Name: Greg Spero
Nationality: American
Occupation: Pianist, composer, improviser
Current event: Greg Spero will take his Spirit Fingers project, featuring Lox (drums), Ben Glasser (bass) and Matt May (guitar). to Ronnie Scott's on November 13th 2024. For more information and tickets, go here.

If you enjoyed this Greg Spero interview and would like to know more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and Facebook.
 


Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in improvisation?

I started improvising and composing when I was about 3. I was plunking around on the piano before that, but at 3, my plunking turned into repeatable melodies. My parents are both piano players, so I was around it all the time. They never pressed me to play, but they always nurtured it.

I would sit at the piano and start to figure things out. The feedback from the instrument is a profound thing; melodies feel certain ways. Harmonies carry emotion. They also carry history, going back to our evolution as human beings and as animals. So for a child to sit with the piano is a profound thing. I believe that’s when I fell in love with it.

Even still, my greatest joy comes from improvising. So much so that I released a secret pseudonym, called “Virgin Ivory”, not attached to my real name, so I could just release piece after piece of solo piano improvised works. You can find that artist on Spotify, though there’s no photo of me attached.



When did you first consciously start getting interested in musical improvisation? Which artists, teachers, albums or performances involving prominent use of improvisation captured your imagination in the beginning?

Kind Of Blue was the first jazz record that I was given, when I was 7 years old, which was the year Miles Davis died.



I didn’t listen to it that year, but years later, when my parents sent me to a jazz summer camp, I stopped by a local record shop and bought Herbie Hancock’s Dis Is Da Drum record. I became obsessed with that record – loved it and listened to it all the time.

After that, I learned some of the history of Herbie, and upon finding out he came up in Miles’ band, decided to go back to the Miles record that my mom’s friend had given me. That became another repeat listen of mine, until I could sing along to ever solo from every player on the record.

It's funny, on a side note, Herbie covers “Butterfly” on the Dis Is Da Drum record. I loved that track – it was my favorite on the record.



But then eventually, I heard the original recording of "Butterfly" from the 70s, and I absolutely didn’t like it.



The affectual nature of the new one connected with the sounds that I was accustomed to, and it was one of the reasons I fell in love with jazz in the first place.

Then years later, as I learned and transcribed the Herbie repertoire, I grew to love the original version much more than the new version. This speaks to how impactful the forward-thinking nature of artists like Herbie are to sparking a love of creative improvisatory music in generation after generation.  

How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument – is it an extension of your self/body, a partner and companion, a creative catalyst, a challenge to be overcome, something else entirely?

In the end, there is nothing but the self. We are each our own universe borne of our conscious experience. So in that sense, the piano is just another part of the self.

When you treat it as such, and step out of the harder-to-grasp metaphysical understanding, and into a more basic observation of the contents of our consciousness, it becomes an incredibly satisfying and rewarding (and also painful and always unsatisfactory) journey to try to master it.

I strive to become singular with the piano, and try every day to get technically closer to feeling like it is an extension of my own voice, expressed in a way that my actual voice could never express. There is a religious experience that happens when I truly connect with the piano, whether it is by myself, or with a band, that I wouldn’t trade for almost any other experience in the world.

Derek Bailey defined improvising as the search for material which is endlessly transformable. What kind of materials have turned to be particularly transformable and stimulating for you?

Improvisation is not searching. It is being.

It is different than composing, in that composing involves lots of judgement and iteration. Improvisation involves pure presence. In that sense, you are not searching for material. The ‘material’ is just a massive set of references that we store in our minds, and the improvisation is the use of those references to say something.

That ‘something’ can be described as a lot of different things, and it’s similar to talking about God, in the sense that you can’t really describe it, you can only point to it, but you know there’s something deep and profound. But as soon as you give it a particular definition, it proves that it’s more than that definition, so you have to keep pointing. But the material is not sought; in its truest essence, it is infinite and already there.

This is so central to my musical existence, that over the past couple years, I adopted a recording process that involved a band completely improvising a series of short pieces, and requiring that each take be the final take. No overdubs, no composition, just complete presence.

You can hear a few examples in my popular tunes on Spotify now, including the recent ones I’ve released with Harvey Mason entitled “Ginger Up” and “Just a Scratch.”



Do you feel as though there are at least elements of composition and improvisation which are entirely unique to each? Based on your own work or maybe performances or recordings by other artists, do you feel that there are results which could only have happened through one of them?

The difference between improvisation and composition is judgement.

