Taylor Eigsti back in Bay Area to present ‘Our Future’

Menlo Park-raised jazz pianist Taylor Eigsti knows all about corralling the wayward thoughts of children and stringing them into a cohesive narrative.

As a faculty member at the Stanford Jazz Workshop for the past two decades, he’s honed an exercise in which budding grade school musicians
“toss out eight notes, eight harmonies, and three wacky sentences, and in 45 minutes we create a full tune with form and structure,” he said. “It’s always really fun and frantic, combining a lot of different ideas and shaping them into something.”

But scaling up the project from a song to an evening-length multimedia production turned out to be much more complicated than he ever imagined, and not just because of the global pandemic.

After some five years of intermittent work he’s wrangled contributions by dozens of kids into an extended piece funded by the inaugural round of the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions, a collaboration with Mountain View’s Community School of Music and Arts.

The CSMA presents the world premiere of Eigsti’s “Imagine Our Future” Saturday March 26 at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts. Written for a 12-piece jazz chamber ensemble brimming with brilliant improvisers, the piece weaves together submissions from 100 kids, ages 5 to 17, many of whom take classes at the CSMA (where Eigsti studied piano as a child).

When CSMA Executive Director Vickie Grove heard that the first round of the Hewlett 50 Commissions focused on music she quickly reached out to Eigsti, who has maintained close ties with the school. Randy Masters, his first piano teacher, is still on the CSMA faculty.

“Taylor is obviously a brilliant musician, and he’s been incredibly generous with his time here,” she said. “The whole concept was that we wanted to use this commission to engage our community in a new way. He came up with the idea.”

The piece’s title, “Imagine Our Future,” served as the prompt, eliciting “artwork, poems, musical ideas, and even some choreography,” Eigsti said, noting that a 5-year-old sent in a video of himself dancing.

Rather than creating a selective process to filter submissions he decided to “take at least a small part of everything I received,” he said. “I didn’t know at the time how challenging that would be or even what instrumentation I’d use. I let that evolve as the piece developed.”

The evolution reached a jazz apex with a heavyweight cast including saxophonist Ben Wendel, a member of the Kneebody jazz quartet; drummer Eric Harland, and Grammy Award-winning vocalist Lisa Fischer, with whom Eigsti has been touring in recent years (after first performing with her at a 2017 Stanford Jazz Festival concert at Bing Concert Hall).

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He also tapped deeply into the Bay Area’s talent pool drawing on top-shelf players, such as bassoonist Paul Hanson, flutist Rebecca Kleinmann, trombonist Jeanne Geiger, and Steven Lugerner on bass clarinet and alto flute. “The biggest challenge was trying to find common threads and a narrative,” Eigsti said.

He devised an elegant solution tuned to the apocalyptic pall pervading the country in the latter half of 2020. The evening opens with a short scene-setting film portraying a time traveler from two centuries in the future, when humanity’s fate hangs in the balance because “people stopped listening to ideas of young people,” he said. Traveling back to the Bay Area, circa 2018, the emissary seeks out insight from youth.

Eigsti composed nine thematic movements, exploring topics like technology, imagination, self-belief, self-doubt, and love. He took creative license with many of the submissions, in some cases writing a musical response to a poem, photo or drawing. But some offerings needed no translation.

The opening was inspired by the cosmic musings a 6-year-old girl, “who wrote that instead of the Big Bang that what we needed was a little bang, and I turned that into the lyrics of the first movement,” he said.

Eigsti offered his own little bang last May when he released his first new album in more than a decade, “Tree Falls,” which is nominated for a Best Contemporary Instrumental Album Grammy Award. It’s a sumptuous, song-centric project gleaned from an expansive field of music he’s sown largely out of public sight.

Instead of disseminating his own music, he’s spent the past decade writing and performing symphonic works and developing material for solo recitals. He contributed to 2016’s Grammy-winning soundtrack album “Miles Ahead,” and was featured on Chris Botti’s 2018 PBS Great Performances broadcast, the culmination of Eigsti’s five-year stint in the trumpet superstar’s band. His schedule was so hectic he sometimes indulges in magical thinking about the pandemic.

“Throughout 2019 I had a really crazy travel year, flying to Japan seven times,” he said. “I remember asking the universe for some time off. This isn’t what I had in mind.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.