CHRIS PATTISHALL

Like many of his favorite things, there is much more to Chris Pattishall than meets the eye, and it gets stranger the deeper you dig. Most know him as a pianist with a “forthright relationship to the jazz tradition” (New York Times) and a hard-earned endorsement from the music’s traditional establishment—Wynton Marsalis once shortlisted Pattishall among his favorite young improvisers, and he’s also worked with Jimmy Heath, Jon Hendricks, and Wycliffe Gordon.

Though he makes his living moonlighting as a besuited scholar of Earl Hines and Erroll Garner, you’re more likely to find Pattishall in a wolf sweatshirt when he’s off the clock, passing through the Gladstone Gallery to experience the latest from Wangechi Mutu or heading to the Armory to check out Oneohtrix Point Never. Pattishall traces his fascination with the surreal to his childhood in Durham, North Carolina. His father, who once wrote a Masters’ thesis on the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, kept a keenly-curated collections of LPs, films, and books that served as an important early influence. But it was at a friend’s house that Pattishall first encountered Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, a watershed moment that was matched only by his first exposure to Thelonious Monk’s pianism. “There’s something about the way that Monk plays—part of it you recognize, but the other part of you can’t tell if he broke the piano; you can’t tell how the sound is created. I felt that in this particular film, and that opened me up to experiencing other things.”

It was within this broader context that Pattishall’s relationship to the piano developed. His parents had brought him a Casio keyboard at age eight, imposing what he describes as a “five-year prison sentence” where he was forced to take lessons. But it wasn’t until his teens that Pattishall’s interest in the instrument truly flourished. He quickly became one of the most in-demand pianists in the region, often working multiple nights a week and going on his first tour before he could legally drive. A pivotal shift came when Chris began studying with Marcus Roberts, a process which led him to a deep affinity for pre-bebop jazz. “I started to notice all of this idiosyncrasy in the early music that I wasn’t hearing in later stuff which also connected rhythmically to what I was drawn to in hip-hop—the emphasis on the beat and the way the rhythm had a little more weight to it. You also start realizing as you dig into the details that the way these things get reduced in pedagogy and criticism totally fails to pay homage to how wild and irregular and personal all of these artists were.”

Through this deep dive into history, Pattishall has taken an important step towards finding the common thread that binds his broad interests. “The thing I’ve learned that I’ve been slow to implement is that you just have to 100% do your own thing. You don’t need affirmation from other people. If you believe in something, you gotta just keep hammering away at it.”