Todd Cochran

ACCLAIMED PIANIST, COMPOSER, ELECTRONIC MUSICIAN AND PRODUCER

Todd Cochran has experienced music as a way of life and being in a myriad of settings. The piano is something he has always known as a way into other worlds, early on recognizing it as a portal through which to escape the confines of youth, expand curiosities, and gain wide-ranging knowledge of the world. Born in San Francisco, raised in a home environment of classical music, jazz, and an atmosphere filled with an omnipresent love of the arts, Todd began fingering melodies on the piano at age 3. His parents had professional careers, his dad in the automobile industry and his mother as an accountant. Both were trained musicians, his father a singer/pianist and mother a violinist. His first piano lessons were taught by his father, and young Todd’s absorption was such that he was able to read musical notation before he learned to read words. In this sense music found him – long before he knew to seek it.

Todd’s formal training began with private study at age 5 with Norwegian pianist, “Ms. Gilbertson” as he fondly remembers. As his talent became increasingly evident, happenchance led him to audition into the studio of then president of the California Music Teachers Association, Geraldine Linegar – a French-Canadian concert pianist who was still concertizing. In preparation to meeting the requirements of entering the main studio, Todd studied with Canadian concert pianist, Valerie Joan Maude Carvath Lee De Visser. At this time, she enrolled Todd in the Trinity College of Music diploma program. Trinity College London (TCL) is an international examinations board based in London. In terms of his orientation to classical music and the performing arts, this training is the foundation upon which his burgeoning fascination with melody is built. Todd’s multinational perspective of art was cemented. A lifelong musical relationship and friendship ensued.

Grade school was important to Todd, who took it seriously even while all lanes led back to music. He prepared intensely for two major music examinations a year – in theory and counterpoint and piano performance – and performed recitals. There is no virtuosity without discipline, and as such, the good fortune of focused work embedded into his outlook early on would prove to be an immeasurable asset.

Todd grew up the Lakeview district of San Francisco, a predominately black but integrated neighborhood and community. “My schools were mixed so I always had black and white friends. I was an outsider, isolated and often teased about my love and study of classical music, but never “otherized.” My solitude enhanced what I was drawn to, music, art and books, and I accepted this. But because of the music I never felt lonely and enjoyed great relationships with my few close friends.”

Influential throughout Todd’s childhood was his maternal grandmother, an ordained reverend, evangelist and protofeminist. They had an easy and close relationship; he loved the hours spent with her, talking, learning to cook, their outings in nature – to Golden Gate Park and the Japanese tea garden, to the seasonal fields of wildflowers and afternoons at the beach. Always surrounded with greenery or flowers that she would nurture – either indoor potted plants or the vegetables and fruit trees growing in her backyard – she introduced him to the beauty of nature. It was his grandmother who taught him how to see nature and to listen and learn from it. Weekdays after school he would practice the piano at her house. Strict and at times overbearing, she harped about “good music” and was intolerant of anything that did not fit her churchgoing or oratorio (religious themed) criteria. Rooted within the Protestant gospel songs she insisted he play, is the traditional blueprint of New England hymns, the northeastern code of American music. Also being absorbed into his musical framework were the codes of the American south from the motifs of the African American religious spirituals and traditional songs he was taught.

Todd was born with chronic allergies – atopic eczema dermatitis syndrome – that by the time he was two years old, developed into asthma. Allergic to nearly everything, foods (especially nuts), fabrics, and pollens he was subject to a good amount of experimentation, in and out of the hospital, until medics could get a handle on how to treat his condition. With a restricted diet (he drank goat milk) and controlled number of foods he could eat, he grew up in a bubble that his well-being necessitated. At age 10 he was old enough to enter a medical program that would desensitize him from his most extreme allergic reactions, a positive step. Nonetheless, his allergies to certain food types – those causing anaphylaxis shock (life-threatening) are never outgrown and have persisted throughout his life. This rare condition isolated Todd at a very young age and forced him to develop his inner space. Music, books, and imagination became his world; practicing the piano was his safe haven and revealed a dreamscape he hoped to someday actualize. Out of a forlorn condition he grew his self-identity and intention to connect with people in a meaningful way while pursuing a love of music that would grow into artistry.

“I had a strict bedtime, lights out at 8:00pm. I’d say my prayers with my dad five minutes before and jump into bed. My dad would switch on the radio and shut the door (he’d come back in my room after I’d fallen asleep to switch it off) and exactly on the hour, the nightly classical show “Concert By The Bay” would begin with its theme music of “Don Juan”, Opus 20, the tone poem for large orchestra by Richard Strauss. I heard it for so many years, and so many times, I’m sure the notes have crept into something I’ve written, thinking it was my own. In middle school my nighttime ritual switched to reading spy novels with a flashlight under the covers and listening to Motown and Memphis soul on my transistor radio.”

Around age 14 Todd was introduced to jazz by his older cousin. She was a music lover and classical pianist with whom he enjoyed playing 4-hand duets of Schubert, Clementi and Grieg. It was she who conveyed the beauty of jazz to him in a musician’s language, opening his mind to the vast cultural landscape of a remarkable artform. The notion of playing jazz captivated him; Wes Montgomery, Gabor Szabo, Willie Bobo, Charles Lloyd, Jimmy Smith. It required understanding the technical and theoretical principles of the classical idiom and then had this contemporaneous, invention in-the-moment dimension that challenged all of the sensibilities of music making. Todd reflects: “Along with going to live concerts, my cousin Cynthia and I were spending hours listening to these astonishing jazz recordings together, and I remember well the day I went to the piano wanting to get some of the harmonic textures and rhythmic sounds I’d heard out of the instrument – and couldn’t. It was life-altering moment, and in that instant, I was hooked on the pursuit. From that day on I existed in two distinct worlds as far as playing the piano and music was concerned. My interests would never be contained or placed into an simply defined single thing.”

Throughout high school Todd continued in the Trinity College diploma program, playing classical recitals, and recording (professionally) solo piano works from the standard classical repertoire. At the same time, in what must be described as total music immersion, his jazz playing was taking root. Learning by absorbing every nuance of recordings by jazz pianists Ahmad Jamal, Gene Harris, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, etc. he began gaining a palpable sense of there being something beyond the notes and the technique.

“Transcribing recordings, doing take downs, copying note by note, everything – the ghost notes and the spaces between, the silences — plunged me into the meter and pulse of the performances I was trying to capture. I pored over the hard accents and especially how the musicians ended their performances… there appeared to be a burst of freedom in the final statements, the last thoughts unbridled from the tune… there was so much personality revealed in the flurry of finality – some left the door open, others slammed it shut. There was so much to learn.”

San Francisco in the 60s and 70s – Todd’s hometown – was a vital center of the cultural revolution. The civil rights movement had become an energy, a force in motion – yet within the fearsome conflict and agitation was a profound sense of hope for the world to be a better place; that equal justice and change could happen. For a young African-American musician, playing jazz and knowing the inflections of the blues experience was rite de passage. To that end, making art that creatively mirrored the vitality and passions of the socio-cultural moment was an embedded mandate. Inspired by the quest, Todd sought out musical associations with relevant, skilled artists.

Key transitions have pivotal points and Todd’s shift from being a classical purest happened while he was studying and performing the music of 20th century composers Hindemith, Khachaturian, and Gottschalk; for him the melodies, rhythmic shapes and harmonic abstractions formed a bridge into jazz. He was perceiving something of a similar tonal language; however, each had a system that was unique to the composer. “They introduced you to their symbolism and sent your mind traveling with them. Through their music they seemed to externalize everything they thought and felt through images. I wanted to do that.”