Hi, I'm Marian McPartland. My guest today on Piano Jazz is Brad Mildow, a recent addition to the ranks of innovative yet accessible players. He has a sophisticated touch, a swinging feeling, and a very sensitive approach to everything he plays. He is an exciting and welcome addition to the jazz world. Hi, Brad. Hi, Marian. How are you doing? Good. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Good to have you here. Boy, I've been listening to your CD and it's very, very interesting because I love to hear some standards as well as originals. And I guess what I especially liked about it is you play the tunes and you sort of do something different on them, but yet you don't take the tune so far out that it's not recognizable. Oh, great. Thank you. I guess I like that a lot. Yeah. So many things to ask you. You're from Hartford? Mm-hmm. Grew up in Hartford, Connecticut mostly, yeah. When did you start to play piano? I guess I started kind of tinkering around with the piano when I was as early as four years old. And I guess I showed some signs of being able to pick out little melodies or whatever. So I started taking classical piano lessons when I was either five or I think six years old. Oh, that's good that your parents recognized that. Yeah. Knew they had a prodigy on their hands. They were really always right from the beginning really kind of aware that there was something brewing there. Boy, there sure was something brewing there, that's for sure. So how did you actually switch then from classical to jazz? I guess a lot of it had to do with a really great jazz band that I was in in high school. Right from the start there were a lot of really good players there who were actually improvising and listening to Charlie Parker and all that stuff when they were 15 or 16 years old. And I think I was just kind of fortunate in that way. Boy, I should say so. Yeah. And were you able to sort of pick up on improvising? Yeah. It took a while and at first I wasn't ready. I'd been kind of raised on a rock and roll diet. Yes, of course. Either that or classical. Yeah. So kind of two extremes. So I guess I did what probably a lot of people do and just kind of worked my way back historically starting out listening to more contemporary stuff like Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett and some of the later Miles stuff and Weather Report and stuff, which I still love all that stuff. Yeah, me too. Yeah, yeah. But then it's nice that you did work your way back because some people don't even try to do that. Right, right. Did you hear some earlier of Herbie Hancock? I think what really got me into the piano and playing piano jazz I think was when a friend of my father's brought over an Oscar Peterson album, a duo album with Joe Pass, one of those Pablo albums. And that just messed me up. It's messed a lot of people up, including me. Boy, I mean the way he plays. Goodness. Yeah. Can you imagine having that guy on piano jazz? Wow. And we did. You did, huh? Oh, yes. It was something. Well, anyway, this all sounds so good, but I would love to hear you play something. Great. Maybe from your new record. Okay. What would you like to do? Maybe I could play from this moment on the Cole Porter. Wonderful. Okay.