# Denny Zeitlin has developed a vision of mind-blowing breadth: Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/06/26/denny-zeitlin-has-developed-a-vision-of-mind-blowing-breadth-videos-photos/
- Published: 2022-06-26T06:12:56+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Secret History readers often assume I know every Chicago musician who ever lived,
but luckily I’m still capable of experiencing the joy of discovery. One of my bigger
thrills in life is buying a random LP by an act I barely know, being floored by 
the music, and then discovering the artist is from the Windy City. Case in point:
pianist and composer Denny Zeitlin, whose 1967 LP _Zeitgeist_ screamed out at me
from the used jazz bin. **

A cool-looking bearded hip cat and a groovy font drew me to the cover of the album,
and it was only four bucks! One of its longer tunes was called “Dormammu,” also 
the name of my favorite Dark Dimension-dwelling Dr. Strange villain. The music was
just as expansive and borderline mystical as that title suggested, skirting around
the borders of free jazz, cosmic jazz, and fusion and still somehow representing
each subgenre. Of course, I dug deeper, and my mind was subsequently blown by the
breadth of Zeitlin’s vision.

Zeitlin was born in our fair city on April 10, 1938, to brainy and musical parents:
his father was a piano-playing radiologist, and his mother was a piano teacher and
speech pathologist. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree: Zeitlin has become 
a world-class jazz pianist and a professor of psychiatry.

While growing up in Highland Park, Zeitlin started learning music from his mom, 
and by age seven he was talking shop with his psychiatrist uncle, leading to a fascination
with the field. Zeitlin began improvising on the piano at two, and in preschool 
he started composing. His formal classical-music studies began when he was six, 
and in eighth grade he moved on to jazz. By high school, he was playing professionally
around Chicago.

“When I graduated high school in 1956, I left Highland Park, a relatively cloistered
upper middle-class suburb of Chicago, and headed down to the University of Illinois
in Champaign-Urbana,” the blog of music writer Marc Myers. “My primary goal was 
to get into medical school. While the University of Illinois’s undergrad, pre-med
curriculum was fixed, I also wanted to make the most of a liberal arts opportunity.”

At the University of Illinois, Zeitlin combined his love of jazz with formal study
of music theory and composition, working with mentors such as Alexander Tcherepnin,
Robert Muczynski, and George Russell. He also began gigging with serious jazz heavies.

“In and around town, I had a chance to play with some great players, like Joe Farrell,
Wes Montgomery, Punchy Atkinson, and Jack McDuff,” Zeitlin told JazzWax. “Being 
near Chicago, I’d frequently go in on the weekends to be part of the jam-session
scene. I got to play with artists such as Ira Sullivan, Johnny Griffin, Wilbur Ware,
Wilbur Campbell and Bob Cranshaw. All this constituted my continuing education as
a jazz musician. There were no formal courses in jazz offered back then in the music
department.”

Zeitlin joined the fraternity Zeta Beta Tau, which led to one of his best-known 
songs, “Quiet Now.” At the university, fraternities and sororities would pair up
to write and perform 20- to 30-minutes musical-theater productions called “stunt
shows,” and pressure naturally fell on him to contribute compositions. “There was
a lot of support from the music school,” Zeitlin said. “They provided a high-quality
band and help with orchestration when needed. Competition was keen, and many of 
the entries were original and professional.”

The theme of the late-50s stunt show for which Zeitlin wrote was the fragility of
love: “How fleeting love is, how delicate it is, and how easily love came be broken,”
he told JazzWax. “The final piece for this stunt show called for a ballad. So I 
wrote ‘Quiet Now.’ The title, for me, focused on the awesome silence of aloneness.”

Of the song’s lyrics, written by a frat brother, Zeitlin can only remember the opening
line: “Love has come and gone away.” He worked in the fraternity house’s living 
room to create a song that he’s described as having “a requiem feel.” The raunchy
frat-party chaos of _Animal House_ is set in 1962—apparently those few years made
a big difference!

Piano demigod Bill Evans would soon become one of Zeitlin’s early supporters, and
he would later add “Quiet Now” to his own repertoire—it’s even the title track of
a 1969 Evans recording that was released in 1981, shortly after his death.

[⌊Jeremy Steig - Willow Weep For Me⌉⌊Jeremy Steig - Willow Weep For Me⌉[

Denny Zeitlin made his first recorded appearance on the 1964 Jeremy Steig album 
_Flute Fever_.

Zeitlin was signed by producer John Hammond at Columbia Records in 1963, a few years
after graduating from the University of Illinois. At the time, he was on a fellowship
in New York during his third year at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Zeitlin’s debut on wax is the 1964 Jeremy Steig album _Flute Fever_, which also 
features drummer Ben Riley and bassist Ben Tucker. Steig was a bit of a wunderkind—
he’d just turned 21 at the time of the sessions—but Zeitlin keeps up with his off-
the-charts flute acrobatics.

Also in 1964, Zeitlin headed to San Francisco to intern at the University of California
San Francisco, where he later began a psychiatric residency. That same year he recorded
his first two Columbia albums as a bandleader: the postbop voyage _Cathexis_ (with
Cecil McBee on bass and Freddie Waits on drums) and the smoothly sophisticated _Carnival_(
with Charlie Haden on bass and Jerry Granelli on drums).

