Musical Matchmaker

Austrian-born Friedrich Gulda, 37, enjoys a dual distinction. He is the best classical pianist now playing jazz, and the best jazz pianist now playing classical music. Last week, at the Village Vanguard, he sat in with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, sight-reading a lengthy jazz arrangement. "He played the hell out of that piece," marveled Drummer Lewis afterward. Two days later, he was onstage at Manhattan's Lincoln Center as the piano soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20.

Gulda neither rags the classics nor classicizes jazz; he applies serious artistry to the natural idiom of each. On the international concert circuit, which he has toured for 20 years, he is established as a pianist with perception, power and a sure grasp of structure and phrasing, particularly in Mozart and Beethoven. In jazz recordings and appearances from Berlin to the Newport Festival, he has not only led his own bands but matched his nimble, imaginative piano improvisations with the playing of such top U.S. jazzmen as Dizzy Gillespie and J. J. Johnson.

In Gulda's mind, the two styles do not conflict; they interact. "I think I have learned to infuse my classical playing with the jazz virtues of spontaneity, better-than-average rhythm, and the courage to play each piece differently every time," he says. His jazz, on the other hand, benefits from his classical sense of organization and dizzying technique. "I now find similar and complete satisfaction in both fields," he says.

Drive & Risk. It was not always so. Encouraged to play the piano by his parents, who were schoolteachers and amateur musicians in Vienna, Gulda started at seven, reached the Vienna Academy of Music at twelve, soon found himself sliding--without enthusiasm--toward a musical career. At 16, a first prize in a competition at Geneva launched him into the concert world, but something was still missing. When he heard his first Count Basic and Dizzy Gillespie records, he found it in "the rhythmic drive, the risk, the absolute contrast to the pale, academic approach I had been taught." He began jamming with a combo at a Vienna club called Fatty's, eventually had a Vienna radio show, on which, on alternate weeks, he led a jazz octet and performed the 32 Beethoven sonatas. For a few years he tried concentrating on jazz, but finally realized that for him, each style flourished best when enriched by the other.

Now that he has struck a balance, Gulda occupies a lonely position. In his attempts to bring jazz and classical musicians together, he is a perennially hopeful--and disappointed--matchmaker. "Each group has much to learn from the other," he sighs, "but when I get them together, they only talk about the weather."

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