TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2026
“What are you interested in?”
“I like making things up.”
“Well, have you ever heard of jazz?”
One stop on the international Aaron Parks Trio tour was Lebanon Valley College, to give a masterclass to students and put on a concert for the college and local community.
You might expect something pretentious from a group of successful jazz musicians who have toured around the world, but it became clear that that was not the style of the Aaron Parks Trio the minute they stopped playing and Aaron Parks turned to address the audience while sitting with his legs crossed on the piano bench. The masterclass was some combination of performance, life-coaching session, and comedy routine.
The trio was refreshingly open about their personal backgrounds, philosophies, and their dynamic within the group. While the three have only been playing together for about a week, Aaron Parks and bassist Ben Street have been playing together for a long time, with Aaron describing Ben as an “older brother figure” in his life. The pair discussed their transparent relationship with each other and the music, and the way they have come to separate their ego from the music, rather than pretending to love everything someone plays, or taking a creative opinion as a personal criticism.
Ben: “What if it’s okay that I don’t like all of Aaron’s tunes?”
Aaron: “What if it’s okay that I know that Ben doesn’t like them all?”
“You know, I feel like music picks you.”
Eric, the drummer, described the series of lucky connections he was able to make through his mother’s commitment to her career, saying that he felt like he won the lottery in the way that he had grown up around so many influential artists who would inspire him and his music. It was clear that Eric was creative in his playing and drew from a lot of different sources for inspiration, as he used a wide variety of techniques. Throughout the recital, he used standard drum sticks, brushes, rods, mallets, and something that might appear to the untrained eye to be a spatula (as for what it might appear to be to the trained eye, you’ll have to look elsewhere).
Aaron remarked on his early experiences with music: how he had a piano in the house growing up and tried to compose something that sounded like a thunderstorm, his parents’ support in getting some more structured piano training, and his first instructor asking what he was interested in, which led him to jazz.
All three encouraged that any aspiring jazz musicians spend a lot of time with their primary instrument, getting to know it until it feels like an extension of themselves.
They also insisted on spending time at the piano, not to become an expert at it, but to have the opportunity to sit down and figure out how the music they like works. To pull it apart and understand it and find the ingredients they like from it, so as to improve their own playing and musical vocabulary.
The concert was well-attended by a mix of college students and the community, and featured a lot of Aaron Parks’ original music, along with a few classic covers, such as “Warm Valley” by Duke Ellington and “Just Us” by Charles Davis. One of the pieces they played near the end of their set was “Little River,” a tune written for his son, from Aaron’s latest album, By All Means.
Ultimately, the Aaron Parks Trio was made up of incredibly talented and skilled musicians who were also very down to earth and happy to be playing music that they found meaning in. Just another great experience brought to LVC by our Jazz Program, made possible by our extraordinary donors, supporting the future of jazz. For more like this, see the Valley Jazz Orchestra in concert at the end of this semester, joined by Artist-in-Residence Ingrid Jensen, jazz trumpeter.
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