Fremont jazz pianist turns school recital into epic concert

When it comes to bragging rights over graduation gifts, no one is going to top Belmont’s Nathan Tokunaga.

The Carlmont High School senior, a precociously gifted clarinetist and saxophonist who played his first professional gig at age 14, had the good fortune of coming under the wing of pianist and Microsoft engineer Charles Chen.

A mentor and friend given to extravagant enthusiasm, Chen is pouring his resources into Tokunaga’s June 15 senior recital at San Jose State University’s Concert Hall, an evening of orchestral jazz featuring a 50-piece ensemble with strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion.

“I’m going broke with this,” Chen said. “There are no grants or anything, but we’re going to record the whole program after the recital.”

Dubbed “All the Strings You Are,” the evening is shaping up as a concert for the ages. All ages. The multi-generational ensemble includes about a dozen of Tokunaga’s bandmates from the Peninsula Youth Orchestra and Carlmont High orchestra.

But Chen has also hired local professionals and he’s flying in musicians from New York City and L.A., including saxophonist Bob Sheppard, a founding member of Chick Corea’s Origin Sextet and a veteran studio musician with hundreds of albums, film scores, and television soundtracks to his credit.

The Fremont jazz pianist has every reason to be focusing his time and checking account on his own musical career. Cellar Music Group just released his second recording, “Building Characters,” an ambitious concept album featuring Chen’s original compositions and a cast of heavyweight players like Sheppard and trumpet great Randy Brecker.

In the coming months he’s playing a string of gigs celebrating the new album with his Bay Area sextet, starting May 24 at Mr. Tipple’s in San Francisco. The same combo hits Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland July 13, Mr. Tipple’s again July 18, and Oakland’s Sound Room August 21.

But as if he just can’t help himself, he’s plunged into “All the Strings You Are.” Studying film scoring and classical orchestration helped prepare Chen for the challenge of writing the charts. He’s arranged about two dozen standards from the 1930s and ‘40s, pieces styled after Golden Age Hollywood composers and vintage Swing-era bands like the Claude Thornhill Orchestra.

“It’s the biggest senior recital in the history of anything,” Chen said, sounding a little awed by the scope of the project. “I started studying to write music for film and classical orchestration. A lot of that skillset will be used in this jazz/classical fusion. As a kid I wanted to play classical music, so I’m combining all the worlds that I love.”

Born in Taipei, Chen grew up in Cupertino and started piano lessons in first grade with a friend’s mother who gave the immigrant family a discounted rate. He’d grow up hearing his grandmother’s Ella Fitzgerald and Wes Montgomery albums, but he didn’t start studying jazz until he was at Monta Vista High School.

He remembers minimal instruction, with the kids mostly figuring out the music on their own, but after two years his combo landed a gig in downtown Sunnyvale at Scruffy Murphey’s. He’d recently watched a Herbie Hancock video “and I picked up the keyboard and played like a Keytar,” he recalled. “I’ve always been a crowd pleaser and class clown. That hasn’t changed.”

The summer of his senior year he made a major leap as a player attending the Stanford Jazz Workshop under the tutelage of piano great Taylor Eigsti. Chen continued to play jazz through his undergrad studies at UC Berkeley while majoring in math and computer science. His life has proceeded along dual career paths ever since, though they intersected during his Google years 2011-15 when he played in Magpie, an all-Googler ensemble led by percussionist Mark Goldstein.

In his own music he’s honed a hard-swinging post-bop approach he documented on his 2022 debut album “Charles, Play!” Produced by South Bay tenor saxophonist Tim Lin, the impressive quartet session captures Chen confidently holding his own with the superlative New York rhythm section tandem of drummer Kenny Washington and bassist Peter Washington.

At the same time, Chen was becoming the pianist of choice for South Bay swing dances and traditional jazz shows, which meant he was cultivating a century of different jazz idioms, each with a distinct rhythmic feel.

Multi-instrumentalist Clint Baker, a guiding force on the trad jazz scene for decades, first played with Chen at a mutual friend’s wedding “and I started hiring him for gigs, initially because I thought he was an excellent Teddy Wilson-style pianist,” Baker said, referring to the supremely suave accompanist revered for his work with Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman.

Deeply impressed by Chen’s facility and interest in learning earlier jazz styles, Baker describes the pianist as “one of the smartest and fastest-learning musicians I’ve ever worked with.” It was Baker who introduced Chen to Tokunaga, and the pianist seems to have found a kindred spirit.

“Charles is really a kind of mad genius,” Tokunaga said. “He has these grand ideas and really pulls them together. I’m so excited. It’s not every day you get to play with a 50-piece orchestra and full big band.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.

CHARLES CHEN

With the Charles Chen Sextet: 6 and 7:30 p.m. May 24 and July 18 at Mr. Tipple’s, San Francisco; $15-$30; mrtipplessf.com; 5 p.m. July 13 at Piedmont Piano Company, Oakland; $25-$30; piedmontpiano.com; 7:30 p.m. Aug. 21 at the Sound Room, Oakland; $30; www.soundroom.org.

Presents “All the Strings You Are”: Featuring Nathan Tokunaga, Charles Chen and orchestra;  7 p.m. June 15 at the San José State University Concert Hall; $30; charlesperforms.com