The Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes is spotlighting genre-bending jazz with an upcoming performance by Trio 315 on Friday, April 17, at 7:30 p.m. in Center in the Heights in Elmira Heights.
Bassist Mario Pietra says the trio’s program is built on contrast and variety, blending original music with both classic and modern influences.
“The program consists of a mix of original compositions by the trio, as well as some more traditional jazz standards by people like Miles Davis,” he explains, “but then also has some different covers of more contemporary songs by Radiohead, Nirvana and even Lady Gaga.”Pietra says drawing on contemporary pop and rock is very much in line with jazz tradition.
“Jazz has a really rich history of always using as a foundation…popular music of that time period,” he says. “A lot of these quote, unquote, jazz standards that people play really at that time were popular music or music from shows and things like that. So really, what our idea was [is], hey, let’s use songs and improvise on them, but have them be songs that people know from this more contemporary time period.”The trio features Pietra on bass, his brother Joe Pietra on piano, and Eric, a drummer and colleague of Mario’s at SUNY Oswego. Pietra says his musical relationship with his brother goes back to childhood.
“We learned jazz together growing up,” he says. “He’s taught me a lot about music and harmony from the piano aspect, and I’ve taught him some things about music from the bass aspect. We always have this running dialog between us that’s existed our whole lives.”Eric, he adds, brings a powerful rhythmic voice to the group.
“Eric is a fantastic jazz drummer and really just brings such a high level of musicality that the three of us combined really have a lot of fun on the stage and improvise together, and just really enjoy making music together.”Pietra handles most of the arranging, while Joe writes many of the original tunes. Adapting modern songs for jazz trio, he says, can be a creative challenge.
“A lot of times popular music nowadays is not as rich, harmonically speaking, as it used to be,” Pietra says. “So it is a challenge to find tunes that kind of work for this sort of environment. But that’s why bands like Radiohead or even Nirvana, to a certain extent, offer up something either rhythmically or harmonically that we can take and then run with it.”To reshape those songs for Trio 315, they often rethink structure and meter.
“We might do something like change a time signature or multiple time signatures in a song, just sort of make a song flow from start to finish, and really give us stuff to work with and dig into,” Pietra says.Music is also a family affair for the bassist.
“My family’s quite musical. Our dad is a drummer as well, and my mom is very musical—she’s a singer. My sister plays the bass, my other sister plays the flute,” he says. “We have always had music around us…it’s been a very big part of all of our lives.”Trio 315 performs Friday, April 17, at 7:30 p.m. at Center in the Heights, 203 West 13th Street, Elmira Heights. More information is available from the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes at osfl.org.