The Cult has just released its first new full-length album in five years, “Choice of Weapon.Wherever Alicia Pyle has found herself up to now, she has been ahead of her time.
In her teens, she was already taking college classes.
And now, as she prepares to graduate from college, Pyle already has a thriving business giving piano lessons to people who know all too well how brilliant she is on that instrument. Artistically, Pyle draws inspiration from the example set by one of the most visionary pianists to emerge from the worlds of classical music and jewelry hoarding: Liberace.
Pyle’s jazz quartet performs tonight as part of the 12th annual WBOI Jazz Fest.
Pyle says her mother was a Liberace fan when Pyle was growing up, and she just didn’t really understand the allure. But in college, as she ventured into other genres from the classical music she’d been studying her entire life, Pyle began to understand the genius of the flamboyant pianist.
“He was a classical musician who realized there was only so much of a market for classical music,” she says. “So he broadened his horizons.”
These days, Pyle’s artistic horizons could hardly be broader.
On YouTube, one can find a video of her quintet rendering Rachmaninoff as some sort of dazzling and urgent urban soundtrack and at tonight’s concert she says she will perform something she calls “Rachmanigaga.”
That’s Rachmaninoff mashed up with Lady Gaga.
“It’s a neat piece,” she says. “It’s really goofy and fun. But it’s also serious repertoire. It’s not like I’m playing ‘Old McDonald had a Farm.’ ”
Not only do such mash-ups please Pyle, they also please audiences, she says.
“I like to play a program that appeals to everyone,” she says. “I like to put one thing on the program for every person in the room. (Local pianist and Pyle’s teacher) Eric Clancy called it, ‘Working the room.’ ”
Pyle says she subscribes to an adage taught to her by an instructor: “If you do it with conviction, you can get away with anything.”
“It’s never boring,” Pyle says. “You may not like what we do, but it’s never boring.”
Pyle says her journey from classical to jazz musician was not an easy one.
“Ask anybody who studied classical music and then branched out into jazz,” she says. “It’s an awkward transition. They’re lying to you if they tell you it’s not.
“The big joke when I joined the jazz band at IPFW is that I didn’t know what ‘groove’ was,” she says.
Pyle is no longer a stranger to groove. In fact, Pyle now gambols with groove.
And she does so without fear, she says.
“It’s supposed to be fun,” she says. “Performers have different reasons for performing but mine is to have fun and enjoy what I’m doing. That’s part of the reason I don’t get nervous. I just don’t take it so seriously.
“It’s not brain surgery,” Pyle says.
“We’re supposed to be making the world a better and brighter place.”
Wherever Pyle plies her brightening and betterment skills in the future, it will likely not be in a nightclub, she says.
She has played a club date or two, she says, but she prefers conventional stages and charitable concerts.
“It takes all kinds,” she says. “If everyone was the same, how boring would that be? It’s not like it’s a religious thing. I just do what I am comfortable doing. I do what I want, ask anyone who knows me.”
Another thing Pyle is comfortable doing is sticking around.
“I really do want to stay local,” she says. “… I love everyone here. The people have been really good to me. … I have a lot of good friends and contacts and an amazing piano studio.
“I am having too much fun,” she says. “Why ruin a good thing?”
