Mark Micchelli: Glitched-On Bop

Pittsburgh local music spotlight: Mark Micchelli

Mark Micchelli considers his new album “Glitched-On Bop” to be a spiritual successor to “Switched-On Bach,” a 1968 album by Wendy Carlos that was the first to use synthesizers to create classical music.

“‘Glitched-On Bop’ is a jazz piano record with layers of electronic processing piled on top. All of the music was performed in a single take and all of the electronics were performed live,” he said. “There are no overdubs and only a small bit of post-processing. So while it took a lot of time to get the software working up to my standards, there’s still plenty of rawness and spontaneity in the music since I’m never exactly sure how the electronics are going to respond to my input at any given moment.”

The new album, released July 18 on New Focus Recordings, performs an electroacoustic deconstruction of five jazz and pop songs by Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Cecil Taylor and Alice Coltrane, as well as Pittsburgh’s Mary Lou Williams, whose “Roll ’Em” serves as an inspiration.

“Pittsburgh was 100% the reason for choosing that piece. In preparation for my move to Pittsburgh in fall 2019, I decided to better familiarize myself with Mary Lou Williams’ discography,” he said. “Williams’ career spanned a huge swath of jazz history — from big band to bebop to that one (ill-fated) record with Cecil Taylor — and her polystylistic flexibility is something I look up to and strive to emulate in my own playing. As for ‘Roll ’Em,’ I just find it immensely joyful. I transcribed it almost immediately after hearing it for the first time, and the next thing I knew I’d integrated it into my ‘Glitched-On Bop’ set.”

Micchelli, who completed his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh last year and taught at Pitt, Carnegie Mellon and Community College of Allegheny County last semester, used the jazz standards as a launching point for his album.

“In jazz, to revere the original material is to change it. Doing a note-for-note imitation of another musician is borderline disrespectful,” he said. “I wanted to capture the overall vibe of the originals, but I was primarily interested in exploring my own ideas using quotation as a springboard.”

When it comes to live performances, Micchelli finds different perspectives as a spectator and as a participant.

“As an audience member, I like to watch musicians think. What decisions are they making? What challenges are they trying to overcome? What do I expect they’re about to do, and how will they surprise me?” he said. “When I’m on stage, I probably shouldn’t say this, but it’s almost like the audience isn’t there. I’m usually wrapped up in my own thoughts or enjoying the interactions between my bandmates. I love that people come to see me play, but my ‘zone’ onstage isn’t all that different from how I feel in rehearsal or in the practice room. The music takes me somewhere else.”

Micchelli filled in TribLive on what else we should know about his music:

Musician: Mark Micchelli (Piano, toy piano, percussion, electronics)

Founding story: I’ve been immersed in jazz music since I was a child, but in college, I ended up majoring in computer science. This record emerges from the combination of those two interests: what would it sound like if I used my programming chops to write software I could improvise with? I first started toying with this idea in 2018, and it took seven long years to get it just right.

For fans of: Jazz piano from Art Tatum to Cecil Taylor.

Influences: All five of the musicians whose music I feature on this album have deeply influenced my personal style: Charlie Parker, Cecil Taylor, Alice Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Mary Lou Williams. While this record leans more “out” than “in” (largely due to the electronics), I hope my respect for all aspects of the jazz tradition shines through. Besides the musicians featured on the record, I’ve also borrowed my rhythmic approach from Conlon Nancarrow, my music-theoretical approach from George Russell, my electronics-processing approach from Sam Pluta, my piano preparation approach from Denman Maroney and my piano-plus-extras approach from Shoko Nagai.

Releases: While this record is for piano+electronics solo, I’ve been in a piano+electronics duo since 2017 called Teeth and Metals. My duo partner, Alex Lough, helped to mix and master this album. Our online discography can be found on Bandcamp. I’ll be releasing my first record with my noisy fusion band, Mai Khôi & the Dissidents, on Ropeadope Records in March 2026. That band is already planning to record our follow-up album, heading into the studio in just a couple weeks.

