Dan Tepfer’s Natural Machines 2.0 Merges the Algorithmic and the Spiritual

"Over 90 minutes, Tepfer, bedecked in his customary black, led a journey through centuries of time and light-years of space, ultimately positing a future of colorful sounds and sights in which machine and man make beautiful music."

Excerpts from review by Phillip Lutz

For Downbeat Magazine

Dan Tepfer is an explorer. Armed with a monster ear for pitch, a virtuoso touch on piano and serious knowledge of computer coding, he is on a quest for meaning at what he terms “the intersection of the algorithmic and the spiritual.” After more than a decade at the grindstone, his search had, until this year, yielded material he delivered onstage accompanied by his computer-enabled piano and little else. And that was how he began his Nov. 15 Carnegie Hall debut.

That format was risky enough, dependent for success on his ability to create a set of rules — algorithms by any other name — that would coax out of the computer support for his ambitious explorations.

But later in the night, he would raise the stakes further. In what he accurately labeled a “genuine experiment,” he would enlist an orchestra and guest artists in his quest. And, in doing so, he would toy with the transcendent.

Over 90 minutes, Tepfer, bedecked in his customary black, led a journey through centuries of time and light-years of space, ultimately positing a future of colorful sounds and sights in which machine and man make beautiful music.

To reach that future, Tepfer collapsed nearly 300 years of musical history, drawing connections between the Baroque period — represented, in his words, by the “poster boy” for the algorithmic-spiritual connection, Johann Sebastian Bach — and our digitally driven age.

Like Bach — an inveterate improviser who pushed the technological and musical boundaries of his day, driving development of the pipe organ and polyphonic art — Tepfer, who has exploited the means and methods of counterpoint as much as any jazz musician, incorporated that knowledge as he raised the bar on real-time algorithmic composition.

Read Downbeat review in full here.