The Brooklyn Rail

Few pianists have made such a radical pivot in their repertoire as Awadagin Pratt. In 1992, he won the Naumburg International Piano Competition playing Bach-Busoni, Beethoven, and Liszt. He was the first Black pianist to take home the gold. Critics predicted a career of international stardom and a discography of canonical masters. But after four albums with EMI, he went two decades without a record deal, featured on just a couple albums.

Last year, he released STILLPOINT on the New Amsterdam label, a record devoted to music that Pratt commissioned from some of today’s heavyweight composers: Jessie Montgomery, Paola Prestini, Alvin Singleton, Pēteris Vasks, Judd Greenstein, and Tyshawn Sorey (who won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music). Several media outlets placed the album on their “Best of 2023” lists and Pratt’s premiere performance of Jessie Montgomery’s Rounds won it the 2024 Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Rounds features an improvised cadenza by Pratt, who mixes romantic passion with modernist severity. In July, Pratt spoke from Cincinnati about his evolution.

Ben Gambuzza (Rail): Let’s start with your hiatus, because your last record was thirteen years ago, and it was Brahms, and then you come out with this. What were you up to?

Awadagin Pratt: [Laughs] I guess the larger hiatus has really been since … When my career started I had this deal with EMI. That was four albums. And then the system imploded. And I’d never seen royalties from them anyway. But there was a big roster of people who sort of just disappeared. Probably a lot because of streaming and all of that. But I wasn’t looking for a record contract. I guess I just assumed something would happen.

I’m thinking right now of recording my recital program that I’ve been playing. I have some short pieces that are four to seven minutes that either go from one consecutively into the other without break, or between them I do an improvisation. The Liszt [Sonata in B Minor] is on the second half, which I’ve been playing for a long time now. I like the way I approach that piece and feel like it’s something to document. And I’m not sure if I would have wanted to record this recital program if not for doing STILLPOINT.

Rail: I’m glad you bring up improvisation because I was going to get into this a little later. I’ve been thinking about how popular music and classical music have switched with each other in terms of how open they are to improvisation. It seems to me most popular music is actually, in production—which is like the new composition studio—very through-composed and produced and clean. Whereas in New York, at least, the most forward-looking classical music is incorporating elements of improvisation. I was wondering your thoughts on improvisation in classical music. Is it coming back?

Pratt: I think so. I don’t know if it’s because I’m interested in it I attach to people that are … It’s important to me to have artists who do that and are capable. One of my former students is Mikael Darmanie. He’s fluent in many different genres of music and improvises. Jeremy Jordan also is fluent between classical and jazz, so they played. People my generation are interested but not really sticking their foot in. I’ve gotten braver over the course of the two years of this program.

Rail: So how did you get into improvisation? Because you’ve said you’re most drawn to eighteenth and nineteenth-century Austro-German music.

Pratt:At some point, before winning Naumburg, within a year or so before, in the early nineties, I was playing recordings of Dinu Lipatti and Josef Hofmann. With Hofmann, it was this recording of [Robert Schumman’s] Kreisleriana. He did a series of chords, extended 9th, 11th, 13th chords, something from the very bottom of the instrument. And Dinu Lipatti’s was the Mozart A Minor Sonata, and it was a little scalar-type flourish going into the start of the sonata. And I was playing it on an LP to the extent that I thought I screwed up or something. I went back and put the needle back and stood over it!

Rail: Yeah, like, “What’s going on here?”

Pratt: Nobody talked about this. In ten years of conservatory training, and all the history, you’d think this would have been part of it. And so, I find out it was called “preluding.” And there was a book called After the Golden Age by Kenneth Hamilton that I read that sort of delves into that extensively. So, it was sort of gestating around for a while. And then I just slowly started messing around, and then COVID lockdown gave me time to really become comfortable. The program came out of that period of being able to practice at home.

Rail: Your genesis of getting into improvisation is so interesting because usually you hear about any kind of musician, but maybe especially pianists, getting into improv because they listen to jazz or they listen to contemporary classical, John Zorn, something like that. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a musician getting into improv from within classical music, from within Schumann.

Pratt: I mean, I listened to jazz a ton when I was at the University of Illinois. There was a jazz club right across the street called Nature’s Table and one of my still-oldest friends, who’s a bass player, we were—whatever the incoming class was, there were three Black kids and he was one of them. I was a violin major actually; he was a bass major. So, I didn’t know anything really about jazz but I went to that club almost every night. And so, I thought I wanted to learn how to be a jazz musician also. And I never had the bandwidth to learn it. I’ve been a jazz fan my whole life, but always thought of it separately as another discipline. Of course, you’re sort of taught that Beethoven and Mozart and Bach had been the best improvisers of their time, but you didn’t know the practice extended into the 1900s. That was the part that nobody talked about. And so, now it’s like, “Wait a minute, why did this stop?”

Rail: We musicians are taught that Beethoven and Bach and Bruckner and all these people improvised, but what I’ve noticed is that people who aren’t into classical music have no idea about this.

Pratt: It’s still new enough that my challenging of my students to do it falls on the ears of, like, “You can do it, but I can’t do it. And I don’t need to do it. And nobody around me does it.” They listen and they’re like, “It’s good when you do it," and I’m like, “No, it wasn’t!”

Rail: “And that’s okay!”

Pratt: But I think it certainly has hope for broadening the scope of people that are interested and curious.

Rail: With you getting more into new music and doing STILLPOINT, I’m wondering how far you see yourself going in this direction.

Pratt:My next recital program is old-fashioned because before COVID I was playing this program with Beethoven [Op.] 110; Franck’s Prelude, Fugue, [and Variation]; and Liszt’s Sonata. And so I’m going back and playing Brahms’s Handel Variations and Ballades. But I want to record the live album of the program we just discussed and I want the next thing to be new music again. And I want to approach some of the composers that couldn’t do STILLPOINT.

Rail: It sounds like what you want to do next with new music is the same level of adventurousness. Stylistically, though, do you see yourself getting more avant-garde?

Pratt:Well, possibly. I mean I’ve engaged with some people doing that kind of stuff and I’m on the periphery of it. But I think the first thing that I will address that people keep prompting me to do is whether I want to compose anything. I’m interested in being able to perform a fully-improvised piece in recital programs. I don’t have any limitations conceptually about what I’m willing to do. I've never been a goal-oriented person. And so, I just absorb and go where my curiosity goes and listen to people. And you’re right, it’s a similar sort of adventurousness, but I don’t have a limit on that. Like if something came along that was vocalizing more stuff in the piano or whatever, I’d be interested.

Rail: As we talk more about if you’re going to get into avant-garde stuff, we’re also talking about getting further and further away from the accepted definition of classical music. And part of that is what classical music looks like. Being a Black pianist, especially in the nineties—I was reading these old reviews and one of the biggest things I noticed was there was sometimes one or two whole paragraphs just about your dreads, the way that you dress, the fact that you sat really low, like Glenn Gould. And all these appearances. Have you felt that’s changed?

Pratt: I remember there were paragraphs written about this stuff. And I remember finding out that [pianist] John Browning came on stage with a dog. And I’m like, how are people writing paragraphs about my hair and I’ve never read once about this guy on stage with his dog. What gives! Write about Evgeny Kissin’s hair!

I was the first one, I think, really to not wear a tux and tails on stage as a concert pianist. And now very few people do. It’s less something to write about. Dreadlocks are still unusual but they’ve also become … Whatever years that you started seeing more athletes wearing dreadlocks, like in 1992, whether it was at Peabody or just in general, there weren’t a lot of Black people wearing dreadlocks. I started because of Yannick Noah. I used to play tennis and loved him.

I definitely did not want to be... I didn’t play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for like fifteen years. I’m like, “I’m not playing that piece.” I don’t want to be that guy associated with it. Everybody would say “Do you play jazz? You must play jazz!” So, I played it for a while and still play it here and there, but I wanted to establish myself with the stuff that was important to me at the time and then be free to do whatever else I wanted but not getting pigeon-holed to what I wasn’t.