Jeff Goldblum’s eccentric rhythm finds its groove at the piano

Meeting Jeff Goldblum is like hearing an old song kick in. The rhythm, the tone, the gliding cadences of real-time cogitation. He arrives on the Zoom screen, repeating my name aloud a few times, trying it out like a line he needs to crack, jamming it like jazz.

“Well, I’m here in Los Angeles, in our so-called ‘guest house’, which has just been renovated, in a house that I’ve been living for ah, ah, in which I’ve been living for 40 years,” he begins, the verbal traffic of impulse and hesitation familiar from dozens of movies from The Fly to Jurassic Park and Wicked.

“It’s up in the Hills, in the Hollywood Hills, and then, of course, Emilie [Livingston, his Canadian gymnast wife] joined me 14, 15 years ago, and the boys, eight and 10 years ago. And now its purpose has found its real, uh, destiny and look, look right there. I could reach it, can you see me?”

Yes, I can see him as he leans in his crisp charcoal jacket towards a vintage Fender Rhodes piano. “Right now, the homework assignment is what I’m going to be playing live when I come see you in Melbourne and all those other places –” which he names in turn, skipping and sliding through Australia’s capitals like he’s decoding a road map.

It’s his jazz ensemble, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, we’re here to talk about. That and the whole musical parallel that’s unfolded since he began his teenaged cocktail-bar-tinkling in hometown Pittsburgh in the 1960s, long before the heights of popular cinema he now commands.

“My innards, my gizzard, you know, connected me with it,” he says of the Great American Songbook he’s been exploring as bandleader this last decade or so. Come June, Night Blooms will make five albums of bespoke jazz standards lovingly arranged and sprinkled with vocal accomplices from Ariana Grande to Dido.

“I’ve been so lucky to work with Miley Cyrus and Fiona Apple and Kelly Clarkson and Gregory Porter, and yes, I think I can tell you that Melody Gardot ...” he wants to tell me that she sings one of his all-time favourites, Erroll Garner’s Misty, on the new album, but he’s suddenly more excited about something else.

“I just opened up this,” he says, teasing open a greeting card. “It came with a gift, and you know what it is? It’s the original sheet music to Misty that Erroll Garner did, and Melody has put it in a beautiful frame, the cover and all three sheets, yellowed now with age, but it’s so beautiful. I’m going to hang it up right here in this room.”

At 72, Goldblum seems less an actor or musician these days than a meme in the original sense of the word: a kind of agreed cultural constant. His amiable, slightly nutty jazz-piano persona is as recognisable as the one that turns up in Marvel films, on chat shows, and in his own exploratory TV series, The World of Jeff Goldblum.

Also within arm’s reach today is David Blistein’s script for Henry David Thoreau, a new Ken Burns series in which Goldblum voices the late American philosopher. His enthusiasm for the transcendentalist writer hints at something deeper about the actor’s approach to craft and life. “Like my acting teacher Sanford Meisner said, you’re not trying to copy anybody … you’re trying to find your unique voice, given your personal and unique experience,” he says. “And that’s what, of course, you’re trying to do with jazz.”

Just as in his day job, “you discover your personality, in large part, in a way that is spontaneous and hopefully alive in the moment because you are interested in and paying attention to the conversation, musically in this case, that is aimed at you from your fellows.” There’s always room for personality in jazz. Goldblum often cites among his favourites bebop legend Thelonious Monk, who was renowned for leaving his stool to spin in space, and for attacking the keys flat-fingered or with unusual angularity.

About 50 years since his first big-screen breaks in Death Wish, Nashville and Annie Hall, stories about Goldblum’s professional eccentricities – the pauses, the detours, the agitated preparation and restless circling of ideas – have become part of his legend. Cyndi Lauper’s memoir describes her first acting role opposite her “constantly preparing” co-star in the 1988 comedy, Vibes. “Before every take, Jeff would get himself worked up, almost like a little breakdown … pacing, making noises, doing these emotional exercises … it drove me crazy.” Other colleagues — director David Cronenberg, former wife and ’80s co-star Geena Davis, his frequent Wes Anderson cast colleague Willem Dafoe — tend to describe his behaviours not as indulgence, but as process: a way of worrying at a moment until something alive stirs inside it.

Back at the piano, “when I think of some of the things I do improvisationally, maybe it does here and there, if I’m lucky, have some of my authentic feel for delivering a line with a pause that might be unexpected or something particularly joyful,” he says. “You know, when you listen to Erroll Garner, I mean, you can’t touch it, you can’t measure it, but there’s palpable joy – well, of course, he utters things vocally – but there’s palpable joy coming through his fingers and in how he touches that piano. And, hopefully when I’m in it, there’s some of all of that, yes, yes, yes.”