Next shows: Mostly out-of-town. … In mid-August, I’ll be doing a workshop performance of a new opera cooking show with Mai Khôi at Madhura Studios in Brooklyn. Then, in the fall, I’ll be touring with the Cleveland-based jazz/Italian folk band Alla Boara throughout Michigan and Ohio. My next Pittsburgh gig is on Oct. 2, when I’ll be playing with the Pittsburgh Composers Quartet (me, Ben Opie, Patrick Breiner, and Adam Kantz) as part of the Pittsburgh Silent Film Festival.

How to find him: I keep an up-to-date calendar on my website, markmicchelli.net, and he also has a YouTube channel.

Three other Pittsburgh area bands to check out: Mai Khôi & the Dissidents — This is a bit of self-promotion since Khôi and I run this group together (and since Khôi and I got married back in January!) But Khôi’s story is incredible and more important than ever given the dramatic rise of fascism here and around the globe.

Precipice Community Band — Antonio Croes, Ava Lintz and George Heid III form the core trio, but they often expand to an eclectic nine-piece. I’m consistently impressed by Antonio’s desire to continually reinvent the band’s approach to the idiom, and they’re top-notch players to boot.

Pittsburgh Sound Preserve — Not a band, but an ever-growing network of experimental musicians based in Pittsburgh. They sponsor a fortnightly free improv jam session at Bantha Tea Bar (every other Monday), as well as monthly concert series at Bantha (second Sunday) and the Government Center (third Thursday).

Favorite pizza shop: Spak Brothers, which is right in my neighborhood. Go-tos are ricotta+meatball or pickle pizza.

— Mike Palm, 7.28.2025

The world is full of re-imaginings of classic musical works. Pianist Mark Micchelli does something more adventurous than that on Glitched-On Bop: twisting, deconstructing, and experimenting with five jazz classics that were (with one exception) radically experimental in the first place.

Assuming you’re old enough to get the pun, the album title is a bit deceptive. Wendy (then Walter) Carlos’s Switched-On Bach brought the baroque into the electronic age in 1968 with synthesizer versions of classic J.S. Bach keyboard music. But these were essentially shifts to a new instrument, not eccentric re-imaginings. Micchelli takes groundbreaking music by Charlie Parker, Cecil Taylor, and other jazz luminaries and blows it apart, turns it inside out, and re-contextualizes and reconfigures it using his own eccentric toolkit of keyboards, percussion, electronics, and imagination.

Bird in a Whirlwind

The overused word “iconic” actually applies to Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee.” Search online and you can find innumerable versions, from Joe Pass’s furiously fast monster to a ballad take by Joe Lovano. Micchelli, a skilled pianist himself, takes apart the tune in “Donnaleelannod,” a palindrome that reflects the piece’s halting backwards-and-forwards adoption of the “Donna Lee” melody.

Starting with a one-hand piano statement, Micchelli develops a weird concoction of conflicting time signatures and multiple timbral layers. I was interested to read that he plays all of these pieces with no overdubs, using an electronic setup to generate multiple sounds and unexpected effects from the piano. It’s good-natured and mostly playful, right down to the stride rhythm that sneaks in towards the end.

Percussion plays a major role in “Pemm Pemm Ican Pemm,” which takes on Cecil Taylor’s more lyrical but still experimental “Pemmican.” Micchelli, also a music theorist, knows his Taylor, having won an award for his article “Sound Structures and Naked Fire Gestures in Cecil Taylor’s Solo Piano Music.”

A drum solo at the start nods to the deep bass-note accents that open the original. Miccelli’s adventure builds to a wall of sound that suggests a jazz band swept up in a tornado. After a lyrical interlude, the piano starts to fight the drums for attention. (One has to keep in mind that Micchelli is doing all this “live.”) Another whirlwind develops in the final minutes, at first more “musical” but becoming a distressed sound-collage. The piece fades with a palette of futuristic tweaks, making one wonder how some of these sounds were created without a synthesizer per se.

