Keith Jarrett. I had a rare opportunity to speak with André from his home in Brazil this week, and what is to follow is some of his wisdom and music.
Robert Ginsburg: André, I just want to tell you how grateful and honored I am that you’ve taken the time to speak with me in anticipation of your upcoming concert at Walton Arts Center.
André Mehmari: Thank you. I’m so happy to. I’m very much looking forward to it and very happy that it’s finally going to happen. And we prepared some beautiful music to perform there for you.
Ginsburg: When I hear you perform, you convey a very deep emotional and personal connection that comes across in your music. It’s almost as if it’s your first language. And I recently heard this story about how your birth is actually kind of connected to the piano. Would you share that with us?
Mehmari: Oh, yeah, that’s a pretty story, because in fact, my mother started giving me birth at the piano bench. She started, you know, the—I think the name is amniotic liquid or something. She was playing the piano and this happened
Ginsburg: When her water broke, is what they said.
Mehmari: Yeah, exactly. Oh my God. So of course, I was listening to piano music way before I was born, in her belly. And so music is a part of my life since the first and before that, too. So I always had music in my house. And, of course, the piano was always present, because when my father knew my mother was pregnant, he gave her the piano as a gift. This is her story. And my story, when it crosses, you know, it’s beautiful. And in fact, when you say about music being my first language, I actually gave an interview when I was 13 years old or something to a local magazine, I think, where I grew up, and I told exactly that: music is my first language. It’s where I can express myself better. And in words I can say things that I don’t want to say. So it’s not a coincidence, I think, your perception.
Ginsburg: You have expressed how important radio was in your life as you were growing up, how it was your medium of choice and it impacted your love of music. And you also at some point decided to do a 30-minute theme and variation on the National Public Radio theme song for All Things Considered. Please tell me more about your connection to radio and this project you did with the variations on the All Things Considered theme?
Mehmari: Yes. I think radio is maybe my favorite media type. I grew up listening to radio, and when I moved to São Paulo in ’95, we didn’t have the internet yet. So I was listening to the radio and recording on cassette the music that I wanted to study. And so it was very important for me to be able to listen to that music and learn and study. I mean, this was a great school for me. And radio is a very important part of my life. And of course, the NPR team—I know it’s a very dear team to the American people. And this is very well known. And I have a good friend called Flavio Chamis, Brazilian, living in Pittsburgh, and he proposed to me to actually do the variations, to actually connect with the American audience and show how my brain works, so to speak, with a theme that they know really well. So the idea was to pick up this very tiny, tiny piece of music and develop a whole musical discourse after, you know, on the piano. And that was the main idea.
Ginsburg: Your style seems like the perfect marriage of the rigors of classical music, and what it takes to stay on the page and understand the fundamentals of what it is to perform. But you’ve dovetailed that with this incredible urge to improvise, and I understand that that’s been an urge you’ve lived with all your life.
Mehmari: This impulse is actually very old in my life. I began improvising at a very early age. I think I recall about being 8 years old, and already my mother was playing music on the piano, and I was improvising on top of it on the organ. When I started to study classical piano, that was a huge problem because the teachers didn’t allow me to improvise, and then I had to stand up for my will to improvise. And, of course, my whole life after that depends on improvisation. And not only as a pianist, but as a composer. Because when I start to compose a new piece, I always start by improvising and gathering ideas. And so improvisation is really a central act. Today, for example, I just played a concert where I didn’t know the first note I would play at the piano. I just decided to ask the audience for themes and suggestions and ideas, and I took the notes and then improvised the whole concert—one hour and a half—on the themes that were proposed by the audience. And it was so much fun, not only for me, but the audience—they follow the creative act in a totally different way than they would follow a regular, so to speak, concert, because it’s being done. Music is being done at the same time. And people love to follow that. And I’m having a great deal of happiness doing that kind of concerts.
Ginsburg: One of the things I love about your improvisations, and especially live, is that you draw me in with things that are familiar and that I recognize, but you quickly go off into places that were totally unexpected and there’s a sense of discovery. I wonder for the artist, because you have this amazing vocabulary and you have technique that you can depend on, when you do an extended improvisation, do you—does that same paradigm work for you? Do you try to bring yourself somewhere where you’ve never been before? And are you willing to risk making the mistakes it takes to get there?
Mehmari: Absolutely. I have to, because otherwise I’ll be stuck with my, you know, already working kind of repertoire of things. So I can see myself very deep in the process, in the creative process, and then thinking while I’m playing and searching for things while I’m playing—not only the local position of the music, but the general architecture of the piece I’m playing, the improvisation. So it’s quite an intellectual effort, but at the same time I feel like I am at home. The piano is the place I feel most at home, even more than at home. At the same time, I feel that I must run risks and search for new ideas, and I don’t want to repeat myself. But at the same time, I am willing to accept those small mistakes, just like Thelonious Monk said in a very happy quote that he said: “Oh, this night I am sad because I did the wrong mistakes.” So there are the right mistakes. I think there are little twists and turns that can happen during a solo thing like that that are welcome, and we have to be able to welcome those ideas and take the improvisation to a different place. And this is something that’s very stimulating for me, and I’m not afraid to go there.
Ginsburg: Because of your vast repertoire and your vast interests—whether it be classical music, jazz, Brazilian music—your concert at Walton Arts Center on Sept. 20 is part of a jazz series. In other contexts, you might be performing more of a chamber music or classical setting. When you go into these environments, do you approach them differently depending on what your preconception of the audience is, or do you just go in with an open mind and let it happen?
Mehmari: That’s a very good question, because I must say that I’m always myself. It could be a concert hall or a jazz club, even a church or something. I don’t know. It can happen. I developed some kind of style that can fit in very different environments—musical environments, so to speak. My musical life is a proof of that, because I am invited to play in classical series and jazz series and chamber music series, and I am always André Mehmari. I’m never somebody else. And I know that there are some protocols, for example, in a strict classical environment sometimes, but I never feel that I have to bend myself to be somebody else. Always faithful to my principles and my music ethics. And the beautiful thing is, sometimes you see familiar faces—they were in your jazz club concert, and they are at the concert hall the next day, and they’re the same people. For me, this is a great example of how music can really be universal if you have some truth to express.
Ginsburg: André, I have been a dedicated fan to your music for decades now, and after speaking with you, I hear that your words align perfectly with your notes. Very much looking forward to your performance here in Fayetteville at the Walton Arts Center. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me.
Mehmari: Yes, I’m very excited to actually translate into music everything we said here. Thank you, Robert. It was a pleasure for me and thank you so much. See you soon. Take care.
André Mehmari performs at the Walton Arts Center tomorrow as part of the Starrlight Jazz Club series, and you can hear more music and conversations with Robert Ginsburg during his show Shades of Jazz, every Friday evening at 10 p.m. on 91.3 FM and Saturday mornings at 11 a.m. on our HD station KUAF 3.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
