Jazz pianist and composer Dan Tepfer is releasing his album Natural Machines tomorrow, May 17, with a twist. On this album, Tepfer plays a unique digital player piano called the Disklavier, which takes the music he plays on the piano, runs it through a computer program he wrote, and plays it back over the instrument.
“I’m not writing a piece, I’m writing the way the piece works,” Tepfer explained to NPR Music for Jazz Night in America about writing for playing on the Disklavier. And in his explorations of the musical opportunities it presented, he also saw an opportunity to introduce his music in a more creative landscape. “The goal is to be really clear about what is happening to the music,” Tepfer said. “I have all this data in the computer and it’s almost insane not to be creating visual art.”
This culminated in Natural Machines, currently available to watch on YouTube, with all his music presented with visualizations. “The visualizations I’ve made are intended to reveal the underlying musical structure of each piece. They’re generated in real-time as I play. Everything on the screen is a direct representation of some aspect of the music: pitch, dynamics, rhythm, harmony,” Tepfer said in the video album notes. All the music throughout the album was improvised as it was recorded, in a single take. “The notes played by the computer were generated in response in real time. Nothing was pre-recorded or pre-planned except the rules that the computer would follow to respond,” Tepfer said.
This summer, Tepfer will return to Ravinia Festival for two performances on August 31. At 2:00 p.m. he will give the world premiere of his Bach “Inventions / Reinventions” classical music project, and at 5:00 p.m. he will join saxophonist Miguel Zenón for a jazz duo program. Tickets to these performances are on sale now, exclusively at Ravinia.org.