A keyboardist and composer comes home a ‘genius’ for Walker Art Center performance

It should come as no surprise that Craig Taborn is now semi-officially a “genius,” having been one of 22 “creative people” awarded a 2025 MacArthur Fellowship this past October. The honor is often referred to as a “genius grant” because it sets no boundaries among the arts and sciences, relies on anonymous nominations and has no strings attached on the $800,000 it provides each recipient over five years.

Taborn is worthy of it. As far back as 2004, his perfectly-named album, “Junk Magic,” swirled a porridge of jazz-infused genres and electronics into what one reviewer described as “a new aesthetic,” and “a stunner from start to finish.” In 2011, the keyboarder/composer/innovator released his first solo piano record, “Avenging Angel,” which another critic hailed as “a major contribution to the actual language of the piano as an improvising instrument.” 

Raised in Golden Valley, Taborn, now 55, is back in town on Friday night as part of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra at the Walker Art Center, a venue frequently cited by Taborn as a major influence growing up and a place that has in turn hosted more than one event where he has played with numerous groups (and solo) over the course of a single evening. (“Craig Taborn: Heroic Frenzies” was the title of their last fete.) 

With the MacArthur in hand, and another homecoming on his schedule, it seemed like a good time to check in with Taborn. We reached him at his Brooklyn apartment just before Thanksgiving, fresh off a European tour where he played solo and with his new trio. The 53-minute has necessarily been significantly edited for length and clarity. 

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MinnPost: Congrats on the Fellowship. I know it is supposed to be anonymous, but do you have any idea who nominated you?

Craig Taborn: Nope, no idea. They keep it very mysterious. 

MP: What kind of impact does something like this have on your work schedule and creative process? 

Taborn: So I still have to meet with a financial advisor and figure out the best way to deal with it. I don’t have a family or kids or anything, so there is no need for a college fund or anything. It might enable certain projects that may have been trickier in terms of logistics. But I’m not really thinking about anything too drastic. I like what I’m doing, so I am not getting off a treadmill or liberating myself. It just relieves any immediate financial worries that might come up. 

MP: There was a time nearly 20 years ago when you told me you were in like 20 different ensembles. I still see your name a lot but I imagine that has been dramatically reduced. 

Taborn: So now, probably 80% of what I do involves my own groups at some level, whether it is the collective or totally me as a leader, or just solo. I’ll play with my friend [saxophonist] Chris Potter just because I like doing it. If [bassist] Dave Holland called me, I’d do it. There are a ton of interesting groups that I learn from when I play with them and I’d do them all if I could. I just don’t have the time. I’m coming into Minnesota to play with Rob [Mazurek], but that’s a one-off, not a tour.

MP: How did you get involved with him and the Exploding Star Orchestra? 

Taborn: We knew each other cordially while playing separately at different jazz festivals. He started contacting me to work with him and about four years ago we recorded an Exploding Star thing down in El Paso and played a gig in Marfa [Texas] where he lives. That resulted in an album release at the Planetarium in Chicago a year or two later, with projections on the dome of the Planetarium as we played. 

His latest album I couldn’t do because I was between two tours back in March. That’s why I wanted to play with him at the Walker. 

MP: He always recruits fantastic people and has you and Angelica Sanchez both on keyboards. How will you split that up? 

Taborn: I have only done Exploding Star with Angie and all those gigs have been with no piano — it was two Wurlitzers and an electric piano last time and the first one we did we had nothing but Moog synthesizers and we’d play the bass lines because there was no bassist. For this Walker gig, I just got an email from Rob and he said we’ll have a piano and a Wurly, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ve known Angie for a long time — she’s a good friend and one of my favorite musicians — so we just divide it up and figure it out as we go. 

MP: Let’s talk about the European tour you just finished. It started with quite a few solo piano gigs. Where does that fit in among the palette of stuff you do? 

Taborn: At this point, it’s a long-term thing, a process that keeps changing. I do solo gigs pretty frequently. They are easy to mount and fit into [the schedule of] any larger project I’m doing on tour. 

I remember running into my friend, a great pianist named Tigran Hamasyan, when he was in the middle of a solo tour that lasted for almost two months. It struck me, because I had been doing, like, a week tops. So a couple of years ago I encouraged my agent to book a longer tour of just solo, almost a month in Europe. That length and intensity, it is such a different process.

