Brandon Goldberg
‘Live at Dizzy’s’
Cellar Music

If you were lucky enough to hear pianist Brandon Goldberg at SMOKE recently, you likely thought you were getting in on the ground floor of what is certain to be an amazing career. After all, Mr. Goldberg is only 18. Yet he’s already been around for a while: I heard him in a club for the first time about five years ago, before the pandemic, when Ken Peplowski featured him as a surprise guest during the middle of a set at Mezzrow. 

Even well before that, he made his Jazz at Lincoln Center debut at the age of 9 during a Sinatra Centennial Concert featuring Kurt Elling and Monty Alexander, and drew an appropriately awesome ovation after playing a dazzling duet with Mr. Alexander on “Fly Me to The Moon.”  

My first reaction — and that of nearly everybody in the house — was, “Nine years old? I’ve got unpaid utility bills that are older than that.”

At 18, Mr. Goldberg has already performed all over New York as well as much of the country and the world. He has released three albums: “Let’s Play” (2019), “In Good Time” (2021), and the new “Live at Dizzy’s,” taped in that club last year. The album features bassist Ben Wolfe and drummer Aaron Kimmel; the SMOKE set featured Mr. Kimmel and bassist Dezron Douglas. (Most of his sidemen are twice his age and yet still young men.) 

It’s one thing to be a prodigy — yes, it’s rare, but not unheard of, for someone so young to be blessed with gigantic chops and the work ethic to practice incessantly, and thus develop astonishing technique — but playing jazz requires more than that: The player has to accumulate a wealth of raw information about the medium akin to what’s available in the Library of Congress.  

For example, Mr. Goldberg began both sets, the one on the CD from Dizzy’s and at SMOKE, with an original titled “Unholy Water.” He phrases his own melody in a staccato, stop-and-start fashion: It sounds sort of like a Monk tune at five times the expected tempo. 

On the album, shortly after the melody, he detours through an apparently random-sounding quote from Tadd Dameron’s early bebop classic “Good Bait.” At SMOKE, he played something completely different in that spot. And that’s the point: How many 18-year-olds have even listened to enough jazz to be able to pull that melody out of the air like that? How many have heard of Tadd Dameron or are even familiar with the concept of bait, good or bad?

Youth can be a blessing as well. The second tune is Burt Bacharach’s “Wives and Lovers,” an early example of a popular hit deliberately written as a jazz waltz. Mr. Goldberg plays it with such joy and abandon that it’s almost like he’s just discovering what it means to exist in 3/4 time. 

He begins with a kind of modal-sounding vamp, which further anchors the tune to the 1960s, the era that created it. If he were a 50-something veteran pianist, performing a signature song for the thousandth time, the challenge would be to make it sound fresh; but by rendering it with such joy, he makes me feel like I’m hearing it for the first time as well.

He’s aware that George and Ira Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” is generally regarded as a popular song, but was actually written for an opera. The Gershwins were admittedly inspired by the singer-bandleader Cab Calloway — who played the role and sang the song in later productions — and wanted to incorporate his famous scat singing, call-and-response numbers, specifically “Minnie the Moocher.” 

Yet in inserting those episodes, the Gershwins totally changed the groove of the song, slowing down and speeding up; heard instrumentally, “It Ain’t Necessarily So” almost feels like a medley unto itself, with several songs combined into one piece.  Mr. Goldberg deftly negotiates those transitions, sprinkling in snippets of the melody — or melodies, as it were — as if they were other songs entirely, like a song quoting itself.  

At SMOKE, he played “It’s Ain’t Necessarily So” faster and more aggressively, with less emphasis on the shifts, and he also threw in a quote from “Rhapsody in Blue” that wasn’t just a Gershwin reference, but specifically recalled the way Nat King Cole would interpolate that fragment into other tunes, like during the coda of  “I Know That You Know.” So in a sense, he’s quoting Gershwin-within-Gershwin and Cole at the same time.

At both Dizzy’s and SMOKE, there was a lovely ballad, one of Harry Warren’s last major songs, the title number from the 1957 Hollywood romance “An Affair to Remember.” Mr. Goldberg is so young that it’s probably irrelevant to him that this movie and the song had renewed significance nearly 40 years after the fact when Nora Ephron canonized them as cultural touchstones in 1993’s “Sleepless in Seattle.” 

His is a stunning, heartfelt rendition, taking the tune on its own terms, free of all generational baggage. There are also sprightly romps through “Let’s Fall in Love” and “I Concentrate on You,” and an exotic, tropical polyrhythmic take on Henry Mancini’s “Slow Hot Wind.” 

A 2024 graduate of the Pine Crest School at his native Miami, Mr. Goldberg is just about to start his first semester at Juilliard.  I don’t envy his teachers: It’s going to be hard for them to find areas where he could use some improvement. At 18, he not only has the chops but the depth and spirituality to match.