A Conversation with Davis Whitfield
Jazz pianist Davis Whitfield talks on his childhood in Jersey City, the music and musicians that shaped him, and what it means for him to carry the name Whitfield.
My family moved to Jersey City in the summer of 2000 when my father started to work for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. It wasn’t until the fall of 2001, that it began to feel like home. I was entering third grade and had one of my most influential elementary school teachers, Ms. Feskin. She nurtured creativity in all of her students and encouraged us to express ourselves fully. It was in her class that I first developed an interest in creative writing and where I met my first close friend in New Jersey, Davis Whitfield.
I would come home most days with stories from my day at school. Stories which usually included something about Davis. After a while, my dad realized that Davis’s father was the jazz guitarist Mark Whitfield, who he’d heard had recently moved to Jersey City. My dad found his number in the class registry, gave him a call, and the two quickly hit it off.
Not long after, I discovered that Davis played piano. Through him, I met my piano teacher, Ms. Emine, with whom he was already studying.
Throughout our childhood, Davis and I developed as pianists along parallel lines that reflected our contrasting temperaments. Our teacher, Ms. Emine, always assigned us opposite pieces. From Bach fugues and Beethoven sonatas to Chopin etudes, we inevitably ended up with works of contrasting mood, with mine usually on the more tempestuous end of the spectrum. Looking back, Ms. Emine was as much a recital programmer as she was a piano teacher!
Our friendship made us an ideal duo for piano four-hand pieces. Both attentive to each other’s playing, we were so in sync that when one of us began to rush, the other followed in perfect harmony. As a result, our first four-hand piece, Schubert’s Military March, ended up sounding more like a forced march than a parade.
Over the years, we both joined the Jazz Standard Youth Orchestra and later attended college just down the street from one another: Davis at Berklee College of Music and I at The Boston Conservatory.
In this interview, I had the opportunity to sit down with my longtime friend Davis Whitfield to talk about our early years in Jersey City, his musical influences, and what it was like growing up with the last name Whitfield.
Q: I remember when your family first moved to Jersey City. For my family, having moved from Kentucky the year before, it was really comforting to have a family move from Louisiana. The fact you guys were a musical family made it even better. What was it like for you guys to up and move from Baton Rouge to Jersey City?
Davis:
It was pretty interesting. To a certain degree it was a little scary and kind of sad, having to leave behind my baby sister and baby brother. But at the same time it was exciting. We were at that age when getting on an airplane was an adventure. The setting, the difference in weather, it was all mind blowing. Of course, getting to meet all these new faces and teachers. I’m sure you remember our third-grade teacher.
Q: Ms. Feskin, yeah.
Davis:
Yeah. She was the one. She really impacted all our lives pretty significantly.
Q: What were some of the cultural shocks you had?
Davis:
In general, I was shocked just by the diversity of Jersey City. The ethnic diversity. That blew me away. Especially in high school. I was surrounded by people from all over the world. In Baton Rouge it wasn’t like that.
Q: Some of my early piano memories with you was our piano four-hands pieces. We had contrasting temperaments as pianists, but we had an uncanny ability to match each other’s tendency to rush. What was that experience like for you?
Davis:
It's funny. I still to this day have a problem with rushing. I’m always telling myself to relax and breathe. I don’t really remember too much of it, but I feel like when we performed, it was one of those things between you and I through our friendship and musicianship were able to move together. Obviously, we were very different types of pianists, but we had this thing where we’re going to play this song together, so we were going to make it one. It felt like an expression of friendship.
Q: Keeping with the theme of childhood pieces, out of the pieces you played when you were younger which ones do you think had the biggest impact on you as a pianist? Usually if you were given one piece, I was given the contrasting piece. It certainly made for good concert programming!
Davis:
That’s a good question. I totally agree that Emine was definitely programming. I’d say the Chopin etude in A flat major. That one always stuck with me. I even ended up writing some music inspired by that. And then there was a Ravel piece that I played later in high school. The Sonatine. I always loved that one. Mainly because of Phineas Newborn. He played that as the intro to “Lush Life”.
There’s not really many other I can think of. When I was older, I pretty much said goodbye to classical music. I have a ravel book now that I go through every now and then, but I mainly wanted to focus on playing jazz music and improvised music.