The whole idea is that it is a hardcore process of spontaneous composition, in the pure tradition of Keith Jarrett and others. If you come in with anything prepared, you are not fully engaged in that process. 

In all my other groups, I’ll have prepared some music for people to improvise. But solo, if I bring in prepared music, I’m not going to be engaged in how to manage materials in real time. And if you don’t engage with it like that, you won’t develop that creative muscle. 

Since the “Avenging Angel” album, I’ve been trying to extend that tradition that Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, have done, to see how far I can go. I don’t prepare anything and make no decisions before I go onstage. It is wide open. I try to lean into creating things in the moment. But by the same token, if I feel like playing a standard or a tune or one of my own compositions or something, I’ll go ahead and play it. That’s part of it too, at this point. 

MP: When you say ‘how far can I go,’ is the progress discrete? Is it measured from performance to performance or within the performance? Do you see or discover ways you can get deeper or better, and are there times you get frustrated because you feel like you are repeating yourself? How does that whole internal creative process evolve?

Taborn: Over the years, you just keep learning. Learning different ways to manage materials and manage the flow of the concert, manage my time and creativity. There are a lot of different ways to do it. There are, I don’t know how to describe it, but compositional postures of things. There are a lot of ways I can start engaging to create a piece. And over time I have gotten even more of those. Just an arsenal of ways I can use to get an idea in the moment and then develop it into as cohesive and coherent a piece as possible. Which can mean different things.

When you mention do I get frustrated, absolutely, but I used to get more frustrated with repeating myself early on, because I didn’t have enough resources. Or I felt like I had to do something the same way because I didn’t have new ideas. That hasn’t happened in a while just because, for better or ill, not everything has to open the door. 

It’s totally baseball. It is batting; you step up to the plate, and most of the game is advanced by failure [big laugh]. But you’ve got to strike out or the thing will never end [laughing]. 

MP: What about the trio, which comprised most of the back half of  your European tour. You are with cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Ches Smith. I was lucky enough to find an entire concert in Amsterdam which was just a couple of nights ago, on YouTube. It is a great band. Tell me how it came together. 

Taborn: I’ve known Ches for a long time and I’ve been playing in his group, a trio with (violist) Mat Manieri and me. And other groups as well, but from that thing I knew we had kind of a working, I guess understanding — we have a lot of things in common in terms of how we approach music and stuff. And I’ve been encountering Tomeka in a number of places — I first saw Tomeka with Nicole Mitchell (who will be at the Walker with Exploding Star Orchestra) a long time ago. So I have known her awhile. 

I realized that even though it was another string group with Ches, it is a totally different thing, because with the cello it allows the possibility of mobility and Tomeka’s time and her groove are so strong. So it is really like this guerrilla commando group in terms of its ability to change forms. She can play bass lines, pizzicato; it can go from being almost a straight-ahead piano trio with a cello instead of a bass, to like a chamber group because I can really engage with Ches — he is very trained on a lot of orchestral and classical percussion as well as a drum set. And we can all do electronics, so there is a free, avant-jazz improvising state that can go anywhere, from chamber to rock to straight-ahead, on a dime. It’s the most versatile group I’ve ever had with just three musicians.

MP: When I was going through a tour list on your website, I noticed a gig where you were commissioned to write a piece, a composition you played entitled “Closed Fist Under Open Palm.” 

Taborn: Yeah, that was with a new music group called Yarn/Wire. They’re great. It is two pianos and two percussionists. They commissioned that piece from me and I played it with them. I played electronics.

MP: When did you write that piece?

Taborn: Oh, this summer, this fall. They commissioned me in the spring and I came up with the ideas over the summer.

MP: I know you listened to everything growing up in Golden Valley, but a classical piece, even if it is a commission for a “new classical” ensemble, seems like a leap.

Taborn: When I was 12 or 13 years old I was listening to [avant garde composers like] Elliott Carter and George Crumb. Frank Zappa. But I was getting into a lot of avant jazz stuff too, and realized there wasn’t much of a distinction. I remember seeing Roscoe Mitchell at the Walker, back in maybe ’85, and it was a concert of through-composed pieces. It made me aware of, ‘Oh, you can do whatever you want.’

MP: You’ve got more than three solid decades in your career now. How have you unconsciously grown as a musician, in terms of setting out to do something and then become pleasantly surprised at something that happened along the way?

