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Larry Goldings is surprising those who don’t know
about his original - and ongoing - relationship with the piano. Until now, jazz lovers
have associated Goldings with his signature playing on the Hammond B3 organ - angular,
funky, textural, harmonically complex. However, his latest release, Awarness, is
performed entirely on acoustic piano.
"I’ve been feeling incomplete as an organ player... I’m more than that. I’m a pianist, organist and composer. With this new CD, I wanted to remind myself and others that I’m a pianist. Maybe some of it has to do with the sheer power and volume of the organ and wanting to go to the other extreme, which Awarness almost does in a way."
The piano, in fact, is Larry’s first instrument: "I began studying piano when I was nine. When I was twelve, someone gave me an Oscar Peterson record and, shortly after that, my mother recommended listening to one of her favorite pianists, Erroll Garner. This was the beginning of my love for jazz."
In 1986, Larry left his Boston home to enroll in an innovative pilot jazz program at the New School for Social Research in New York City. It was there he began his professional career, after being asked to tour with legendary jazz vocalist Jon Hendricks. Larry remembers that "being with the greates be-bop singer alive was the beginning of my real schooling." At the New School, Larry also studied with guitarist Jim Hall who, impressed with Larry’s piano playing, asked him to join his band. He did, and their collaboration lasted almost three years.
When not on the road, Larry was working around town devoting himself to both piano and his then-new interest, the Hammond organ. Throughout college he played in an organ trio with guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Bill Stewart, both of whom are featured on five Goldings records. After college, he toured and recorded with Maceo Parker (of James Brown renown) in Europe, the U.S. and Japan.
Worldwide exposure soon brought him a record deal, and Larry began his solo career in 1990 with a release for Minor Music, picked up by Verve, called The Intimacy Of The Blues. Larry signed with Warner Bros. Records in 1994. In all, he has recorded six albums as a leader and more than 20 as a sideman, including albums with Jon Hendricks, Maceo Parker, James Moody, Jim Hall, and most recently with another of jazz’s leading guitarists, John Scofield.
Now with Awarness, Larry Goldings invokes our ears, mind and soul, as he reveals and explores a lesser known, but equally prodigious dimension of himself...on the piano.
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