To say nothing of his “fumfering”. “That’s funny.” The word, as he’s framed it before, “I inherited linguistically from my parents, but I’m not sure what the derivation of it is … fumfering is kind of, uh, stutter, mmm, adjacent. It’s a stutter and a kind of, you know, mmm, like I’m doing now: fumfering, marking time, instead of getting to the point with succinct articulation.”

It might not lend itself to the more technical demands of Bartok or Rachmaninov, but “in the jazz world, you can turn a mistake into a happy accident and fumfering, while you’re trying to find how you want to say what you feel like saying, can be beautiful and acceptable, and you can embrace it.

“Like in acting, I’m getting more familiar and comfortable with this as I continue to try to get better and experiment. This place of confusion or being lost or not knowing or having not a clear strategy is a very beautiful place to be. It sort of is a nice fertile ground for discovery, you know?”

As accomplished musicians sometimes do, Goldblum may be downplaying his proficiency on an instrument he’s been pursuing with some diligence since his piano teacher in Pittsburgh propped Alley Cat on his music stand when he was 10. His Broadway orchestra pit experience began with the long-running musical adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona in the early ’70s. He recalls the thrill of looking sideways at trumpeter Thad Jones and drummer Bernard Purdie, and always keeping a piano at his apartment to stay on his game.

As he pursued acting from New York to Hollywood, he says, “I snuck it in, over the years, a movie and a play or two. The Fly character plays piano and the Earth Girls Are Easy character plays. And then about 30 years ago, I did Buckaroo Banzai and [co-star] Peter Weller, who plays horn, and I would get together and go through the fake books” – he means the hand-drawn charts jamming musicians use.

The turning point came when Weller “talked to his friend – get this – Miles Davis, who said, ‘Oh, I know you and Jeff.’ He said, ‘You should get a gig and get together with real musicians, and you’ll get better, and you’ll have fun.’”

It was a couple of decades before Goldblum named his band after Mrs Snitzer, an old family friend, and settled into a residency at Rockwell Table & Stage in LA. But if this were a movie, you could imagine the spinning headline at this crucial juncture: ‘Miles Davis Discovers Jeff Goldblum’.

“Ah, I don’t know that that’s the headline,” he says slowly, as if searching his internal filing system for the correct one. “It may be misleading but, ah, you know, how ’bout that?”

Well, it wouldn’t be a movie that took itself altogether seriously. Whatever the context, that’s a large part of what makes Jeff Goldblum Jeff Goldblum. “As an actor, he has an advantage,” Melbourne jazz piano virtuoso Steve Sedergreen tells me, “because he knows how to make people feel good.”

“Well, let me see, let me see,” Goldblum responds. “I mean, there are different portals into that answer. One is that you know, if you’re on the beam, you’re not trying to impress anybody. You’re just trying to express yourself. But yes, finally, your purpose and your mission may be well served to contribute something to the listener.

“But it may not always be to entertain or distract or otherwise make happy. As we know, music can play notes that you haven’t even discovered in yourself, of exquisite anguish and beautiful outrage and unbounded ecstasy. At its best, music can be potentially any of those things. I can think of a lot of songs that are deliciously sad.

“Music is a waker-upper. Somebody said that the purpose of life is not necessarily to be happy, but it’s to be awake, which includes the full range of experience, and not flinching or resisting or avoiding any part of the great mess.”

There’s just time for one more question before the great mess moves on, so I summon one from the moment. I’m not sure where Jeff Goldblum fits on the Academy’s list of all-time greats, but he does seem to be one of the most beloved performers of our age. Is that a reward in itself?

“Well, that’s very ... as you say it, you’ve choked me up, and that’s very, very touching,” he replies, showing signs of real mistiness. “I don’t know if we have any data on that. Who knows how objectively true that is, but I do feel appreciated by many people here and there, and it means a whole, you know, a lot to me.

“Yes, that is its own reward, better than anything that I can think of. I mean, isn’t the purpose of this to have a connection? To make a connection to ourselves and to others? Everything else will, like Robert Altman used to say, ‘be like so much sand in a sandcastle’. Why we’re really doing any of this is to have a reason, an excuse, to be together and enjoy each other. And that’s where the treasure is, of course.”

Of course. With much gratitude in both directions, we fumfer through disjointed goodbyes and something like a parting riff. “I’ll look forward to seeing you tap me on the shoulder as soon as we get there.”

Jeff Goldblum & The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra’s Night Blooms tour plays the Palais Theatre in Melbourne on April 24, Riverside Theatre in Perth on April 28, Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre on April 30, the Adelaide Festival Theatre on May 2, and Sydney Opera House on May 4 and 5.

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