Taborn: A lot of things but one of the biggest is apropos of what we just talked about — the composition stuff. That Yarn/Wire piece was the latest in a string of commissions from that world. I did a piece for Claire Chase, the flautist, for flute and small ensemble that she commissioned from me a couple of years ago. We recorded it and we did it at the Ojai Festival this summer, and had done it a couple of years ago at The Kitchen. 

And I did a piece with this Polish string quartet, the Lutoslawski Quartet, a couple years ago in Poland. And I did this concert-length piece with the Brussels Philharmonic in January. That was huge. 

I’d always done this [classical composition] in private. But within the last couple of years I’ve suddenly had some relative extensive and high-profile introductions to that world for real. The biggest of course being the Brussels Philharmonic piece.

MP: Yeah, I was wondering, did you score that entire piece yourself? 

Taborn: I did the arranging and the score and then hired an orchestrator to check my work.

MP: What a leap! 

Taborn: Yeah, it’s funny; many people when they get these [first] commissions and things, it is for like a five- or ten-minute piece. But except for the Yarn/Wire piece, those other three commissions were all concert-length pieces, 50-60 minutes of music. It was a lot of work and it stressful but in a way it really challenged me and engaged my whole sense of scale. But in a way I’d been rehearsing for it with these solo piano concerts, which involve spontaneously composing something for 70 minutes. I’ve been doing that for about 15 years. 

Again, [success] is a question of degree. Not everything is going to be knocked out of the park. But I know I can get ideas and develop them and work to fill up that span of time. 

So that’s one way I have developed. [More generally] I like to keep challenging myself. This is a point, at this age and at this stage of my career, where a lot of artists enter their mannerist phase. They were taking risks and finding out who they were and now they have settled, often very elegantly, into a sense of ‘this is what I do.’

I love a lot of that stuff. But there are other creative people who keep challenging themselves. I remember Roscoe Mitchell, when he was about my age, which is when I started playing with him, suddenly engaging in baroque and renaissance music, studying very intently with masters in the early-music community. He had harpsichords and things around his house and was learning to tune [instruments] differently. 

And I remember Henry Threadgill moving to India. Threadgill completely changed his working method, his compositional method, Just dispensed with everything he was doing before and came up with a whole new approach. 

I feel like I am in a space now, where I’m finding that I’m not settling in, I’m kind of tearing things down to see what else can happen. I’m excited by that. When those commissions were coming in it was really kind of scary, but I thought ‘I’m going to say yes to all of this stuff and see what it yields.’

MP: And now with the McArthur Grant, you have a financial safety net. 

Taborn: Yeah, as I said before, it relieves the pressure on that. It might subsidize some projects that otherwise wouldn’t be subsidized. Because outside of getting a grant, there is no music industry or label interested in subsidizing those kinds of projects. 

I can lean into that if I want to. That Yarn/Wire was the last commission that I had on the books so there is a clean slate creatively right now for me moving forward. That [Brussels] orchestra piece was recorded by ECM which should be coming out soon. I have this trio with Tomeka and Ches and that album will be coming out in late January. And then that string quartet was recorded and that could come out soon. So I have a good backlog of things to be released. As to what’s next, I can be wide open in a great way. 

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MP: One last thing: I know you always make it a point to get back to the Walker and I know what growing up here has meant. You want to close with a few words about your roots? 

Taborn: Oh, wow. I’m fond of the Twin Cities. Some of the most creative people I know are still there; iconoclasts like Steve Tibbetts, Leo Kottke, Dean Granros. They are genius people who operate on their own steam, their own terms — they are their own molecular unit. And I identify that energy there, because growing up there gave me a bit of that juice, that determination to do my own thing. 

But the Twin Cities was and is also culturally savvy enough to offer spaces like the Walker Art Center, spaces that brought progressive and interesting things there that didn’t get anywhere else in the States. 

Seeing people like John Zorn or Tim Berne or Roscoe Mitchell or Geri Allen, Julius Hemphill — any number of people. Being able to see them in 1985, ’86, before there was any hype on them at all. They were unknown, even in Europe or the rest of the States, and they would be in New York, scrounging it out and then they would come to Minneapolis once. And kids like us would go see that stuff. 

That’s unique. I talk to so many people from other cities and they’re like, “Wow, you got to see that?” Like, how did I see, John Zorn’s “Cobra” performed in 1980-whatever? Oh yeah, it was at the Walker. It made a difference. 

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