musically i've we've never got a chance to meet face to face because like we were talking about piano players never going to chance to talk because we're always working thank god but i want to welcome you and i want to welcome steve rudolph thanks very much all the way from harrisburg it's a pleasure to be here thank you thanks for coming and you know steve you have had i mean just an unbelievable career in music and a fifty plus year career i mean in twenty eight minutes that we're going to have here i know we won't have a lot of time to talk but tell us about like your beginnings your where you're from and what really got you into jazz i river born in southern india and lived on a farm and midwest boy and the ok and we we didn't have a lot we were rather poor so i didn't really have a lot of money but i they they decided they were going to have a band at this fall school in winter and they the day they passed out the instruments i was sick local teacher from one of the colleges nearby to come and teach is just two days a week and he realized pretty quick that there was no written music really for a nine piece ensemble  ahead so he started he taught us how to play dixieland that was one of the first things i ever did wow after i got some proficiency on the horn right and then i played trumpet all the way through high school in college and when i got to the butler university in indianapolis i got introduced to the jazz scene there so so and then went what with what did you make the shift because i have to also tell my audience that steve is absolutely phenomenal jazz pianist composer arranger and teeth were not even ok and it was comfortable and play over here and read had range and everything but he was insisting that i play in the center and my scholarship insisted that i play in the orchestra and the wind ensemble in the sephardic band on a highly professional level every week and you can't really do that and change your own history so i tried to make the change and in the process i lost what i had before and never really got what he wanted me to get i could still play well but not on the level that i was playing before and then you went into piano at that point i was invited by a friend to go to to a place called jellies ok in dayton ohio which is a gig you want to check out it's still there and it's still that really ok and i was in the process of trying to figure out what to do with my trumpet playing and after i heard that i decided i would be a piano player and like a fool i thought i could do it so anyway i went back three or four nights in a row and actually got to know them now how old were you at that point would you say twenty two so you're relatively young at that point and here's the thing that always interests me is there is that around that between fourteen and twenty five timeframe it seems that we find where we want to do if we're musicians that's where we want to we kind of latch onto a certain style or something that you know we want to kind of take you know with the rest of our lives i know i found brubeck when i was around fourteen dave brubeck so and that was one of my influences so to talk about like how when you saw it when you were there like how did that make you feel and how did that those performances like what was going through your mind at that point i had there are a lot i should say there are a lot of great piano players in indianapolis and maybe not quite of that stature but quite each night when i would go see him it seemed that he would have a moment or two of what i think that there's hardly anything you can refer to it as other than a moment of grace where suddenly the music goes to another plane entirely exactly and that his sound it was not a great piano in this club but he still got his sound out of the instrument in fact i was i was told once for his fiftieth birthday they had a party at someone's house apartment in manhattan with a small yamaha grand ok and for that there were fifteen or eighteen piano players there so for bill's birthday they each played one of his compositions and at the end he was so so touched he said i don't really know how to to pay you back but play the tune i'm working on now and they said he said he sat down at the instrument and this little five foot yamaha suddenly sounded like a nine foot ball and yet he had the ability to really consume the instrument with his touch so and that's amazing to note for our listeners and viewers bill evans one of the preeminent i mean masters of jazz piano who really brought many many different styles and many many different approaches to jazz but almost made it over orchestral sounding you know but his technique was otherworldly and well so that must've been like for you that's like you have the epiphany you're like that's what i want to do it really set me off on the on the path of practicing a lot of talk to me about that because that's what i love that's what i'd love to hear stories like that like someone that inspires someone that much to abandon everything else that they have a preconceived notion of you know the that ninety five or whatever you know what i'm saying it's just at the end you have that burning desire to do that and that's  and to create and to try to i don't know so go for something greater than yourself i think that music wise i think i was pretty consumed from pretty early age as far as music but bill really made me a jolt for sure and who are some of your other influences at that well when i was a kid they were all trumpet players right where i write louis armstrong every james al hurt you know we were so poor that we didn't have a turntable we didn't you know we there were no records me out there was the radio in the house yeah if you're trying to learn anything off of and they were playing good music back then you could hear a lot of great stuff yeah but i hadn't heard miles davis until i got to college so you know kids don't realize these days how lucky they are to have you tube all the other advantages of being able to just plug in and see a thousand yeah videos of your favorite it's an art easing it's amazing and i mean the things that are readily available at their fingertips you know before we go any further we have some video of you playing so i want to show our viewers some video and it's a steve rudolph on piano alley reierson flutist and you were where with it was the east coast yes festival six or eight years ago i think with a great drummer named joe hunt inspirations and then you were in in indiana let's talk about the transition from indiana to pennsylvania all right well i'd like played in indianapolis for five or six years after i switched to piano as a mostly as a trumpet player still but some things as a piano player and i quit the trumpet about the age of twenty five or six was just playing as a piano player and i got a call from a guy named bob edmonson who used to be the part time jazz band director at butler university where i went to school ok and he called me to play the lead trumpet on the tommy dorsey band and i said well you know bob that's really nice of you offered i don't do that i'm a piano player he said well buddy morrow just took over the band we need one of those to come on out so the audition was you go to the gig you meet him at a gig and you play the book and you either make it through the book don't and if you if you're if you play well enough you're on the bus on the road and cold not on the bus home so i met them at the  is reading along and i turn the page and there are no other people on the chart went on for another four and a half minute changes and all the rest of it really i guess i made it through well got through that's where improvising comes in very handy so i stay i stayed on the road with buddy for little over a year and as a piano player on the road you know there's never a place to practice right so i would if we were staying in a hotel that was viable enough i would try to find an instrument in the hotel somewhere and play on it before the bus left the next morning after the gig how was that did you ever find like where the instruments are good or they were mostly marginal but good case that you would find something decent but anyway we were we were had played a concert at the forum in harrisburg which is the