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Artist
Chris Pattishall
9+ albums
about
Like many of his favorite things, there is much more to Chris Pattishall than meets the eye, and it gets stranger the deeper you dig. Most know him as a pianist with a “forthright relationship to the jazz tradition” (New York Times) and a hard-earned endorsement from the music’s traditional establishment—Wynton Marsalis once shortlisted Pattishall among his favorite young improvisers, and he’s also worked with Jimmy Heath, Jon Hendricks, and Wycliffe Gordon. Though he makes his living moonlighting as a besuited scholar of Earl Hines and Erroll Garner, you’re more likely to find Pattishall in a wolf sweatshirt when he’s off the clock, passing through the Gladstone Gallery to experience the latest from Wangechi Mutu or heading to the Armory to check out Oneohtrix Point Never. Pattishall traces his fascination with the surreal to his childhood in Durham, North Carolina. His father, who once wrote a Masters’ thesis on the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, kept a keenly-curated collections of LPs, films, and books that served as an important early influence. But it was at a friend’s house that Pattishall first encountered Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, a watershed moment that was matched only by his first exposure to Thelonious Monk’s pianism. “There’s something about the way that Monk plays—part of it you recognize, but the other part of you can’t tell if he broke the piano; you can’t tell how the sound is created. I felt that in this particular film, and that opened