When I compose, I go back and examine every note, every rhythm, think about their connections, watch their progressions, and ultimately listen and consider how they feel. When I am improvising (successfully), I am simply letting everything exist as it is without judgement, without return to anything, but always being exactly in the moment with the understanding and consideration of all that has been and all that will be.

The process of composing is actually much more painful and tedious than improvisation. I spent a full year developing the Spirit Fingers record from 2018, which is still my best work, but that sort of pain isn’t something I want to experience too consistently, so I took a long time after that creating more improvisatory works.



I will soon get back to a deep dive into composition, though, and you can expect more deeply composed works from me within the next year.

When you're improvising, does it actually feel like you're inventing something on the spot – or are you inventively re-arranging patterns from preparations, practise or previous performances? What balance is there between forgetting and remembering in your work?

It’s not investing, but it is creation. I’m finding out new things with every note, because the “me” that I consciously experience is very one-dimensional, and the creation of the music is coming from so many layers of consciousness beneath  what I can experience with my senses on the surface of consciousness.

This is why you see Keith Jarrett in ecstasy, groaning and moving his body in reaction to the sounds he’s hearing as he’s improvising. It is an incredible experience to receive feedback from the subconscious, and embrace it with the conscious; the player is as much an audience member as anyone in the crowd.

Are you acting out parts of your personality in your improvisations which you couldn't or wouldn't through other musical approaches? If so, which are these? What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation?

Herbie once told me, when I was trying to figure out how to get better at music, that I shouldn’t focus on the music; I should focus on life. He said that my entire existence as a human being came out every time I played the piano, so I should focus on that existence first, before technicality.

Of course you need to control the instrument to speak through it, but many of us neglect our life for the sake of music, when the most impactful music comes from direct expression of our life.

In your best improvisations, do you feel a strong sense of personal presence or do you (or your ego) “disappear”?  

The ego never disappears, but it can quiet down at times, and those are the times when I get the most joy out of improvising. It’s also the time when the greatest music tends to come out.

There can be surprising moments during improvisations – from one of the performers not playing a single note to another shaking up a quiet section with an outburst of noise. Have you been part of similar situations and how did they impact the performance from your point of view?

These moments tend to do one thing that most people overlook; they focus the artist’s attention.

One of the most important things during the improvisatory process is the attention the artist is paying to the moment. It seems obvious, but so often our minds can wander to other aspects like what the audience is thinking, our judgements of ourselves, and different things that don’t have anything to do with the music being created. Surprises in the music serve to jar us out of our heads and back into the present moment, and when we are in the present moment, there is nothing but genius that emerges.

And that’s for everyone, no matter what your level of skill and vocabulary is; being present is more important than anything, and it’s one of the most rare qualities of improvisers (which is why there are so few greats).

I have always been fascinated by the many facets of improvisation but sometimes found it hard to follow them as a listener. Do you have some recommendations for “how to listen” in this regard?

In the same way that being present is the most important thing for an improviser, it is also the most important thing for the listener. Let everything go. Listening to music, whether improvised or composed, is about going on a journey into a dimension that we rarely get the privilege to access, of deeper connection to infinite layers of our conscious journey, all of which can only be accessed in the present moment.

Try to let go of judgement, thoughts, planning, and everything that you can think about, for just a moment, and be present with the music. Then you will be listening and understanding as effectively as you are capable of.

In a way, improvisations remind us of the transitory nature of life. When an improvisation ends, is it really gone, just like a cup of coffee? Or does it live on in some form?

This depends on how you think of time. Is time something that is singular, but experienced linearly?

Music is experienced directly in line with our experience of life, and our seemingly linear expression of consciousness. If you choose, nothing is gone, nothing is in the past, nothing is in the future; there is only a continuous present, which is always in existence, whether or not we are experiencing it seemingly in this moment.

Please recommend two pieces of art (book, painting, piece of music) to our readers that they should know about.

I was at the home of Wayne Shorter in the Hollywood Hills years ago, and I took the opportunity to ask him this question – “How can I go deeper in my music?”

His answer was this – “You do not go deeper into music. That dimension doesn’t exist. You go wider. Broader. If you want to integrate more life into your music, experience more life. Read a book. Watch a movie. Fiction – narratives. Every experience you have informs the music you create.”

There is one book that I always stock multiple copies of, and give away as a gift. It’s called Awareness by Anthony De Melo. I heard about it first on the Tim Ferris podcast, and he said that he reads it every few months, and it effectively resets his ability to be present and grateful for the moment. It has the same effect on me; it serves as a reminder of how blessed we are to be on this earth at any moment, no matter what is going on.

And when I am of that state of mind, my music is better, because with gratitude comes presence, and with presence we can channel the divine.