Alex Taub started playing piano at six years old in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is not unusual. What's unusual is that by thirteen he had found his way to jazz — studying under pianist Jon Ozment and performing around the D.C. metropolitan area while most kids his age were still deciding whether to keep taking lessons. The instrument chose him early, and he had the good sense not to argue with it.
At East Carolina University, he played in the Jazz Ensemble and performed at Lincoln Center and the Billy Taylor Jazz Festival, experiences that tend to recalibrate a young musician's understanding of what's possible. Then, in 2013, he moved to Asheville and did something that takes most transplants years to accomplish: he became essential. Not visible in the way that bandleaders are visible, but essential in the way that the best pianists are — the person everyone calls, the player whose touch and harmonic instincts make any room he sits in sound better than it did before he arrived. Jazz, funk, soul, R&B — Taub moves between idioms the way a fluent speaker moves between languages, without pausing to translate.
A decade into building that reputation, he did something surprising. He left. He went to Montreal and enrolled at McGill University, pursuing a Master of Music in Jazz — the kind of decision that only makes sense if you understand what it means to be a working musician who still wants to be a student, who believes there are rooms in the instrument he hasn't opened yet. McGill's jazz program, housed in a city with its own deep improvisational tradition, gave him those rooms. He returned to the mountains with a degree and with whatever it is that happens to a player who steps away from the familiar long enough to hear it differently.
Now he teaches at East Tennessee State University, and his duo recording Six Feet Apart with pandeiro master Scott Feiner — the founder of Pandeiro Jazz, whose four previous albums essentially invented a genre — captures something central about Taub's musicianship: the willingness to meet another tradition on its own terms and find the place where it intersects with his. Brazilian rhythm and jazz harmony and the particular warmth of a piano recorded at Seclusion Hill in Asheville, all of it threaded together by a musician who understands that versatility isn't the same thing as restlessness. Taub isn't searching for a style. He found it a long time ago. What he's still searching for is the edge of it — the place where what he knows meets what he doesn't, the next room in an instrument that started opening its doors to him when he was six years old.