Santa Cruz resident Charlie Lindner plays piano in the Jazz trio The Pickle Mafia. The name comes from the fact that apart from playing music, the trio also makes pickles in their spare time. They are playing at Vino By The Sea on the Santa Cruz wharf May 16 as part of a tourup and down the coast of California. Lindner dropped by the KAZU studio recently to talk about music and pickles. He began by playing a song called "The Blue Room" from the trio’s upcoming third album, which he wrote when he first moved to the area last year.
Charlie Lindner: I found myself in a blue room in the house where we were staying. And it had been such a change, moving to California, that I sat in this room and the song came to me and I started playing it and I called it "Blue Room." So I'll play a little bit of it, the solo version.
Dylan Music: Blue room, you said? Right? Okay.
<<Blue Room plays>>
DM: Yeah, that’s nice!
CL: So I wanted to just give you a little sample of what it is.
DM: We were going to talk about one of the songs off the last album.
CL: It's called “Flying Pineapple.”
DM: So, should we play a little bit of this and kind of talk about what you wanted to explore there?
CL: Sure.
DM: Let’s do it.
<<"Flying Pineapple" plays>>
DM: Alright, so that’s great. So what are we looking at there?
CL: There’s a lot going on there. We were just talking about the simple music like “Blue Room,” and this is much more complicated.
DM: Yeah.
CL: So, we really enjoy to synchronize on melodies together. In “Flying Pineapple,” which is definitely fusion, we did a combination of different parts. The beginning riff in the entire song is:
<<Plays riff from “Flying Pineapple”>>
DM: That almost sounds like news bulletin music!
CL: Yeah, it does! Especially with the sound.
DM: Gotta use that for the morning newscast!
CL: Maybe that’s where it came from subconsciously. So we return to that melody in the middle of the piece and we all of us synchronize on that…
<<Plays excerpt from “Flying Pineapple”>>
CL: We have those nice jazz chords in there.
DM: So, why is it called “The Flying Pineapple” anyway?
CL: The summed up version is that we were making pickles and somebody was helping us out and they were not making the pickles to the right specifications. And there was an argument and a piano — not a piano — but a pineapple was thrown at my head.
DM; Oh, ok.
CL: So I ducked and it smashed against the wall.
DM: That is a story. Well, do you want to go out with anything?
CL: Oh, there’s a song called “Tale of the Pub.” at the very end of that particular composition, there’s an outro, and I’ll just play the outro.
DM: Ok.
<<Plays outro of “Tale of the Pub”>>
Santa Cruz resident and pianist Charlie Lindner is part of the jazz trio The Pickle Mafia. They'll be playing at Vino by the Sea on the Santa Cruz Wharf this Thursday at 6:30pm.