New York — Sir Andre Previn sits at his Bosendorfer grand piano, brought in especially for the occasion.
On this night, he's not performing a Mozart piano concerto or one of his own compositions with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall.
Instead, he's sharing the bandstand at the Jazz Standard club with bassist David Finck, lightly swinging through such classics as "Oh, Lady, Be Good!" and "Embraceable You."
It's only his second jazz club gig in nearly 30 years. But the 71-year-old maestro was thrilled to be doing it again because "the kind of freedom of sitting all night and improvising is hard to resist."
Just years after his family fled Hitler's Germany to settle in Los Angeles, Previn was working on film scores at MGM and sitting in with jazz bands at night.
Despite winning four Oscars and recording the best-selling jazz album "My Fair Lady," he quit Hollywood and jazz in the '60s for a career as a symphony conductor. He returned to jazz in the early 1980s with a trio recording on the Telarc label with bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Joe Pass.
Since then, he's regularly taken time off from his classical work to make jazz recordings. His latest with bassist Finck is "We Got It Good and That Ain't Bad: An Ellington Songbook" (Deutsche Grammophon).
Do you feel any special affinity with Duke Ellington because you're also a conductor, composer and pianist?
I really am in a different world altogether, which does not keep me from admiring him boundlessly. His entire life was concerned with jazz. He had his band and did not work with symphony orchestras. He did not perform and conduct other people's music with the exception of a few things. He's a jazz composer, I'm not.
I think he's the best jazz composer who ever lived. ... Ellington's whole musical head was based on jazz, so his tunes quite naturally and informally fall into a groove where you can improvise quite easily.
What was it about jazz that appealed to you?
I was purely classically trained. And then when I was a kid in Los Angeles, somebody gave me a record of (pianist) Art Tatum playing "Sweet Lorraine." I was astonished and bewitched by it. Here by any yardstick is a fairly innocuous tune, nothing startling either harmonically or melodically, and this man made an amazing piece of virtuoso music out of it. I got some records of his and tried to emulate them, which is hopeless because he was unique. ... I went from there and made up things of my own. They weren't very good and then they got better.
Why did you turn away from jazz? Were you afraid that playing jazz would make it harder to be accepted in the classical field?
I must say it probably crossed my mind. It's a cowardly confession. ... But the other thing is that once I quit Hollywood in '65, I really needed to get going as a classical conductor. ... I was very determined and ambitious and worked very hard. So the years went by and I got better engagements as a conductor and started to compose more and more, and had to neglect the jazz.
Why did you come back to jazz?
I missed some of my jazz musician friends very much and the atmosphere ... of it. I always liked improvising. During the time that I didn't play jazz, I always listened to it.
There was a record company that said, "Why don't you make a jazz record?" I said, "Well, I don't know if I can still do it because I haven't played in so long." So I got the greatest insurance you can get for the session: the guitarist Joe Pass and the bass player Ray Brown. ... It wasn't difficult technically so much but the ease of improvisation was rusty. I didn't like to play absolute killer tempos. But it was really fun and I liked it. So we did the record. ... And I began to play some jazz concerts.
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