Wednesday , April 5, 2015, 8pm Zellerbach Hall An Evening with Bruce Hornsby Bruce Hornsby’s new live album, Solo Concerts , will be included with the purchase of each ticket. The CD can be picked up in the lobby. Tonight’s program will be announced from the stage. Cal Performances’ " !#–" !$ season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. PLAYBILL ABOUT THE ARTIST RUCE HORNSBY ’s work displays a creative piano performance where one hand doesn’t Biconoclasm that has been a constant in the just accompany a melody played by the other artist’s two-and-a-half decade recording career. but rather, as in boogie-woogie, simultane - His commercial stock soared early on, when ously achieves a parallel compositional and “The Way It Is”—the title track of his 1986 musical life and vitality of its own. début album—became one of the most popu - “It’s this situation where you’re playing that lar songs on American radio. Despite his early pattern but you’ve developed your brain- mainstream successes, Mr. Hornsby has pur - splitting expertise to the point where you can sued a more personal, idiosyncratic musical play very free rhythmically. I’d always admired path, focusing on projects that sparked his Keith Jarrett’s hand independence on the early creative interest, including collaborations with records he made. He had the independence of the Grateful Dead, Spike Lee, Ricky Skaggs, a drummer. ‘Oh, my God,’ I’d think, ‘how can Don Henley, Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, I do that?’ Before, I’d never wanted to deal Bela Fleck, Bonnie Raitt, Pat Metheny, and with that area of piano; it was always a door I Robbie Robertson. Mr. Hornsby’s perform - would open then close right back up again— ance will offer a glimpse of a restless spirit because I knew it was a deep area that in - who continues to push forward into exciting volved untold amounts of practice.” But, just new musical terrain. into his fourth decade, Mr. Hornsby went for A decade after Mr. Hornsby established his it. Staying put proved no option. global name as the creator of pop hits that de - Solo Concerts , an emotional musical merger fined “the sound of grace on the radio,” as a of American history and European daring, Rolling Stone reviewer once wrote, the is a two-disc demonstration of all this Virginia-born pianist, composer, and singer- and more in which the various elements of songwriter found himself compelled by two Mr. Hornsby’s songwriting and instrumental ostensibly separate areas of music. “One pas - styles align in highly personal ways. The sion of mine was old-time American roots album’s 21 tracks are culled from Mr. Hornsby forms—hymns, blues, country, bluegrass, old solo concerts performed in the United States folk, shape-note religious songs, on and on,” during 2012 and 2013; together, they fuse a Mr. Hornsby says. wide variety of what Mr. Hornsby considers That tracked with an artist who from the different “information” from musical lan - beginning of his career played accordion and guages often thought to be opposed: U.S. fronted a band featuring fiddles, banjos, and roots music, folk-pop, film composing, and dulcimers. The other area—modern classical modern classical. Much of the work on the music—did not. Yet the cranky dissonance album involves what Mr. Hornsby calls an and expressive chromatics of 20th-century “unholy alliance” of comforting Americana twelve-tone inventors like the Austrian com - and daunting composition. The result, how - posers Arnold Schoenberg and Anton ever, sounds effortlessly like one tremen - Webern, as well as the work of an American dously ambitious, and equally capable, piece. modernist like Elliott Carter, a Hungarian like “I think I’ve found a middle ground,” György Ligeti, or a French mystic like Olivier Mr. Hornsby says. “I think it’s very easy be Messiaen, ultimately fed Mr. Hornsby’s sense straight down the middle, to write and play the of raw challenge. very straight, simple music. I think it’s also He was turning 40. He was wondering easy to be completely out there, very obtuse whether he’d stay gracefully put as an artist— and obscure, saying oh, they don’t understand. or not. “It’s generally about a pattern in the left For me, the difficult thing is to find a middle hand,” Mr. Hornsby says of what he champi - ground where you’re reaching and broadening ons as “two-handed independence.” The your language but still connecting with some - phrase describes an elevated sonic state in one perhaps used to hearing—for an entire CAL PERFORMANCES ABOUT THE ARTIST lifetime—only those seven white notes and pop music in the late 1970s—is not always those simple chords.” easy for listeners. “My wife,” he laughs, “can’t Here is Mr. Hornsby on the album’s open - stand Caténaires .” So Solo Concerts weaves in ing tracks, which provides an idea of how Solo songs like “Invisible,” a searingly melodic Concerts proceeds as a whole: “For years peo - folk-pop plaint, and “Continents Drift,” a ple asked me to describe my style. I came up performance that taps Mr. Hornsby’s vintage with this facile, quick way of doing it, just to Moog Piano Bar to give silvery cinematic have an answer for them, and it was Bill Evans balladry fine modernist edges, as well as a Meets the Hymnal,” he says, citing the breath-stopping minor-key version of renowned U.S. jazz pianist famous for his im - “Mandolin Rain.” “My standard line,” pressionistic range. “‘Song E (Hymn in E-flat),’ Mr. Hornsby says of his solo concerts, “is: I’m which opens the record, really is a perfect ex - not the vehicle for your nostalgic night out. ample of that: It’s from a Spike Lee score I But I will be kind.” wrote a couple of years ago. And then the sec - Still, the album teems with Mr. Hornsby’s ond track, which isn’t an instrumental but a sensuously engaged yet clear-headed playing song, is ‘Preacher in the Ring.’ It’s a boogie of passages from Schoenberg’s Piano tune, an old pattern I was shown by a longtime Concerto, Messiaen’s La grive musicienne , cohort of mine. So I wrote a song based on Ligeti’s Étude No. 5, and more. Sometimes the that pattern, which illustrates two-handed in - “information” these pieces offer turns up in dependence very well. different new ways in Mr. Hornsby’s own “But there’s this other language on top—the songwriting, as in “Paperboy,” “Where No Webern second variation from his three-move - One’s Mad,” “Life in the Psychotropics,” and ment Variations for piano. And the in the end I “Might as Well Be Me,” whose lyric is by work in an excerpt from the late Carter piece I Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia’s noted lyricist- play, Caténaires . I think it goes with the content collaborator in the Grateful Dead, which of the lyrics: When you’re singing about a snake- whom Mr. Hornsby toured for two years. handling congregation, that’s a very strange area, The pop world, Mr. Hornsby knows, ob - a strange part of American religious life, really sesses over virtuosity less than style or chart out on the fringes. An electric guitar player, I positions or sales figures. But his sane view is: guess, would make it a little more angry and Why shouldn’t it be part of the mix? “There’s overdriven and distorted. For me, this modern often a bias in the rock or pop world against piano music is my way of doing it.” virtuosity. I understand that mindset: expres - Mr. Hornsby recognizes that modern clas - sion over virtuosity. But my feeling is, why not sical’s often atonal language—which rocked both? This is not clinical, what I do. This is re - the classical music world in the middle of the ally emotional. It’s what I call the pursuit of 20th century as decisively as punk shook up the unattainable.” PLAYBILL.