Many musicians have their hands more than full balancing a career with what's known as a life, but jazz pianist Denny Zeitlin has had two careers to go along with being happily married for 44 years. He has a psychiatry practice in San Francisco and Kentfield and is a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF.
And as a pianist and composer, Zeitlin has made more than 35 albums; played with such heavyweights as Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, and David Grisman; contributed music to Sesame Street; and scored the 1978 remake of the iconic science-fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Yet after fifty years of recording and touring the world, at a point where many musicians would be content to remain comfortably in their niche, Zeitlin is still exploring new areas of expression.
As it is with most jazz musicians — and with most great musicians, in general — Zeitlin was a product of his time. "[He] assimilated the breakthroughs of the previous decade, from the impressionism of Bill Evans to the free-fall explorations of Ornette Coleman, and blended them into a personal style that anticipated the next fifteen years of keyboard advances," wrote jazz historian Ted Gioia in a review on Jazz.com.
In some ways, Zeitlin presaged the protean style of Keith Jarrett, waxing rhapsodic and engagingly melodious while embracing elasticity and a powerful impetus. Unlike Jarrett, he enthusiastically embraced electronics along with acoustic music-making: Along with Sun Ra and Burton Greene, Zeitlin was one of the first jazz players to explore synthesizers. Further, in the Sixties, while many jazz musicians regarded rock music as inferior or The Enemy, Zeitlin saw it as inspiration.
For more than a decade he's maintained a steady, hard-swinging (acoustic) trio with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Matt Wilson. After a lengthy hiatus, this year Zeitlin released an album, Both/And, which combined both electronic and acoustic sounds.
Read more: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-double-life-of-denny-zeitlin/Content?oid=3776540
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