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NEW YORK - In New York, you're constantly surrounded by noise. Some of it masquerades as music, and only a trained ear can sort it all out.
There are few ears more trained than those of Taylor Eigsti, the 21-year-old jazz pianist who has just made his New York debut at the Blue Note and whose latest album, "Lucky to Be Me" (Concord), was released in March.
Eigsti has been in the public eye a long time. At the age of 13, he sat in with Dave Brubeck (whom he calls "Uncle Dave") in his native California.
He has performed with Brubeck's sons as well as Diana Krall and Al Jarreau. He has also accompanied classical singers Sylvia McNair and Frederica von Stade.
Eigsti's tastes couldn't be broader. The composers on his album range from Leonard Bernstein, who wrote the title song, to Mussorgsky to Bjork.
"Our culture is force-feeding a certain kind of music to people, but even within that there can be quality," he says.
He draws his interviewer's attention to the music being piped into the room. There are soprano voices, probably synthesized, doing an insipid choral melody, but what attracts him is the bass, which is full of rhythmic variations - "That's a talented drummer; it's more than just a loop."
The music was probably created to be absorbed peripherally, but casual listening seems beyond Eigsti.
He wants to get to the root of everything he hears.
"I love any music that has vibrant energy," he says. "You hear Bjork eight times, and then, suddenly, on the ninth time, you hear what she's really doing."
His own music suggests his sophisticated education as well as the complexities of his life. He was 3 when his sister, also a talented pianist, died of cancer. A few years later his father died.
His father, who played drums as a hobby, designed receivers for satellite images. In Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park," the scientists watch weather formations on machines of his father's design.
Eigsti's prodigious talent was noted at a very early age. He rebelled against taking formal piano lessons but acknowledges, "I didn't get technique until I started studying classical music. One of the things I do well is control the dynamics within a phrase; you can't do that without discipline."
And one of the things he admires about Brubeck, who studied with such 20th-century masters as Arnold Schonberg and Darius Milhaud, is his ability to engage a wide range of listeners.
"His music is easy enough for audiences to latch onto," Eigsti says.
"He plays `Take Five,' and they're with him. So the next song he does can be totally out."
Brubeck, who turned 85 in December, has been honored all over the world.
In Boston recently, conductor Christopher Hogwood organized a concert in which he and a group of classical musicians on one side of the stage played the work of J.S. Bach and his sons. On the other side, Brubeck and his sons did jazz. The forces combined on Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk."
In a phone interview, the gravelly voiced jazz pianist said how honored he felt a few years ago when his sacred music was performed during Holy Week at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna alongside the work of composers whose Masses had their world premieres there - Mozart and Beethoven.
Brubeck was also tickled, listening to Eigsti's "Lucky to Be Me," to hear the opening of his own "Summer Song" in an Eigsti composition called "Argument."
"I know `Summer Song' very well, but I wasn't deliberately quoting it," Eigsti says.
His goal, he says, is to elicit emotion.
"It's possible to look at a painting and be moved to tears," he says. "But I think it happens more often in music, partly because the sense of hearing is closely tied to memory.
"The hardest thing to do as an instrumentalist is to involve the listener, especially when our collective culture reflects attention deficit disorder - we can't even buy whole CDs anymore; we download one tune at a time.
"Dancing used to play a role in jazz. When it was swing, people danced to it. When it was bebop, people danced to it. No one dances to improvised jazz, partly because it has odd time signatures.
"I remember watching a woman try to dance to `Time Out,' which is in 5/4. There are certain things you can't do," he said.
"When people listen to my music I'd like to thing they're dancing internally."
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(c) 2006, New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
