Gilchrist is not your typical jazzer - Local Jazz

Sitting in a corner booth in Xando's, Lafayette Gilchrist looks up at the ceiling with a look of mischief on his face.

"You see," he says, pointing towards the speakers that are softly -- almost inaudibly -- playing Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." "This is the type of stuff I grew up on."

While this is an unexpected statement coming from a jazz piano player -- a hip jazz piano player, decked out in Sean John and Kangol -- anyone who knows the musician, and knows his history (call it the Passion of Gilchrist) would not be all that surprised.

Gilchrist's persona is a severe deviation from the stereotype of the savant jazz musician, with the legends of Mozartesque upbringings that cloud the biographies of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Instead, the Baltimore-based pianist describes himself as a child of the '80s and a prodigy of hip-hop. While most contemporary jazz pianists were spoon-fed a dosage of Herbie Hancock's classic albums like Maiden Voyage and Empyrean Isles at a young age, the first Hancock song Gilchrist ever heard was "Rockit," a hip-hop-influenced song that got Hancock considerable airtime on MTV in 1983. "I'm an old school hip-hop head," he says.

As is immediately evident on his new album, The Music According to Lafayette Gilchrist, Gilchrist did not develop his sound in jazz clubs. He and his group, The New Volcanoes, play an in-your-face blend of bebop, funk, rock, and soul, replete with cacophony and tension. Maybe an errant horn line will invoke The Brecker Brothers or a minimalist drumbeat will sound like it was plucked from Chuck Brown or The Headhunters, but other than that, the music is hard to define, taxonomically speaking.

"With The New Volcanoes, it's horn-driven, it's percussive, it's loud, it's invasive, it's bombastic," Gilchrist says. "But it's also very simple. I wanted to destroy the notion of jazz as being music you don't have to pay attention to. I almost want to take a baseball bat and be like, ??"Here we are [expletive deleted]. We're here to tear some [expletive deleted] up.' We will not be ignored. We may be loved, we may be hated, but we will not be ignored."

Gilchrist didn't discover jazz music until after he had taught himself how to play the piano as a 17 year-old attending summer school classes at the University of Maryland. He considered his lack of knowledge during his formative years as a player to be a blessing, not a hindrance when he was developing his chops. "One of the nice things about jazz is that no one knows what the [expletive deleted] it is. Instrumental music is that foreign to people," he says. He devoutly uses the word "instrumental" in lieu of "jazz."

"My music is rooted in the jazz tradition, so it will be considered jazz. And I'm cool with that. When people write about it, they'll write about it as jazz -- they gotta write about it as something."

Gilchrist made his professional debut in 2000, playing with saxophonist David Murray at the Irideum, a Manhattan jazz club located across the street from the Lincoln Center. Gilchrist looked into the first row of the crowd, and saw jazz legends McCoy Tyner and Bobby Hutcherson staring back at him -- and he knew he had made it. "But I was scared!" he says.

Gilchrist then formed his own band, and began playing at Baltimore clubs like The Ottobar and The Red Room, venues usually reserved for eccentric, offbeat acts.

"We played a punk club," he says of The Ottobar. "And I believe in that divergence, that crashing of cultures. That's the only thing that's going to save this [expletive deleted] country, especially the way it's moving now. That's the type of activity that is going to reinvigorate and save the culture."

Gilchrist has since formed The New Volcanoes, a group of like-minded Baltimore musicians. Gilchrist chose to invoke the image of a volcano because of what he feels the natural phenomenon symbolizes.

"I've always been fascinated by volcanoes. With volcanoes, landmasses are rising out of the sea. 'The New Volcanoes' came from the idea of this creative and destructive thing coming all at the same time. There are certain things that I wanted to create with our music, and there are certain perceptions that go along with jazz and instrumental music that I wanted to destroy. The idea with The New Volcanoes is to destroy the notion of instrumental music as being background [music]," he says.

"One of the things about the music we do is that it either sucks you in or totally repels you. People think of jazz as being something to turn on and then start talking. If you turn it up, they just talk louder." Fortunately for Gilchrist and The New Volcanoes, their new album has done more sucking in than repelling. Last weekend, the band performed at The New Haven Lounge, one of Baltimore's most respected jazz clubs.

"You never know what the future will bring," says Gilchrist. "I'd just like to be able to live. At this point, that's asking a lot of the world. Or so it seems."

Gilchrist performs Dec. 3 at the Bohemian Caverns in D.C.