Eric Scott Reed on Out Late

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Eric Scott Reed began his musical life playing piano during his father's worship services at church and has since become one of the most accomplished pianists of the US jazz scene over the last few decades. Having fulfilled the role of soloist, bandleader, ensemble pianist, educator and composer, Eric's career has been full of exceptional projects and collaborations, working with some of the largest names in the genre: Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Buster Williams, and Wynton Marsalis. Working with such jazz greats was no accident - his exemplary skills have constantly reflected his musicality and his ability to make his mark, whatever the context.

With his new album Out Late, the pianist now embarks on a new creative journey, surrounded by his stellar ensemble. Last month, I was absolutely delighted to have had an incredibly insightful chat to Eric himself (now based in Los Angeles), discussing his career, his new music, and why putting mayonnaise in chocolate cake can achieve surprising results…

You've had an extensive career in jazz. Can you share how you first got interested in the genre and some of your earliest influences?

My introduction to jazz came via several recordings that my aunt and uncle got from flea markets and just some little yard sales and things. In a stack, there was a record by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (Live at the Cafe Bohemia) featuring Horace Silver on piano, Ramsey Lewis’ Sounds of Christmas, and Dave Brubeck’s Time Further Out. I was about five years old and that was the start. I heard it and my body, my mind and my spirit made the decision that this is what I wanted to do. It's kind of like the difference between whether or not you like oranges or bananas - I don't think there's any real concrete explanation for why! 

I had also been playing gospel music in my father's church (he was a pastor) and studying some modest classical pieces. I was hearing things on the radio like R&B, and I had heard a whole bunch of music as a child. But jazz was what grabbed me. My brother does play guitar and my father was also a singer, but I wouldn't say that we were a musical family as much as we were surrounded by a lot of music in a variety of places. You could hear great music everywhere, TV shows, movies – you can still hear it now, but it was just a different thing back then. 

You’ve worked with a range of legendary artists, like Wynton Marsalis. How did these collaborations shape your musical approach or perspective?

There's something to be said for being able to function inside of a structured environment; about being able to work with musicians who are high profile. There's a machine that they put in place with regard to being out on the road, performing and rehearsing, as well as the way their music is composed or arranged. You have schedules; you have to show up at this time and you’re going to wear this outfit and the flight leaves here, the bus leaves here etc. It's very much sort of a mobile nine to five.

Every day was pretty much the same thing, so that impacted me musically by being able to structure myself around that. I knew when I was going to play, which was usually at night for a couple of hours, and I knew I had those two hours to really concentrate on what was happening in the moment, to be authentic and present. And then I knew I had certain hours to eat and to sleep; I had a certain time to pack and only so much to practice. Unfortunately, when you're on the road, there's far less time to practice and it's even worse for somebody like me as a pianist because I can't always get to an instrument. And when you have so many moving parts, there’s no accounting for the fact that you're not on time. It teaches you a lot about structure and definitely allowed me to create some consistency surrounding my own musicianship. 

The title ‘Out Late’ seems to carry multiple layers of meaning. Can you talk about the significance the title holds?

Well, if you think about just being “out late”, jazz is often played late at night and starts once the sun goes down. Once it gets dark, all of the really interesting and mysterious things happen. There's a certain type of energy and a buzz, especially in big cities: New York, London, Tokyo – there's just this excitement. There's this vibrancy about going out someplace to hear music and I think people let their hair down. Most people work during the day, so this is an opportunity for them to be entertained and just relax. 

Another meaning is how it ties into my personal life. A couple of years ago, I came out of the closet. That's not a term that I really like using, but it is what it is. It's a choice that I made to live openly, freely and authentically in my totality, which includes not just being true to music, but being true to who I am. It was about having my personal philosophy of life sort of lived out, but that also includes my sexuality which is also a large part of who I am. It was a part of myself which I tended to suppress and repress for many years, for the same old reasons, nothing unusual. There was fear of rejection, the intersectionality of being African-American in the United States, being a Christian, and the homophobia that went across so many aspects. So at this place in my life, I just feel completely free. And I felt that was being now more reflected in my music. Not proactively, but just naturally and organically.

You brought together an incredible lineup for Out Late. What made this quintet the perfect group to capture the sound you had in mind for this album?

Well, I had been working together with Eric Alexander, Joe Farnsworth, Nicholas Payton and Peter Washington at Smoke Jazz Club in New York City, doing some gigs together. Paul Stash, the proprietor of Smoke Sessions Records and of the club started a conversation about making some more recordings for the label. My previous albums were very structured, very arranged, very rehearsed and I wanted to present something different here. I wanted to engender a different approach and challenge myself, as well as the other musicians. And I knew I could do that with musicians where their careers were set, their musical personalities were strong, and their sounds are easily identifiable. So the challenge for me was how could I bring music to the table that was going to put us all in a different musical headspace? The emphasis was going to rely heavily on the collaborative effort, not so much on what I wrote versus how they interpreted it.

