But I feel at peace here it’s not as frantic as New York. New York had given me a lot: the drive to be creative, to always be one step ahead of the game. Immediately we felt at home, and we rented this place soon after. “I played the Keystone Korner two nights in the fall of 2021,” he recalls, “and we stayed in Baltimore for two extra days to look around. On the seventh floor of his apartment building, in a nicely furnished, piano-dominated room overlooking Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood, he is wearing blue jeans, pink socks and a gray, zippered sweatshirt. Meeting Alexander for the first time since 2015, one is struck by how the short, chubby middle-school-age kid has lengthened into a taller, thinner college-age adolescent. Joey wasn’t like that he went directly to jazz.” Most pianists have gone through classical music and then switched to jazz. Most students are taking in so much information and it takes a while to filter through that and find themselves. “He was already going for something different than being just another bebop pianist. He was like Ahmad Jamal he knew how to set something up and let it simmer. He’s gotten better since, but even then he was really good, not just in the big things but also in the little things like touch and timing. It became more like, here’s another interesting piano player to play with. The idea of his age quickly disappeared as soon as we started. “The first thing that impressed me, obviously, was that this guy could play amazingly well at such an early age,” Grenadier now says about those first sessions. Motéma Records signed him to a contract, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jason Olaine produced the My Favorite Things album with such heavy hitters as Grenadier (Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny) and Ulysses Owens Jr. A year after that, Wynton Marsalis invited Alexander to play at Lincoln Center’s 2014 gala. A year later, the kid was leading a trio at the Jakarta Jazz Festival, and a year after that he won the all-ages Grand Prize at a festival in Odesa, Ukraine. Herbie Hancock had been impressed when he stumbled upon an eight-year-old Alexander in Jakarta. Alexander wrote 10 of the 12 tracks on 2020’s Warna and all 10 of the pieces on his latest release, Origin. Live!, was an all-Monk affair, but the third studio album, 2018’s Eclipse, contained six originals. The 2016 follow-up, Countdown, included three originals. Even his 2015 debut album, My Favorite Things, released when he was 11, featured one original among the standards by Thelonious Monk, Harold Arlen, John Coltrane and the like. “Alexander insists that he’s always wanted to be a composer. The composition is there, it’s just our version that has to be decided.” Photo by Stevie Chris They’re realized, so it’s up to us to interpret that. The tunes are pretty complete he wrote out some stuff for us. He’s able to use that connection in the music. “The music is a representation of who he is,” Grenadier comments by phone from Switzerland, “not just as a player but also as a person. But I like to see other people as well, and I was very happy with the musical insights that Larry and Kendrick brought to the piece.” I was trying to communicate on a personal level, because I like to see myself in the song. “They had never played this music before this was their first impression of it. “I was trying to figure out how to get the musicians into the mindset of the piece,” he says. ![]() He recorded “Midnight Waves” as a piano-trio piece with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Kendrick Scott at New York’s Sear Studio during the week of his 18th birthday, in the summer of 2021. ![]() In many ways, such maturity as a composer at 19 is as impressive as the command of the keyboard that Alexander showed at 11. It’s not easy to invest an engaging jazz tune with such emotion-especially when you won’t turn 20 till the summer of 2023. But there was more to the tune than mere sonic description there was a feeling of weariness and the grateful relief of putting that exhausting work behind him for the time being. ![]() He conjured up the scene with a rippling figure in his left hand and a right-hand motif that resembled the bubbling foam as the waves crested. And one of them would be “Midnight Waves,” a musical evocation of the scene before him on the beach. He had recorded more originals on each of his successive albums, and he wanted to devote the entirety of his next project to his own compositions. What he wanted, he realized, was to be known as more than a child prodigy who could play jazz piano at a level unheard of for one so young. I said to myself, ‘Why don’t I write about something that’s right in front of me?’” I had to tell myself, ‘I don’t know what’s next.’ We were living near the ocean, so I could hear the tranquility of the waves through the window. “When the pandemic hit, I had that feeling of not knowing what lay ahead,” Alexander confesses.
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