big state theatre there and we were staying at this hotel called the holiday inn down and i found this piano and was playing and some guy walked by and he said he's on pretty good mind if i sing a song with you and usually i would have told him and hit the road but you know there are those there are these moments in time where you make a decision that totally alters the way the rest of your life absolutely man absolutely you wonder if you actually if it was your decision or not but yeah but i let him sing a song and he was sort of an irish tenor you saying danny boy and it was ok at best that but it turned out he was the new manager of the hotel and he was looking for a jazz band six nights a week in his hotel and i said well that's interesting i said what do you want to do and he wanted to just look at trio and have him play in the corner of the lounge and i said well you know that'll work for a short while but i don't care how good the trio is it's going to be the same set of guys playing basically the same styles of music and you're going to have to have some variety so why don't you let me put a trio together and then we'll book guest artists every week so i stumbled into the best paid school that i could possibly imagined so every week i had these guest artists coming down from new york and philly and all different kinds of places so i got to play with my mentor and joe lovano jr cook when i hurry closs and a litany of pentasa horn players and singers and guitarists and whatever and at the same time i didn't realize it when i took the job but i was playing for the mob basically it was an or organized crime scene that own the place and they were laundering money so three times a week in the local paper they did the biggest favor that they could ever do to me was they had ads you know this is when these but when the newspaper actually meant that they had the scene they knew about me and i got offered so much work i just never left town and the people that were really the diehard fans that would come almost nightly some of them right to this club  play they decided that they wanted to keep seeing these guest artists coming in from out of town so three or four of us got together in front of the sentiments of your friends of jazz which is still in existence today and that's why we had just about anybody you can name when did that start also calls himself the steve rudolph of scranton but just i mean between the three of us and i know there's a lot more out there but we're out there always trying to you know bring jazz more to the public and some of the things that you're doing with that with the festivals that you're putting on you're also getting a lot of the young the youth involved into jazz as well so talk to me about that you have some students that are really doing some great things that have gone on to great things you know i've been blessed to have some really talented kids study with me who have been quite successful and i've been you know there have been many players in this in central pennsylvania that played with me early on and now they're doing quite well you know to more field ok  there's a bunch but anyway yeah the friends of jazz has been instrumental in continuing a lot of this we have a youth band there that there's no there's no fee and there's no audition so a lot of kids come out and literally learn to play from them from the ground up and that's great for them because then there's no like for real pressure type situation and it's not a it's not a big band it's an improvising ensemble right so they're there they're playing off of lead sheet they're not playing rhythm part and then they're learning improvisation which is you know that's a language in itself i mean that's like for a lot of people that don't realize what jazz is it's an improvised music and you know we could be playing the melodies of a tune like an old tune say like take the a train you know we'll be playing the main melody of that but within the within the structure of that tune we're improvising over the chord changes and that in itself is a language it's like you know it depends on you know chord structure how you're i always think of it as a conversation to you're having a conversation not only with your musicians but you're having a conversation with the audience and musically and it has to fit musically within the forum to talk to us a little bit about that how do you approach a tune how do you when you're sitting at the piano how do you look how do you dissect a tune do you like to pick a standard or whatever and whatever tune how do you approach it i would like to know that well it is in these days it's much different it was than it was when i was younger you know when i switched from trumpet to piano the big problem was teaching this hand yeah not to hold the instrument yeah yeah right so so i i as a composer i would write simple arrangements for standard tunes for piano and forcing my left hand to do stuff that i would not have been able to normally do yeah and after doing that for two or three years someone gave me a really good lesson in saying that you can't really improvise with both hands what's freely one of your hands because of the two sides of your brain one of your hands has to be doing something that is relatively familiar in order to free up the other hand right to explore so that that helped me harrisburg hilton right yeah the new hotel there in town that was six nights a week and five hours a night and so i had my own concert grand in the in the bar and was able to play with all these great musicians you know that that was a huge institution out there i know because i over the years i know a little i had heard about you through that but i know a lot of the musicians had said what they were going to i know steve foreigners another friend of ours bass player who's played with you out there and and that gigs like that back in the day but not not now yet now now anyway so i think about four or five years into that i i mean i always treat gigs like it's a practice you know so i wouldn't i would try new scales and trying to patterns and in situations like that where you're doing a steady night when concert situations it's a whole different story is that you've got it and an audience there that's listening in things like that and that's what we all want is that audience intently to what we're doing you know i mean there would be some nights like that yeah hilton where people were yeah a little bit up in it after twenty two years i would say they're coming to see you you know well but there was no coverage charge on the room yeah so if there was a big we've all been there but i just started i mean i would force myself to play tunes in other keys and had a long list of tunes that i was standards and and the originals and all different kinds of things i was playing so after a while it became a scene where i was just playing in this kind of stream of consciousness managed yeah and you know once you once you were talking about the language yeah you know you you develop scales you develop chords you develop rhythms and you develop all of this language and eventually it just gets to the point where you can all melds together and you can actually think music in the moment yeah exactly and i had that conversation between in the couple minutes that we have left here i want to talk about world every everyone is everywhere well let me tell you steve this is been a pleasure for me and it's so great to meet you finally face to face and if we get a chance to do you know talk and definitely we should definitely stay in touch and let's do this again but could and we could you could cut to like the cd and then come back to me i guess so yeah i'll just say something cool larry well ladies and gentlemen i want to thank you again for tuning into talking jazz there can tell each week we have guests on here that are bringing jazz to the forefront of the public mind set and one of my passions it has been over the last twenty five years that i've been bandleader is to get this music to you and to understand what the jazz musicians role in the world is and it's a very very important role so tune in keep tuning in and we'll have some more interest interesting guests and a lot of fun so thank you so much god bless