I had sent the others the music in advance, but we didn't rehearse until we got under the microphones. And so they began playing through it and were a little puzzled; there was a little bit of hesitancy about what they were supposed to do. My response was, “Whatever you want to do, I don't have any preconceived ideas. I have complete trust and complete faith in what you want to do”. I think a lot of musicians are probably not accustomed to that in general. It's a very rare situation where you have a band leader who says, ‘I'm trusting you guys, do whatever you want’. I'm always thinking of Miles Davis and Kind Of Blue.

Miles and Bill Evans had been working on the concept of playing over modes and using certain kinds of scales in terms of improvisation. But the way the tunes were structured wasn't like your typical 32 bar tunes that are based off of Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker contrafacts. These were odd bars and based just off modal sounds. So Cannonball, Chambers and Coltrane, as much as they knew harmony, this was still a different approach compositionally. And Miles had complete trust in them – complete trust. And it’s Kind Of Blue that always kind of sits on my shoulder whenever I'm trying to think about ways to challenge myself and allow myself to really trust the musicians.

Each track is a fresh take, no repeat recordings or headphones - it’s all about the band in the room. Why was this important to you and what was the effect of recording in this way? 

If it was up to me (and it is to a certain degree), I would only record live. I’d do it that way because you can hear the instruments with your natural ear and not through headphones or the monitors being super loud. I can hear and respond to everyone's natural, individual sound. If you listen carefully to some of those heads, Eric and Nicholas weren't playing exactly the same notes in some of those unison passages, but it didn't bother me because this isn't Beethoven. I just need the sound, the feeling, and at the very least, let's get close to the essence of what a piece is about. Ultimately, the essence of the piece isn’t necessarily about accuracy of notes as much as it is about the feeling.

You’re also a musical educator. What’s your approach like to teaching the next generation of jazz?

Everybody learns their own approach. You can learn how to teach; they have methods and all kinds of books. They may work, they may not… because it always depends on the student. But if you get a student who doesn't fall in line with the method then you have to figure something else out. And in jazz, I can't think of a situation where that would be more true. The approach that works for me almost 100% of the time is: just do what I say – just do it, don't ask any questions. And it's very much like how when you learn languages. When you first learn how to speak, you look to your parents, you don't question ‘why are they making me say words that way?’. You learn the language by listening and repeating. 

I have one student and I was trying to get her to understand how to play a line over just three chords. I played something she didn’t expect, but she heard it and it kind of puzzled her. I said, ‘listen, this is what I did’, slowed it down and told her, ‘practice that and then take it to all 12 keys’. It was one of the few ways I could get her to understand the vocabulary. I have another student where we're playing ‘Recorder Man’, but after you play it decade after decade, you start to look for different ways to get through the piece. You want to still get to the same place, but you take a different route. 

It's funny actually, I was making a chocolate cake once and one of my aunts said, ‘This is really, really good, Eric, but you know what will make it more moist? Put in a cup of mayonnaise’. I said, ‘Do what? Have you lost your mind? The taste of mayonnaise is for sandwiches and meat’. And she said to me ‘Baby, it's just eggs and oil – it's going to cook out’. And you know what, it was the moistest chocolate cake I’ve ever made in my entire life. And you don't taste the mayonnaise, but you taste the impact of the moisture made with the oil. It blew my mind. So teaching ultimately for me is about bringing together the analogies of shared experiences and about appealing to students’ sense of hearing, exploring an option that they hadn't considered. It’s seeing the students respond to it and watching the light go off. That's the reward right there.

Given that the album is a product of live energy, what’s something that listeners might not immediately notice on their first listen but that you feel is essential to the essence of Out Late?

I would love it if everyone's first introduction to this album could be hearing it and having no idea who's playing. Because when you think of the five of us, we're all in our 50s and 60s, so we've been playing the way we've been playing for some decades and just continuing to hone and fine tune. This record embraces our individual well-established musical stamps and personalities, but I think it also takes us into another realm. It forced us to have to play in some keys and delve in some feelings that weren't right within our bailiwick. So you actually hear the process and the evolution of trying to figure out what to do in this situation. That's what I love about this album. There's such an organic presence. 

One of the tunes is a contrafact of ‘All Of Me’ (it's got to be a piece that every jazz musician has played more times than they care to acknowledge), except we recorded this in B major. Something that's pretty simple changes once you put it in a key like that. So I really hope that people are able to hear and appreciate that we’re doing something a little different here. And the organic nature more than anything, just the trust that the musicians have with each other. That's always the tricky thing: are people going to like this album? There's always that uncertainty, even though I know I can't ever produce anything less than high quality music. But it doesn't mean people will always like it!

Any final thoughts?

Another thing that I want to really put out there is that music doesn’t solve problems. Music doesn't win wars. I know all eyes are on the United States right now, and I know it’s a risk to speak this way, but I know that the world sees this. I know that the world sees us. I just need the world to understand that what's being projected doesn't represent 330 million Americans, it doesn’t represent all of us. And it doesn't have to be like this. It doesn't. But I still have hope, and at the very least I hope that music can be some sort of soothing balm or a salve for where we are in this world right now. 

Out Late is available to purchase on Friday 16th May 2025 alongside Smoke Sessions.