Come fly with actor Jeff Goldblum on his new jazz album

Jeff Goldblum, the actor? No, Jeff Goldblum, the Decca Records recording artist, thank you very much. The wry, well-established star of Independence Day, The Big Chill and The Fly is also a jazz pianist, one who has been holding down a weekly club gig in Los Angeles for years with his semi-pro outfit the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. Recently, Goldblum released The Capitol Studios Sessions, a lively, accessible debut album recorded at the famed Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles, but with an audience in the room. The loquacious actor spoke to The Globe and Mail recently about how his music career came together.

IN HIS WORDS

When I first began piano lessons, Erroll Garner, who is from Pittsburgh, where I’m from, had an album out called Play Misty. My dad brought that record home and we played it over and over again. That got me started.

Over the years, I’ve kept a piano wherever I’ve lived while I was acting, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of different players. I certainly love Thelonious Monk a lot. Bill Evans I love a lot. And Keith Jarrett, I adore. All those guys.

I was never particularly strategic about my career – at least about music, anyway. I was when it came to acting. But with music, I just put one foot in front of the other. It’s all happened organically and spontaneously in an evolving and fluid way.

I was on a promotional tour for Thor: Ragnarok in London, where I did Graham Norton’s [talk] show. Gregory Porter, whose music I’ve loved for years, was going to be playing a Nat King Cole song from his new album. They asked me if I wanted to play with him, and sent me the arrangement. I looked it over for a couple of days and then I went through it with him in our dressing room.

After we did it on the show, the lovely people from Decca Records suggested I should make a record with them. Later we had a meeting in Los Angeles, and they suggested I meet with producer Larry Klein. Which I did. What a spectacular guy. It was his idea to record the album in the Capitol Records Building, where he’d worked before, and to make the studio like a club and not do any more than one take of anything and just have a show. That’s what we did.

I have shows coming up in Europe. I’m thinking about some of the songs we’re going to play. I’m enjoying investigating further some of the things we played on the album that came to me just a little before we did it. I know them better now. I explore them every day.

We’ve never played Paris or Berlin, where there might be a second-language challenge. We shall see. But I’ve always found with these things that the less I plan out, the better. I’m comfortable with it being off the cuff. It’s the result of thousands of hours of involvement with the material.