| Jazz88’s Peter Solomon speaks with Harlem-based pianist Emmet Cohen about his recent album “Vibe Provider,” and about “Live from Emmet’s Place” – the live stream series he started that helped him navigate the pandemic. Cohen plays the Dakota on November 15th with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Joe Farnsworth. |
TRANSCRIPT
PETER SOLOMON: Emmett Cohen is appearing at the Dakota Friday evening. He’s a pianist based in Harlem, originally from Miami. He’s got extensive classical music training, but jazz captured his imagination early on, and he’s made a careful study of the entire history of the music, from modern post-bop going all the way back to the early days of Harlem stride and ragtime.
During the pandemic, Cohen launched a series of weekly performances from his Harlem apartment called “Live from Emmett’s Place. It’s actually still going, and it’s brought him legions of fans from all over the world. I started our recent zoom conversation by asking him to talk about that very thing.
EMMET COHEN: When everything shut down, we were hanging out in Harlem and somebody from the University of Lawrence, Kansas reached out to me and said, “Hey, would you – I know you’re supposed to play here on March 20, or whatever it was, 2020 obviously, the gigs canceled, but we’ll give you the full fee if you just do something online for the community.” I said, “Well, it’s really cool that you guys are supporting musicians in this time. Of course, we’ll give it our best shot.” And we called the guys, and they all lived one block away from me at the time, which is what Harlem is really about. And they came over, and we put on a suit and tie, and we played on Facebook Live, and it sounded like a Game Boy, like an eight-bit Game Boy. It was like no bass, you know, all cymbal. But it got almost like 40,000 views, and just people were so happy to gather and come together for not only a distraction, but a celebration of music and life, even in the most challenging and uncertain time. I realized how important that might be to the community, but also how important it was to us to just be able to get together and play. It was like the symbiotic thing, and I just realized that maybe live streaming would have a place just like radio had a place for jazz, and YouTube has a place for jazz, and jazz exists so many places and affects people. And I just had that realization that that maybe live streaming is a place that people can benefit from the positivity of music. And so we gave it our best shot to improve the technology every single week, and came up with something that I think a lot of people connected to, as the quality of the of the live streams got better, and it became the snapshot of New York City where we’d hire or invite a lot of our friends over, and some legends and some newcomers, and it became this place where we got together and and jammed and let the whole world into our Harlem rent party 100 years later, from the roaring 20s and this century’s Roaring 20s, when last century was prohibition, this century was the Coronavirus. We have done 124 as of this taping.
SOLOMON: Your latest recording is called “Vibe Provider.” Can you talk about the person who is the inspiration for the title of the album?
COHEN: Yeah, we have a friend, and had a friend in the jazz community. His name is Michael Funmi Ononaiye, and he was part of the jazz scene for 40 years in New York City, and at everyone’s gigs and friends with all the musicians at Small’s every night for the jam session, just the life and spirit of New York jazz. And he came and kind of sheltered within our bubble during the pandemic. And he was at the early live streams, and came to every single one, and eventually started helping me figure out how to curate – which musicians belonged where, and if we had a singer one week, maybe we would have some instrumentalists, or maybe we needed more diversity or female representation, or whatever it is. And we talked about that all the time. He was just a beautiful human being. And then after that, he got a job working for Wynton Marsalis at jazz Lincoln Center, and he passed away suddenly in 2023 in December. And we wanted to celebrate the life that He lived and what he taught us, which was that we can all be the vibe providers, in our own in our own lives, and help people in beautiful ways through music and otherwise. So that’s that’s why we decided to dedicate it to him. You.
SOLOMON: Your new album includes the tune “Hinei Ma Tov,” which is a Hebrew Psalm. It’s it’s the 93rd Psalm, and I wanted to ask you about why you included the track on the album and what message you glean from its words?
COHEN: Well, more than the message for me, it was the melody, and it was something from my childhood. I think that I’ve been watching a lot of musicians around me draw from their folk music, and I’ve been traveling the world and seeing different kinds of folk music. Really what it comes down to, whether it’s Greece or Italy or China, or anywhere in Asia, Brazil, all these places have these folk musics, and I really just felt compelled to tap into the music that I had been hearing since childhood, and had an idea for it. And it also helps that the particular prayer is about brotherhood. It’s about unity and coming together, which is what I feel the spirit of jazz has to offer at its best. And so we decided to take the simple melody like a chant, and kind of put it in a more John Coltrane-esque style. And Harold Mabern-influenced as well, who obviously loved John Coltrane, and it was just a fun vehicle to play and explore.
SOLOMON: What for you were some highlights of this new album?
COHEN: One of the highlights was having two different drummers on the date. One was Kyle Poole, who’s been playing with me forever, and one is Joe Farnsworth, who’s a little bit older and established and we’ve been playing a lot lately together. It’s my first recording with Philip Norris, who, on bass, has done many gigs and live streams and has been a big part of our world. And then to record with some of the people in my generation, Tivon Pennicott, Bruce Harris, these guys have been my big brothers in New York for many years, and part of my scope of recording now is to is to get down on wax with many of the people who have shared meaningful musical experiences within New York and beyond, and I think they’re some of the most amazing musicians I know, and to be able to document that in this time was it’s it’s important to me. And they celebrated Funmi nicely and and celebrated all the things that we deem important.
SOLOMON: Pianist Emmett Cohen. His most recent album is called “Vibe Provider.” He’s appearing in two shows at the Dakota Friday night. You can find details at www.dakotacooks.com.
