Today we’d like to introduce you to Taylor Hatch.
Hi Taylor, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have been a professional musician for what feels like my entire life. Even though I am not directly from a musical family, I grew up with an eclectic family, being them middle of six kids in the Central Coast of California. As a young boy, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. I was usually looked at as the one kid in my class to have challenges with learning and socializing. I would never stop talking about trains and Thomas the Tank Engine, which actually is a part of what helped me in my artistic direction. I think if anything, music became my muse in the midst of the challenges I had trying to understand myself. It’s thanks to my autism that my obsession with music really is what led me to making it my career.
I took piano lessons as a young kid. It wasn’t easy for me to sit still and be focused with piano, but my teacher, Margie Noble-England, was very patient and understanding with me, so lessons were purely enjoyable. As a young kid, I was obsessed with the music of Vince Guaraldi (Charles Schultz’s Peanuts), Mike O’Donnell (Thomas the Tank Engine 1984-2006), Lesley Barber (Little Bear) and Pat Metheny’s Last Train Home. In addition to piano, I was given a guitar when I was ten years old by my Uncle Jay, who was also my very first guitar teacher and is a pulmonologist in the Davis area. Uncle Jay is truly the reason why I became a guitarist in the first place, and he has influenced me so much from showing me my first chords to listing to his favorite records he grew up with (you’ll see a photo of both of us jamming in this article). When he was in college at UCSB, he was the lead guitarist in his band called “Soil’, which opened up for the Dave Matthews Band, and additionally, he and singer-songwriter Jack Johnson were bandmates and are still good friends to this day.
I was homeschooled for a couple years during middle school so it gave me time to work up guitar and take lessons from my good friend Matt Justmann, who used to live down the street from where I lived and has now works as a film composer contributing to hits like “Big Hero 6” and “Detective Pikachu”. I played in all ensembles in high school that I could get my hands on from playing percussion in marching band, wind ensemble and concert bands, singing in my high school choir, and playing guitar in pit orchestras and jazz bands. Nothing mattered more to me than playing music, but I will admit that academia in my younger years felt like a competition to try and get the best grades in all subjects.
I can recall so many of my fondest moments absorbing music from my early mentors such as George Stone (pictured), who was super pivotal in my compositional and improvisational journey. And then, incredible guitarists like Julian Lage (pictured) and Jeff Miley. They both guided me with lessons on exploring ranges of the guitar in ways that were so eye opening. Both Julian and Jeff are just wonderful people as they are guitarists.
I pursued my undergrad in jazz performance at the University of North Texas, where I received my Bachelors of Music Performance in Jazz Studies. UNT was a huge attribute to my musical development, but admittingly very intense. At the time, I was performing a lot in the DFW area and getting time with artists like Jacob Collier, Alison Miller, Kurt Elling, Mike Moreno, Philip Dizack, and many others. I working on expanding my artistry a lot, writing a lot of compositions, and spent a lot of time in between studying jazz guitar and composition/arranging. What I discovered during my time at UNT was that I became so in love with experimental music and the sounds of minimalist composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, and those like Jarosław Kapuściński (Stanford University faculty). It was so eye opening. It was thanks to my teachers like Dr. Joseph Klein, Dr. Andrew May, and Dr. Drew Schnurr that I started to dabble with using “intermedia” (visuals, animations, field recordings, and video projection) in my music. I have synesthesia (seeing music as color), and so I began using these elements of my life in my music seriously. When I was taking this direction, I sadly was ridiculed for going off bounds in what I was expected to do for my major, but it ended up being one of the best decisions in my musical pathway. For my senior recital at North Texas, I wrote a piece inspired by the famous painter Wassily Kandinsky entitled “Everything Starts From A Dot,” which is quoted by the painter. I combined jazz quartet, strings, vocals and intermedia animations that was Kandinsky-like to compliment the music and respond to my synesthesia. Once I got out of school, the biggest inspiration for me was knowing that I could curate my own musical trajectories and connect with artists who shared my visions.