Ahead to India, and Back to Boogie-Woogie

Alice Coltrane’s Indian-flavored “Journey in Sachidananda” furnishes the inspiration for “Jjjjjjj (Satchidananda).” At four and a half minutes, half the length of the other tracks, it uses hovering white noise and bells with eerie sustains to recall the drones and darkness of the original. A muffled toy piano suggests the key bass line amid dominant percussion, bells, and electronics.

What’s most distinct about Thelonious Monk’s “Evidence” is its curious rhythms. Micchelli exercises his contrariness by basing his “EevVidIenDceEevNidCenEce” on the melody instead. Aggressive percussion triplets mark the opening section, followed by a peaceful development of the tune, with its strange intervals, in a focused multi-timbral construction. This piece too builds to a cyclonic climax.

A quiet coda flows easily into the bell-percussion intro of the final piece, “Rollem Em Roll Em,” inspired by Mary Lou Williams’ boogie-woogie instrumental “Roll ‘Em” and Colin Nancarrow’s impossible-sounding player-piano works with their disconcerting rhythmic juxtapositions. Your great-grandmother’s boogie-woogie blues is here as a kernel. Micchelli displays his improvising skills during the eccentric development of the nine-minute piece, joined by electronic stabs and stutters that combine with the bluesy base in ever-more disturbing ways.

On my first listen to the piece, before I had read up on Micchelli’s process, flashes of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart came to mind. It’s fun for a while. To be honest, though, the rave-up starting in the sixth minute, with its clash of cross-rhythms, literally gave me a headache. And I have a high tolerance for “difficult” music (just ask my long-suffering wife). So, kudos to this pianist-composer for accomplishing something few artists have managed: making me physically uncomfortable. Switch that on, Wendy Carlos.

You can easily find online all the tracks that inspired this album. Giving them a listen will add significantly to your appreciation of Mark Micchelli’s striking new opus.

— Jon Sobel, 8.29.2025

The synthesizer became a crossover sensation in 1968 with Switched-On Bach, an album of Bach keyboard works submitted to electronic treatment by Wendy Carlos. It is given a witty, nostalgic nod in the title of this new digital release, Glitched-On Bop. On it, composer-pianist Mark Micchelli “reimagines selections from the jazz standard and pop repertoire [in an] electroacoustic deconstruction of five iconic tunes heard through the lens of his fertile creativity,” to quote New Focus’s summary.

Before giving any critical responses, I’ll note that Micchelli doesn’t overdub the various instruments he plays here—piano, toy piano, percussion, and electronics—but works from a performance station that gives him access to them in real time. Each of the five pieces is transformed by a panoply of techniques, some of them musical standbys like retrograde and inversion, others devised by Micchelli as he twists the melody, applies electronic treatments, provides new harmonizations, and so on. Dan Lippel’s thorough program notes online provide an expert road map of what Micchelli achieves. I’m far from being a jazz insider, so I listened to recordings of the original tunes first.

To begin, Donnaleelannod takes off from a Charlie Parker standard, “Donna Lee,” a favorite of virtuoso improvisors. The bebop original from 1947 is kinetic, racing, and complex, featuring a duet for Parker on saxophone and Miles Davis’s trumpet. The stream of sixteenth notes is based on the chord progression of an earlier jazz tune, “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Micchelli’s treatment is a start-stop affair, the short bursts of music given first to the piano, then the electronics.

I should underline that it isn’t necessary to know the original jazz and pop standards. Micchelli’s riffs/fantasias stand on their own. In this case, recognition of the original isn’t easy, since the piano statement is in retrograde, as revealed when it is played back in reverse by the electronics. As the notes aptly point out, Micchelli is playing around with the original’s obsession with constant permutation. The introduction of slide piano towards the end adds a smile and a touch of simplicity in an otherwise dizzying display of passagework.

