There’s something marvelously perverse about a pop-singing jazz pianist who plays a bluegrass version of the Rick James funk standard “Super Freak” and makes it fit.
That’s Bruce Hornsby, the 6-foot-2 Virginia native who can hold his own with Randy Newman in the songwriting world and once beat Allen Iverson at roundball, sort of.
The Grammy-winning writer of the No. 1 radio hit “The Way It Is” and “The End of the Innocence” (which helped Don Henley sell 6 million albums), Hornsby brings his wide-ranging musical appetite to the Atlanta Botanical Garden on Friday.
Performing with his band the Noisemakers, including eminent Atlanta jazz drummer Sonny Emory, Hornsby will demonstrate that he doesn’t really break through barriers of different forms. He just keeps a steady course and the genres dissolve before him.
Hornsby’s newest album, “Levitate,” comes out in September. He spoke recently from his Williamsburg, Va., home about building his shows around requests from the audience (he doesn’t use a set list), about his love of the much-maligned accordion and about playing with the Grateful Dead.
Q: You went to Berklee College of Music: How did you keep them from pounding the originality out of you?
A: I was only there for two semesters, then I went on to the University of Miami, which is a great music school. ... If you have a strong personality when you get there then you’re going to survive the onslaught of rules and regulations and this is how it’s done.
Q: Accordion: most hated instrument or chick magnet?
A: I don’t think of it in either of those ways. I think of it as my punk moment, my nod to the punk aesthetic, which is that anyone should be able to play this music, rock ’n’ roll shouldn’t be about virtuosity, it should be every-man’s music and that’s certainly me on the accordion, ’cause I’m no good.
Q: Your shows are shaped by requests: What tune that you didn’t know have you played anyway?
A: We’ve winged it on such chestnuts as “Whiter Shade of Pale”; I had never played it and I don’t really know all the words.
Q: How did you enjoy working with Spike Lee [writing the soundtrack for his basketball movie “Kobe Doin’ Work”]?
A: I’ve worked with Spike for so long, 18 years or so, this was the most intense collaboration so far. I’d never scored a film before; it was really enjoyable, a great way to get my feet wet.
Q: How did you survive the keyboard player’s curse in the Grateful Dead? [Four keyboard players with the Dead perished prematurely.]
A: I’m the only one who ever quit! I was influenced by them as songwriters. I love their songs. They are underrated as songwriters.
Q: Perhaps because none of them can sing.
A: Hey! Jerry had a soulful sound — Bobby too. But [their weak vocals] made it hard for people to hear through that. People would ask me, “Why are you playing with them? What’s good about them?” And I can’t explain it to you, except to say that the hair stands up on my arms many more times with them then any other musical situation I’ve been in.
CONCERT PREVIEW
Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers
8 Friday night. $55 (Botanical Garden members qualify for a $5 discount). Atlanta Botanical Garden, 1345 Piedmont Ave. N.E. Atlanta.
404-876-5859, atlantabotanicalgarden.org, ticketmaster.com
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