Today, my work stems in all sorts of avenues from playing guitar in numerous settings, transcribing lead sheets for producers around the world, and working on my own musical works that stem in jazz and chamber interdisciplinary settings. For the last few years, I have been building a special project that explores experiences of my autism and synesthesia with my own compositional practice. I call it my “Internal Projector.” In addition, I teach at world-renowned music education programs like the Stanford Jazz Workshop, connecting with students from all walks of life alongside with many of my favorite artists like Taylor Eigsti, George Cables, Sasha Berliner, Camila Meza, and Roy McCurdy. I also have been affiliated with the Infinite Music Foundation in Morro Bay, California, which focuses on giving aspiring music students the opportunity to play music in various settings while getting one-on-one mentorship from Central Coast professionals and educators.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Personally for me, I have been learning from the “bumpy roads” of my journey. The way I see it to quote Mark Manson (my favorite author) is asking myself the question “What are you willing to struggle for?” Music is my moral compass, and while I’m overly thankful for all of the musical experiences I have had and continue to have, the struggles, failures, and rejections have taught me how much I love what I do, as counterintuitive as it sounds. I used to think that because I have a learning disability that I had to prove to myself and other people that I was socially competent to do what I am doing now, and what that ended up doing was placing me in intense burnout and thought patterns that altered the way I was going about how I felt like society wanted me to be.
All artists learn from the hardest times and what they look like individually for each person. You have to hit many bumps until you give yourself the time to pave the road and drive froward with clear visions and perspectives. As some say, curiosity is the cure!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Nowadays, I feel like my work is intersecting on many different positions in music and abstract art. I play and record as a guitarist, and then I’m also an experimental intermedia composer. My creative process is always shifting with many obsessions and formations, so I have been dabbling in a lot of interdisciplinary ways of composing such as taking field recordings in my favorite locations, to using animation programs making graphic notations. Within the last few years, I have been collaborating with a good friend in Mountain View, California exploring the usage of LED light panels to display my Synesthesia that I cannot wait to bring to a live performance setting. I am excited to have other collaborators contributing to this vision, especially as I have been gaining inspiration from artists who I admire dearly such as Ukrainian painter Natasha Kramskaya, San Francisco-based artist Nina Maystrovich, Jhoely Garay from Mexico, and even abstract painters like Kandinsky. I also have to credit Jarosław Kapuściński for influencing me to explore intermedia in my music. I’m so happy that I live a life working with my heroes and people who really give me so much influence in what I do. It really pays off to have a wild imagination!
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
I get asked this a fair bit, and I think with anyone’s advice you take, it’s always your job as an artist to know what is important to you. Ask the tough questions, and I mean LOTS of them! I would always ask people who have had more experience than me the deep questions in reference to their creative pathway, and I personally think the more you expand your resources, the more the well will never run dry when you have people in your life supporting you and helping you learn. Remember, there’s always community surrounding your fields of interest. Simply put, sometimes starting a conversation will get you to places you never imagined. I was fortunate to have a brief but beautiful distant connection with Britt Allcroft, a very special woman who created Thomas the Tank Engine for television in the 80’s. Something I can still hear her say is that “If you want to have an adventure, an adventure is life and adventure isn’t going to come to you. You’ve got to go out and find it.”
I have no regrets or feel like I wish I “knew something” when I was taking my musical direction seriously. I don’t think now I wouldn’t change anything (granted that I’m not even thirty yet). You keep on driving your own road of desires, and you have to also filter out what bull**** you don’t need so you always can drive yourself out. I have found when I am anxious or just feeling like I am in a weird state that talking to someone always seems to get the nervousness out, which is why when you make new connections with people, you can always find wisdom in their own paths that can influence yours. Never take the people in your life for granted!
One of my best friends said it like this, “You have to turn over every stone, find every weak link, make it a strength, and creatively delve into aspects you may think are insignificant at first glance because they could be not just significant but VITAL… and you won’t know until you know.”
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taylorhatchmusic/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/taylor.hatch.758/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorhatchmusic/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TaylorHatchMusic
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/taylorhatchjazz