Q: How did you manage to balance the two styles of playing?
Davis:
I’ve always wanted to do something other than classical music. I just didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t until I was old enough to discover things for myself. My dad was always showing me tons of music, but even the music my dad was showing me, which I loved, there were still things, like for example he never showed me Jaki Byard. He didn’t play Ahmad Jamal for me. These types of things I had to find for myself. And when I did, I found an intersection of jazz and classical that I was really into. Both of those pianists were also very good concert pianists. For example, Jaki would do a solo piano concert where he would play stride and Rachmaninoff. Ahmad Jamal when he was young was playing with a symphony orchestra. In my mind, they’re not all so different. The main difference was the person and their own choices of expression.
Q: Who were some of the jazz pianists who you would say have had the biggest influence on you?
Davis:
Ahmad, Jaki, McCoy and Monk are probably my biggest influences. Of course, Duke Ellington, not just his playing, but his writing and arranging I really love. With those others though, there was always something that seemed to me to be unique. Especially Jaki.
Q: How did you discover Jaki?
Davis:
I discovered Jaki when I was around 17. It was right around the same time I had heard Phineas playing “Lush Life” on that Jazz Scene USA tape. It was from a Charles Mingus record. I was going crazy over this piano player. I couldn’t understand how he was playing what he was playing or even what he was playing. When I looked him up, I found a video on YouTube of the Jazz Piano Workshop 1965 in Germany. I watched that video probably a thousand times. It’s like a piano summit. Earl Hines played. Bill Evans, Lennie Tristano, a bunch of cats. But Jaki closed the show. It’s just remarkable what he plays. His pieces sound like classical music.
I remember in high school having a funny little argument with my older brother. I was suddenly just obsessed with Jaki and I was trying to listen to every album he was on. I came upon that Sam Rivers album Fuchsia Swing Song. I was telling my brother that this piano player was so amazing. And he said to me, “That’s Herbie”. We actually had like a ten-minute argument about that. It was so funny. I guess at the time when that album came out, when the Miles Davis second quintet was happening, Sam Rivers did do albums with Herbie on it, so he probably just assumed that was Herbie.
Q: How was it for you coming from a family of musicians? Was there any pressure for you having the last name Whitfield?
Davis:
I’d say it was fun and easy. But it was also a pain in the ass. I guess the only reason why I started playing piano was because I wanted to play something that my brother and my dad didn’t play. But I always felt like an outsider. I always thought they were so advanced and so great, and I couldn’t compare and stand on my own next to them. It took a long time before I was able to get out of my head and realize I’m my own person and that there wasn’t really anyone pressuring me to be any certain way. After that, it became much more fun when we were doing the family band.
Q: How is it to play with family?
Davis:
It’s extremely different. When I play with my dad, it’s almost as if I know exactly what he’s going to do at any given time. I don’t even know how to explain it. I know how to support him and comp for him. I could do it in my sleep. With my brother it’s the opposite. He knows what I’m going to do as well as my dad. He’s kind of a savant in a way that he remembers everything. He’s rhythmically a complete genius. No matter what happens, when I play with my brother, I know that he’s got my back. Everything is going to be fine.
When I play with any other drummer, I always bring it down to this bottom line of whether they will have my back as much as my brother does.
The other thing too. I don’t know if it’s a Whitfield thing. We all love to rush and we do it collectively. By the end of the song, we might be playing at a different tempo, but because it was together, nobody in the audience notices.
Q: When was the last time you played together?
Davis:
All three of us? It was at Van Gelder Studio. We were recording on Steve Carrington’s album right in the middle of the pandemic. I’ve played with both of them separately since then but that was the last time for all three of us.
Q: Can you tell me about some recent project you’ve been working on or what you have upcoming?
Davis:
There is an album coming out soon that I was a big part of. It’s in collaboration with a great drummer and composer named Franklin Kiermyer who leads the band Scatter The Atoms That Remain.
Another thing that’s not coming out soon, but is in the shop, is my own thing under the name Maniacs of the Fourth Dimension. It is going to be an amalgamation of electronic and acoustic music.
Another one For the books! Thanks Wynton.