As the headnote readily communicates, Micchelli likes brain teaser titles. The second piece, Pemm Pemm Ican Pemmmm, is based on pianist Cecil Taylor’s “Pemmican” from his 1982 album, Garden. In the original, for solo piano, the left hand provides rumbling gestures underlying a spare melody picked out one note at a time without harmony. The writing becomes more complex as it unfolds; the mood is considered more lyrical and romantic than was typical of Taylor. The source of the title, pemmican is a dried Native American food like jerky that combines powdered meat and tallow; Taylor’s indirect reference is to the modal and pentatonic scales his piece employs, reminiscent of Native chants. Micchelli’s version, after a wild electronic drum into, is just as spare as Taylor’s, adding more complexity and texture as its proceeds. Percussion is prominent in the form of drums and bells. Unlike the entertaining mood of Donnaleelannod, Micchelli picks up on the sober contours of Taylor’s original while later combining density and virtuosity. That this complicated layering is occurring in real time is very impressive. The piece’s climax is cataclysmic.

Micchelli switches to toy piano for Jjjjjjj (Satchidananda), taking off from the title track of Alice Coltraine’s fourth album, Journey in Satchidananda (her spelling of Sat Chit Anada, the Sanskrit for “eternal bliss consciousness”). Although known as a pianist, Coltrane plays harp on this track, which has a sustained background of a droning sitar. Prominent in the foreground is a solo soprano saxophone. Micchelli captures the Eastern spiritual mood of the original indirectly with a sustained electronic buzz for the sitar drone, bells that evoke temple bells, and loops from the toy piano that have something of the feeling of repeated chants. The piece brings to mind his ingenuity in fashioning a completely novel sound environment for each piece.

Thelonious Monk, the thorniest and most intellectual of jazz greats, provides the source, the off-kilter “Evidence” from 1948, that is the basis for EevVidIenDceEevNidCenEce. Lippel’s notes are especially helpful here: “Micchelli chooses to focus on Monk’s melody as opposed to the notoriously thorny rhythm, zeroing in instead on the intervallic construction that is such a great example of Monk’s quirky genius.” Monk used the working title of “Justice,” since he was taking off from the chord progressions in an earlier jazz standard, “Just You, Just Me” (hence “Just Us”). A rapid pulsing electronic drumbeat sets the stage for Micchelli’s methodical exploration of pitches on piano, eschewing Monk’s improvisatory style. Quirky sounds emerge from prepared piano in the middle section before “the towering pitches of Monk’s melody return in the bass register.” The piece feels like a riveting amalgam of the disembodied, the eerie, and the ominous.

The disc ends with Rollem Em Roll Em, which departs from jazz into boogie-woogie for its source, Mary Lou Williams’s “Roll ‘Em.” This isn’t a turn to simplicity, however, as Lippel explains. A second source is “Conlon Nancarrow’s maximalist player piano works. Micchelli takes the opportunity to extrapolate the basic blues harmony in Williams’ original (I-IV-V) into ratios that play themselves out rhythmically in ways that are reminiscent of Nancarrow's dizzying complexity (2:1, 3:2, and 4:3).” Williams’s catchy original for piano, double bass, and drums, is popsier than anything else Micchelli refers to. He sets up a dialogue between his improvised acoustic piano playing and electronic loops, at first with a reproduction of boogie-woogie rhythms but progressively gaining in complexity. The piece is the most rhythmically engaging on the program and returns to the entertaining mood the album began with. The culmination is like a pileup on the boogie-woogie highway but retaining the spirit of fun.

Jazz aficionados might be the automatic audience for this release, along with New Music devotees, but Glitched-On Bop is so imaginative and adroit that it deserves wider appreciation. Micchelli is an exciting pianist, and he has provided himself with some spectacular opportunities here. His virtuosity is probably the best entry point for general listeners with adventurous ears. For me, it was fascinating to switch back and forth between some jazz greats and Micchelli’s reimagining of their work.

— Huntley Dent, 12.01.2025