Zeitlin followed these in 1966 with _Shining Hour: Live at the Trident_, which featured
the first recorded appearance of “Quiet Now” (as well as the album-cover debut of
Zeitlin’s impressive beard). The aforementioned 1967 LP _Zeitgeist_, which gave 
me my eureka moment with Zeitlin, would be his last for the label.

Jazz critic Ted Gioia had high praise for Zeitlin’s Columbia output. “He assimilated
the breakthroughs of the previous decade, from the impressionism of Bill Evans to
the free-fall explorations of Ornette Coleman, and blended them into a personal 
style that anticipated the next fifteen years of keyboard advances,” Gioia wrote.“
He stood out from the crowd for the unbridled creativity of his work, the richness
of his harmonic palette, and the sheer beauty of his piano tone.”

But then Zeitlin took an exciting left turn into a stranger sound.

Denny Zeitlin wrote the music for a series of animations that ran during the first
year of _Sesame Street_.

For the next few years, Zeitlin focused on exploring the new technologies of synthesizers,
electronic treatments, and the like, though it would be a while before he’d do so
in public. One of the earliest revelations of this new approach came in 1969, in
the music Zeitlin composed for a whimsical series of animated counting tutorials
on the first season of _Sesame Street_ (variously nicknamed “Jazz Numbers” or “Jazzy
Spies”). Zeitlin used a bonkers selection of nonstandard time signatures, in keeping
with the focus on numbers, and Grace Slick added her voice.

The same year, Zeitlin recorded an album called _The Name of This Terrain_ with 
percussionist George Marsh and bassist Mel Graves, which captured this transformation
in progress. At the time it was pressed only as a small-run demo, in an attempt 
to lure a label into bringing aboard a proper singer to replace Zeitlin’s vocals.
It didn’t get a formal release for ages, though—not even more than 30 years later,
after the LP’s coproducer died and his copies were discovered. Zeitlin still refused
to release it for nearly two decades, and went so far as to destroy his own copies.

^(Last month’s long-delayed release of the 1969 recording _The Name of This Terrain_.)

The pianist eventually relaxed his negative appraisal of the music and gave his 
blessing to an archival release by NowAgain, which put out _The Name of This Terrain_
last month. The label describes the album as “a wonderful and weird fusion of avant-
classical, jazz, funk, rock and electronic music.” In the late 60s, electronic instruments
were appearing more often in rock and jazz (see Miles Davis’s fusion period and 
the band the United States of America), but the world still hasn’t caught up with
the sounds or the vibe of Zeitlin’s unearthly recording.

After a couple more years of incubating this new style, in 1973 Zeitlin released
the artsy, forward-thinking _Expansion_ LP on the tiny Double Helix label, also 
featuring Marsh and Graves. Zeitlin plays synthesizers, melodica, electric piano,
clavinet, organ, and tambourine, and to this day the music sounds like nothing else.
He committed the similarly spaced-out fusion of _Syzygy_ to wax in 1977 for 1750
Arch Records.

Just when Zeitlin seemed to be settling in on the avant-garde margins, though, he
encountered a plot twist—Hollywood came calling.

Filmmaker Philip Kaufman, also a Chicago native, had been dazzled by Zeitlin’s performances
in his Windy City days and filed him away in his brain for a future film score. 
That moment came when Kaufman was working on his famous 1978 remake of the sci-fi
horror film and “red scare” allegory _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_. Kaufman initially
wanted a jazz score, but as script rewrites transformed Donald Sutherland’s protagonist
from an amateur jazz player to a public-health officer, the director began asking
for a 20th-century classical sound. Zeitlin admits he had to wing it, but his first-
ever experience writing for a symphony orchestra (which he augmented with overdubbed
electronic instruments and effects) produced a memorably ominous soundtrack.

Zeitlin wouldn’t use synths again till the mid-2000s, but in the wake of his work
on a popular film, he landed more higher-profile gigs. He recorded with Charlie 
Haden in 1981 for the ECM label (the 1983 release _Time Remembers One Time Once_)
and for mellow acoustic specialists Windham Hill in 1988 (the album _Trio_, with
Joel DiBartolo and Peter Donald).

Since then Zeitlin has released a tall stack of albums, one every few years at minimum.
The most recent is 2021’s _Telepathy: Duo Electro-Acoustic Improvisations_, with
longtime collaborator George Marsh.

^(At publication time, the 2021 release _Telepathy_ was Denny Zeitlin’s most recent
album.)

Zeitlin has lived in Marin County, California, for many years. He’s been teaching
at the University of California San Francisco since 1968, and he also maintains 
private psychiatric practices in the Bay Area. Zeitlin has even developed a lecture
and workshop called “Unlocking the Creative Impulse: The Psychology of Improvisation,”
combining his two careers.

“In each setting, communication is utterly paramount,” Zeitlin told the _San Francisco
Chronicle_ in 2004. “There has to be a depth of empathy that allows you to really
inhabit the other person’s world. It comes out as a collaborative journey in both
settings.”

That seems to sum up Zeitlin well: his evolution in psychiatry and in jazz has helped
him develop a distinctive kind of genius.

![An illustration of jazz pianist Denny Zeitlin embedded in the title card for the
Secret History of Chicago Music](https://i0.wp.com/chicagoreader.com/wp-content/
uploads/2022/05/SH_denny_zeitlin_web.jpg?fit=1200%2C983&ssl=1)

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