11-Year-Old Jazz Pianist Joey Alexander

Article in New York Times article on Joey May 13, 2015 by Nate Chinen: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/music/joey-alexander-an-11-year-old-jazz-sensation-who-hardly-clears-the-pianos-sightlines.html

(I’m not sure if you can access all NYT articles without being a subscriber.)

“…Joey began playing piano at 6, picking out a Thelonious Monk tune by ear, which led Mr. Sila, an amateur pianist, to teach him some fundamentals. Beyond that, Joey recalled, ‘I heard records, and also YouTube, of course.’

He played at jam sessions in Bali and then in Jakarta, when his family moved there. At 8, he played for the pianist Herbie Hancock, who was in Jakarta as a Unesco good-will ambassador. (‘You told me that you believed in me,’ Joey recalled last fall, addressing Mr. Hancock at a gala for the Jazz Foundation of America, ‘and that was the day I decided to dedicate my childhood to jazz.’) He was 9 when he entered the first Master-Jam Fest, an all-ages jazz competition in Ukraine. He won its grand prize.

Soon one of his YouTube videos caught the notice of Mr. Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who invited him to appear at the organization’s 2014 gala. Joey played a solo version of the Monk ballad ‘Round Midnight’ as the finale, earning a standing ovation, glowing reviews and some influential supporters.…”

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

4 Responses to 11-Year-Old Jazz Pianist Joey Alexander

  1. Lloyd;

    It is possible for your readers to view Times articles, with some restrictions. From the NYT subscription page:

    "Visitors can enjoy 10 free articles (including blog posts, slide shows and other multimedia features) each calendar month on NYTimes.com, as well as unrestricted access to browse the home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds. Your free, limited access resets every month: at the beginning of each calendar month, you’ll once again be able to view 10 free articles for that month."

    In reality, if you have your browser set to delete cookies after a session (for instance, as a security precaution) or by deleting them manually, you can read articles forever, assuming that it's so important for one to do so. It's a rather porous paywall system.

  2. Pianists can sometimes get away with bending the tempo a bit, particularly when playing Jazz, Dummers, on the other hand, know that timing really is everything….

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