Geoffrey Keezer brings eclectic musical spirit to MSU

Pianist Geoffrey Keezer, the first guest of Michigan State University Jazz Studies’ 2023-’24 Jazz Artist in Residence program, has been compared to the greatest piano virtuosi in the world, from Vladimir Horowitz to Art Tatum.

But Keezer, 52, is no music snob. He will bring an eclectic musical spirit and some of the scariest piano chops around to his weeklong residency, culminating in a public concert Friday (Oct. 20) with MSU’s jazz ensembles at the Fairchild Theatre.

“I just happen to love a lot of different kinds of music, and I think most people do,” Keezer said.

He has ample opportunity to check out what young people are into from his perch on the faculty at the Juilliard School in New York City.

“I look at the next generation of students, and even though the program at Juilliard is a very focused program, the kids themselves are listening to everything,” he said.

Keezer playing his first keyboard instrument, the ARP 2600 synthesizer. The bulky apparatus was used to create R2-D2’s bleeps and bloops in the …

In “Refuge,” a dark and turbulent track from the 2023 album “Playdate,” Keezer boldly blended sweeping orchestral flourishes, sparkling jazz piano, banging rock guitar and bluesy B-3 organ, earning the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition.

“Most artists are interested in making good art, period,” Keezer said. “As long as we acknowledge that this music we’re playing is Black American music, anyone can play it. Just give credit to the people who invented it.”

Keezer brings an astonishing range to jazz piano, from his exploratory duets with the late guitarist Jim Hall to his 2009 album, “Áurea,” nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album.

According to what the occasion requires, he can rock out a la Billy Joel, diffuse into abstraction, bust out with gutbucket blues or swing like mad. He’s relished playing adventurous concerts with Hawaiian guitarist Keola Beamer and Native American flutist R. Carlos Nakai.

“Let’s stop arguing over nitpicky things like, ‘Is this funk? Is this gospel? Is it R&B? Is it jazz?’” Keezer said. “Why does it matter? We’ve got bigger fish to fry. Global warming — we’ve got bigger problems. Just enjoy the music, have fun.”

At 18, Keezer was a member of the late Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, one of the most influential and hardest-swinging groups in jazz history, but he really honed his art, both as a soloist and a band member, in a fiery trio with the late jazz double bassist Ray Brown.

“Ray was the bandleader, and he called all the shots, but he was also an incredibly supportive accompanist,” Keezer said. “He let me explore. Anything I wanted to do musically, as long as it sat in the style of the music we were doing, he was happy.”

Playing more than 300 nights a year for three years with Brown, Keezer flexed his chops to the fullest, pushing hard at the music’s harmonic and melodic boundaries. Brown stuck with him — most of the time.

One night, as the trio was digging into a Dizzy Gillespie tune, “Tin Tin Deo,” Keezer crossed the line.

“We were playing it in a minor key, and I threw in the ‘Imperial March’ from ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’” he recalled.

Brown leaned toward him and quietly said, “Jazz, please.”

What would you expect from a young man whose first keyboard instrument was the ARP 2600 synthesizer, the bulky apparatus used to create R2-D2’s bleeps and bloops? In 1976, at 5 years old, Keezer had the chance to play and program Wendy Carlos’ album “Switched-On Bach” on the ARP at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where his dad, Ronald Keezer, was on the faculty.

“At that time, Stevie Wonder and John Lennon had one, but they were relatively rare,” Keezer said. “They made these incredible space-age sounds they used for sci-fi and laser battles.”

A piano teacher at the university saw how the gizmo fascinated young Keezer and advised his dad to get him to a piano teacher.

Keezer loved jazz as a teenager, but he couldn’t afford to be a jazz snob while playing in his dad’s jazz band. Eau Claire had no equivalent to New York’s 52nd Street.

“We played the grand opening of car washes, we played pizza joints, all kinds of gigs,” he said.

Weddings were a staple. In Wisconsin, that meant wall-to-wall polkas. To keep things interesting for themselves, the band members played everything they could think of as polkas, from Beatles tunes to John Coltrane’s album “Giant Steps.”

“Nobody knew the difference,” Keezer said.

Keezer met a legendary figure in jazz, the late pianist James Williams, when he was in his mid-teens.

“You need someone to mentor you and take you under their wing, and he was that person for me,” Keezer said.

Williams introduced Keezer to Blakey, a volcanic drummer, one of the all-time jazz greats and leader of the Jazz Messengers.

Nothing could be more intimidating to a young musician. Generations of jazz’s greatest artists, from Wayne Shorter to Wynton Marsalis, started out as Messengers. But Keezer was as “prepared as a Boy Scout” to meet Blakey, having played his music for three years in Eau Claire and in an informal “Blakey ensemble” at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where a member of Blakey’s band, saxophonist Bill Pierce, was an instructor.

“It was a dream come true for me,” Keezer said. “It was a combination of being prepared and putting a lot of my energy and focus into that music.”

For about 20 years, Keezer has written and arranged his own tunes for the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, along with arranging tunes by people he’s worked with over the years, including Shorter. The MSU jazz ensembles will tackle a few of them this week.

“We have great jazz educations all over the world, but MSU is one of the most highly respected and coveted places to be able to get into,” Keezer said. “There are so many great graduates coming out of there, and I’m really looking forward to working with the current group and the world-class faculty there.”