But as the rumors kept coming in, I figured maybe I should go hear this kid.  In November, 1999, I dropped in on his campus recital. You can hear some of what happened that night on this album (“Beatrice,” “Stella By Starlight”).  When you do, you’ll see why even a hard-bitten jazz critic for a daily newspaper got pretty excited. b141pw01

Seattle recently sent four high school jazz bands (out of 15 selected nationally) to Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington competition.  The area’s schools also nurtured many players on Manhattan’s downtown scene, such as Mike Sarin, Jim Black and Brad Shepik. I’m used to hearing great young jazz talent.

But when I heard Aaron Parks launch into Sam Rivers’ “Beatrice,” I heard something different.  I heard a kid trying to pull music down from the sky through his hands.  The technique wasn’t always there, but the transmission was direct, like with Keith Jarrett, or Bill Evans.  There wasn’t anything in the way.

After the performance, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Aaron—a sweet, self-possessed young man, by the way, who doesn’t fit the “whiz kid” image at all—hadn’t had much formal training (although the guidance of Murl Allen Sanders through nontraditional piano lessons was key).  It also seemed natural that he had started to compose before he learned to play. replacement laptop screens

When he was ten years old, he told me, growing up on Whidbey Island (about 45 minutes from Seattle) he wrote a piece inspired by the sounds of a storm boiling up over the water.  He called it “Storm Cycle.”

“I was just playing things for the noises they made,” he said.

He still is, and that’s a good thing.

Aaron was born October 7, 1983.  A National Merit Scholar with an interest in math and computer science, he was pulled out of middle school by his mother when he was in sixth grade, so she could home-school him in a college-prep program.  His first exposure to jazz wasn’t anything hip and modern, but rather Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” When his teacher and his parents learned that he could improvise, he began playing with a student big band. I see best joomla web hosting as well as domain name

“I couldn’t read music and I couldn’t keep time,” recalled Aaron, “but my mom [who had once played French horn ] sat behind me and pointed out the bar lines!”

“He’s a super-talented guy, and really focused,” says Marc, who accompanied Aaron to the White House this past June, where the young man received a Presidential Scholar in the Arts award.  “And it’s amazing because he’s really mostly self-taught.  He’ll hear something and he’ll just go work on it.  He’s like a sponge.”

All that was a less than a year ago.  Aaron had just put together his first album, The Promise, and was entering his sophomore year at the U.  Now, at the ripe old age of 16, he has transferred to the Manhattan School of Music, in New York, and is bringing out his second album.

The tracks were all recorded live, at various gigs in the Northwest, including the two cuts from the recital with his regular trio—Evan Flory-Barnes (bass) and Eric Peters (drums), both UW students.  On the others tunes, he is joined by Julian MacDonough and Larry Holloway, who hail from Bellingham.  Though Aaron is clearly under the spell of Bill Evans on this album, he plays with a fluidity, lyricism and maturity well beyond his years.

I love the way he follows through with his melodic lines, breathing warmth and intimacy into each phrase on the opening waltz, “First Romance.”  And how many 16-year-olds do you know who could come up with a tune as fetching as that?

It's hard to play a warhorse like “Stella By Starlight” with conviction, but Aaron manages to make it fresh, and swings it, too, at a sweetly up tempo.

“The Wizard”is another Parks original.  With its mysterious minor and boiling cross-rhythms,you might well start hearing it played by other musicians, as well.

“All the Things You Are,” recorded at Fort Worden, Wash. (where the Port Townsend Jazz Festival takes place), begins with a lush rubato intro, then springs to life with the kind of emotional swell we know so intimately from Evans.  Dig how Aaron plays the piano for sound, not just notes, as overtones mix into a sweet solution.

“Someday My Prince Will Come,” the waltz from Snow White Miles Davis made his own, is another love song in keeping with album’s romantic theme.  Late in his solo, Aaron pulls away from the changes, creating some tangy tension.

The melting pool that is “Beatrice” manages to be both transportive and rapturous, like romantic love itself.  It also gives us a nice snapshot of Aaron by himself, as Evan and Eric lay out for a bit.

“Oleo,” that gift from Sonny Rollins to jazz musicians in the mood for a high-speed jam (it’s based on the chord changes of “I Got Rhythm”), showcases the discrete and percussive attack Aaron brings to every note, even when the tempo is breaking the speed limit.

Aaron Parks will be 17 this fall. Though prodigies are not unusual in jazz—think of Clifford Brown,and Wynton Marsalis—genius is rare.  Give Aaron Parks a couple of years in New York, where he can mix it up with the best players in the world, and any hard-boiled skepticism that may greet him will soon fall away, just like mine did.  This kid’s the real thing.

Paul de Barros
Seattle Times, Down Beat; author of Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle