Post by Charity on Nov 14, 2004 11:51:18 GMT -5
Pianist savant wows jazz world
Autism isn't slowing down 12-year-old music prodigy Matt Savage, writes ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN. He's already done six CDs
Matt Savage, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of 3, will be performing with his jazz trio tonight in Toronto.
By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Toronto — The chandeliered ballroom at the Royal York Hotel is empty except for a grand piano and a small boy running laps on the thick carpet. Matt Savage, who is 12, informs me that he's not yet as fast as he could be, because he's still getting used to his new runners.
On the keyboard, however, Matt is plenty fast. We have barely been introduced when he dashes through a breezy off-kilter number called Seven Up, one of the 14 jazz pieces he wrote for his sixth and latest full-length CD (Cutting Loose, on Savage Records). His slender fingers scamper around the tune the way a puppy might frolic with a bone. An urbane, post-bebop puppy, if you can imagine such a thing
"By the way, did you know that before Dave Brubeck made a record called Time Out, nobody had ever done a jazz tune in 5/4, and now everyone has one?" he says, in the clear confident voice of a boy accustomed to making important discoveries. Matt likes irregular meters, being enamoured of numbers in general and certain numbers in particular. For some time he's been having a love affair with 47.
"I wrote a piece called 47, because it's such an ordinary number, and ever since then it's been terrifyingly nice to me," he says. "But 12 is usually winning right now. 47 is in a slump." Twelve is the current favourite of Matt's sister Rebecca, his rival in all things, although the rivalry is not so fierce as to prevent him from writing a piece for her birthday called Sneaking Up.
Matt usually performs with his own trio, whose adult members (bassist John Funkhouser and drummer Steve Silverstein) have flown to Toronto for tonight's benefit concert for the Geneva Centre for Autism. The New Hampshire lad has inside knowledge of autism, having been diagnosed with the condition when he was 3.
He last played with the Matt Savage Trio for last month's CD launch party at New York's fabled Birdland club. Robert de Niro and Michael Feinstein dropped by, because a talent such as Matt's is one in a million, or maybe one in 120-million, since there are only 50 prodigious savants like him in the world.
He began classical studies at Boston's New England Conservatory when he was 7, switching to jazz after he discovered the music of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Bud Powell. The Matt Savage Trio came together 2½ years ago, after jam sessions with Silverstein and Funkhouser convinced them that they had more to say than a casual gig could accommodate.
News of Matt's gifts has gone through the jazz world almost as quickly as he can run another lap around the ballroom.
Matt has played with the likes of Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath and Bobby Watson. Dave Brubeck called him another Mozart, which is a more exact comparison than you might think. Like the boy wonder of Salzburg, Matt seems to absorb and generate musical ideas without effort.
At a recent concert for kids in Ohio, he asked for themes for improvisation. Someone proposed a piece about the first day of school, so Matt improvised a funeral march, although he doesn't feel at all gloomy about his own home-schooling regimen. He practises piano an hour a day and takes lessons once a week, which leaves plenty of time for learning about his favourite subjects: math, geography, science and roller coasters. He's the New Hampshire state geography-bee champion, and startled officials at New York's Lincoln Center recently when he pointed out that their Hall of Nations display was missing the flag of East Timor, which gained independence in 2002.
He wasn't always so outgoing. When he entered a special program for autistic children at the age of four, he couldn't communicate easily, or cope with the presence of other children, or withstand noises that would seem only moderately loud to most people.
"He couldn't even sit with another child next to him. . . .," his mother Diane says. "Instead of introducing him into the mainstream by putting him in a classroom, they brought the mainstream to him. They would bring one child down the hall to sit with him for lunch."
Patient training and a strict dietary regime (the DAN Protocol, which forbids dairy products, cereal grains and processed sugars, and prescribes daily vitamin supplements) helped him retune his sensory and social perceptions. Playing for a few hundred strangers, or chatting on national talk shows, holds no terrors at all for him.
"His weakest point, still, is what most people would call common sense," Diane Savage says. "Being aware of the dangers in the world around him."
Just now, Matt's world seems mainly full of opportunity. He recently became the first child to be signed as a Bosendorfer Artist, which means he gets to have one of the world's best grand pianos at home, and wherever he plays in public. He seems a natural for the jazz festivals that dot the continent in summer, and has been invited to play at Birdland around the time of his 13th birthday next May. But these honours seem no greater to him than that of being asked to write a piece for the band at that school in Ohio where he charmed the crowd with a funeral march.
"It's called The Shaker Swing, because the school is in Shaker, Ohio," Matt says. "There are 19 parts, or 20 if you count the zither part I threw in as a joke."
Just for fun, he thinks up questions about geography and flags, easily stumping the adults in the room. He asks me my birth date, and quickly calculates what day of the week that was. It's a classic savant's feat of memory. I have to consult a universal calendar on the Internet to see if he's right (he is).
"Every concert's different, and it keeps getting better and better," he says, summing up the important events on his own recent calendar. It's like an impossible roller-coaster ride in which the only direction is up, and the one at the controls is the boy with the new running shoes.
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Autism isn't slowing down 12-year-old music prodigy Matt Savage, writes ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN. He's already done six CDs
Matt Savage, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of 3, will be performing with his jazz trio tonight in Toronto.
By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Toronto — The chandeliered ballroom at the Royal York Hotel is empty except for a grand piano and a small boy running laps on the thick carpet. Matt Savage, who is 12, informs me that he's not yet as fast as he could be, because he's still getting used to his new runners.
On the keyboard, however, Matt is plenty fast. We have barely been introduced when he dashes through a breezy off-kilter number called Seven Up, one of the 14 jazz pieces he wrote for his sixth and latest full-length CD (Cutting Loose, on Savage Records). His slender fingers scamper around the tune the way a puppy might frolic with a bone. An urbane, post-bebop puppy, if you can imagine such a thing
"By the way, did you know that before Dave Brubeck made a record called Time Out, nobody had ever done a jazz tune in 5/4, and now everyone has one?" he says, in the clear confident voice of a boy accustomed to making important discoveries. Matt likes irregular meters, being enamoured of numbers in general and certain numbers in particular. For some time he's been having a love affair with 47.
"I wrote a piece called 47, because it's such an ordinary number, and ever since then it's been terrifyingly nice to me," he says. "But 12 is usually winning right now. 47 is in a slump." Twelve is the current favourite of Matt's sister Rebecca, his rival in all things, although the rivalry is not so fierce as to prevent him from writing a piece for her birthday called Sneaking Up.
Matt usually performs with his own trio, whose adult members (bassist John Funkhouser and drummer Steve Silverstein) have flown to Toronto for tonight's benefit concert for the Geneva Centre for Autism. The New Hampshire lad has inside knowledge of autism, having been diagnosed with the condition when he was 3.
He last played with the Matt Savage Trio for last month's CD launch party at New York's fabled Birdland club. Robert de Niro and Michael Feinstein dropped by, because a talent such as Matt's is one in a million, or maybe one in 120-million, since there are only 50 prodigious savants like him in the world.
He began classical studies at Boston's New England Conservatory when he was 7, switching to jazz after he discovered the music of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Bud Powell. The Matt Savage Trio came together 2½ years ago, after jam sessions with Silverstein and Funkhouser convinced them that they had more to say than a casual gig could accommodate.
News of Matt's gifts has gone through the jazz world almost as quickly as he can run another lap around the ballroom.
Matt has played with the likes of Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath and Bobby Watson. Dave Brubeck called him another Mozart, which is a more exact comparison than you might think. Like the boy wonder of Salzburg, Matt seems to absorb and generate musical ideas without effort.
At a recent concert for kids in Ohio, he asked for themes for improvisation. Someone proposed a piece about the first day of school, so Matt improvised a funeral march, although he doesn't feel at all gloomy about his own home-schooling regimen. He practises piano an hour a day and takes lessons once a week, which leaves plenty of time for learning about his favourite subjects: math, geography, science and roller coasters. He's the New Hampshire state geography-bee champion, and startled officials at New York's Lincoln Center recently when he pointed out that their Hall of Nations display was missing the flag of East Timor, which gained independence in 2002.
He wasn't always so outgoing. When he entered a special program for autistic children at the age of four, he couldn't communicate easily, or cope with the presence of other children, or withstand noises that would seem only moderately loud to most people.
"He couldn't even sit with another child next to him. . . .," his mother Diane says. "Instead of introducing him into the mainstream by putting him in a classroom, they brought the mainstream to him. They would bring one child down the hall to sit with him for lunch."
Patient training and a strict dietary regime (the DAN Protocol, which forbids dairy products, cereal grains and processed sugars, and prescribes daily vitamin supplements) helped him retune his sensory and social perceptions. Playing for a few hundred strangers, or chatting on national talk shows, holds no terrors at all for him.
"His weakest point, still, is what most people would call common sense," Diane Savage says. "Being aware of the dangers in the world around him."
Just now, Matt's world seems mainly full of opportunity. He recently became the first child to be signed as a Bosendorfer Artist, which means he gets to have one of the world's best grand pianos at home, and wherever he plays in public. He seems a natural for the jazz festivals that dot the continent in summer, and has been invited to play at Birdland around the time of his 13th birthday next May. But these honours seem no greater to him than that of being asked to write a piece for the band at that school in Ohio where he charmed the crowd with a funeral march.
"It's called The Shaker Swing, because the school is in Shaker, Ohio," Matt says. "There are 19 parts, or 20 if you count the zither part I threw in as a joke."
Just for fun, he thinks up questions about geography and flags, easily stumping the adults in the room. He asks me my birth date, and quickly calculates what day of the week that was. It's a classic savant's feat of memory. I have to consult a universal calendar on the Internet to see if he's right (he is).
"Every concert's different, and it keeps getting better and better," he says, summing up the important events on his own recent calendar. It's like an impossible roller-coaster ride in which the only direction is up, and the one at the controls is the boy with the new running shoes.
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