So what’s old with Lafayette Gilchrist? Here’s a more specific kind of question: How’s that left hand doing? “It’s active!” Gilchrist replies, his voice brightening the way an ancient sun suddenly burns through an evanescing cloud. At the piano, his left hand is responsible for his music’s rhythmic foundation, its sense of propulsion, its sense of momentum, even its sense of history — and this Gilchrist can easily describe.
“In terms of the left hand, the styling, I always loved the Harlem stride,” the 55-year-old District native says. “I always loved Eubie Blake, the great ragtime pianist. His left hand was incredible. I always loved Mary Lou Williams and how she managed to adopt all the different styles that evolved within jazz, and outside of jazz, too. Just Black music, period. Mary Lou Williams is my ideal, because she could play the stride, the ragtime, the boogie-woogie, the bop, the funk, the gospel — and she had it all rooted in the blues. Her left hand could really, I mean, you know.”
What we’re supposed to know (I think) is that Williams’s left hand was capable of conjuring musical and physical motion from various eras and traditions, and that Gilchrist aspires to continue stretching that idea as wide as his music will allow. His longtime collaborator, the legendary saxophonist David Murray, once told Gilchrist that his left hand was responsible for his “social beat” — something that made a lot of sense to a pianist whose foundational ideas about swing came from the communal push and pull of go-go music.
Gilchrist says he’s been bonding over those formative go-go rhythms in the Sonic Trip Masters with saxophonist Brian Settles, who, like Gilchrist, remembers initially encountering “Harlem Nocturne” and other jazz standards through the music of the late Chuck Brown. So are these Trip Masters learning new things about music that they’ve known their entire listening lives?
“It’s still very much the view from here, but the view has widened and deepened,” Gilchrist says, before pivoting toward his personal perspective. “I was talking with David Murray about it: I think everybody goes through this thing in our 50s, man. We’re just stronger. I can’t place where it came from, but I can feel how I turned the corner, stronger.”
As for what all that strength and breadth can do for anyone listening to the Sonic Trip Masters, Gilchrist is totally clear: “We want to knock the dust off of everyday life.”
June 9 at 6 p.m. at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 400 I St. SW. westminsterdc.org. $10.