Their stellar intellectual gifts gain them access to the best colleges at an age where most of us are still learning basic arithmetic. They could be the next Einstein or Tesla who discovers the tremendous breakthroughs that forever change life as we know it. We see in them a bright future they are the greatest hope for finding solutions to the scourges of civilization. They often join the ranks of Mensa with their freakish IQs and perfect SAT scores. Child prodigies who make the news and appear on talk shows as an awe-inspiring source of wonder and fascination. You've likely heard of them - little geniuses who started reading and writing at an impossibly early age.
College courses can be tough enough as an adult, but imagine taking them as a 10-year-old! There are some precocious students however, who make the transition well before they reach puberty. If Alexander can succeed in getting more people to listen to jazz music, in making it “hip”, then he might become one of those stories himself.The college experience is for many a rite of passage into adulthood. “I like those stories, it reminds me of Thelonious Monk who people thought of as an underground musician but he became influential. It’s this underdog who people didn’t care, but he kept going. Just as he explained his enthusiasm for Transformers, he uses music to explain his fondness for Rocky. He’s currently on a Rocky kick – he plays the video game on his iPad, and “loves” the film.įor Alexander though, everything comes back to his love of jazz. Aside from Transformers, he likes swimming, tennis and watching the news, particularly CNN, and especially world news. He says he loves touring, though, and seems to have plenty of hobbies. With any child star there is a risk of them being overexposed, of having too much too young, of some sort of dramatic fall from grace, and with constantly being on the road I did wonder about how much time Alexander spends with other children. “Playing music and being on the road is like a school for me,” he says. He’s home-schooled and is still working on improving his English, and in the longer term, he doesn’t know if he wants to go to university. He’s got six gigs in November, including in London and Paris, and his website lists shows booked all the way up to June 2017. In the immediate future, Alexander is focused on touring. Anyone can listen to it, and I hope people will play more and listen more to this music.” Because you know this music can be hip, I believe. “I’m really just thankful that people want to listen to jazz. “Some people say: ‘I really love your music, I haven’t really listened to jazz yet, now I’m starting.’ Playing music and being on the road is like a school for me Joey Alexander He has no interest in fame – when I tell him he has 100,000 fans on Facebook it seems like the first time he’s heard that – but seems most excited about growing interest in jazz as a genre. At times he seems to be in awe of his own ability. He and his family are Christian, and Alexander repeatedly refers to his talent as a “gift”. “That’s how I really started my career as a musician, I think. At nine he won the inaugural “Master-Jam” jazz festival, and when he was 10 one of his YouTube videos was spotted by Wynton Marsalis, the nine-time Grammy winner and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who invited him to play in New York. The family realised Alexander’s talent, and by the time he was eight they had uprooted to Jakarta so he could accelerate his learning closer to Indonesia’s jazz scene. His dad, Denny, was an amateur musician, and soon started taking his young son to jam sessions in Bali. Soul Dreamer, the last track on Countdown, was the first song he wrote, when he was 10 years old.Īlexander had taught himself to play the piano – using a mini electric keyboard – four years earlier. “And my dad will record it so I can remember it.”Īfter his dad records his explorations Alexander listens back and refines his work, spending about a month on each song.
“I just explore chords and melodies and then suddenly these ideas come out to me,” Alexander says. He declines coffee or tea, although his agent promises him a post-interview tiramisu, and starts to tell me about his songwriting process. He looks like he could be in a very young boyband. He’s wearing a navy blue peacoat, skinny jeans and black sneakers, and has a Beatles-style haircut looming above thick framed glasses. The three of them moved here from their home country of Indonesia two years ago, and have settled in SoHo, a trendy Manhattan neighbourhood.Īlexander looks the part. We’ve arranged to meet in a steak restaurant in New York City, where Alexander has been living with his parents for the past two years.
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