In another life, Randall Goosby would have been a pianist.
When offered the opportunity to learn an instrument as a child, he chose to play the violin, but said he was too small for that. So he started with the piano instead. He struggled, and his mother, who had primarily pushed him and his siblings into class, could see his self-esteem begin to wane.
Then they decided to try the violin again and something clicked.
“I came home from school and while my brother and sister were about to play I ripped open the violin case,” Goosby, now 24, recalled in a recent interview. “I played the violin the whole time.”
He leafed through the first books of the Suzuki Method at a pace that would make the average violin student feel incapable. All the signs pointed to something more promising than a simple love for a new instrument.
At 13, Goosby became the youngest winner of the junior division of the Sphinx competition, then was invited to a Young People’s Concert with the New York Philharmonic. It shouldn’t be long before he was a protégé of the legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman. And now, not even with his training at the Juilliard School, Goosby is making his major label debut with the album “Roots” released on Decca on Friday.
The album, Perlman said in an interview, shows that Goosby “knows who he is and he wants to make sure everyone feels that way”.
It’s not the usual debut. Instead, where many young musicians could leave their mark with a war horse concert by Mendelssohn, Bruch or Beethoven, Goosby put together a comprehensive concert program with works by black composers – including a world premiere by bassist Xavier Dubois Foley and first recordings of the discoveries by Florence Price – and by Dvorak and Gershwin, two white composers whose music on the album reveals a commitment to their black counterparts.
“A debut recording has to express the handwriting of the artist, and that is exactly it, of someone who is a perfect advocate as an interpreter, but also a perfect advocate for what this music means,” said Dominic Fyfe. the director of Decca. “It’s always exciting to see young artists who are at the very beginning of the catwalk.”
GOOSBY’S MOTHER, Jiji Goosby, a Korean who grew up in Japan with a passionate love for music and dance, was the linchpin of Randall’s first violin training. When he outgrown his first teacher, she bribed him to take a lesson from Routa Kroumovitch-Gomez and promised that she would invite him over to sushi later if he tried.
He accepted his mother’s offer and stayed with Kroumovitch-Gomez as a student for three years. It was from here that he had his first experience of serious violin lessons, he said. More teachers would follow, including Philippe Quint, whom Goosby and his mother would fly to New York once a month for six hours of intensive study.
In addition to being a chaperone, Jiji also sat in class and took notes. She also took a job as a waitress in a Japanese restaurant to cover the cost of her trips to New York; Goosby’s father, Ralph, was often out and about for his marketing job. There were nights when the children were home without parents eating a microwave meal or pizza.
“I really understood back then how much sacrifice it was for my whole family,” said Goosby. “My family is my core, and it was a time when we could have seen each other a little more.”
A turning point came when Goosby joined the Perlman Music Program after his Sphinx triumph and met his mentor.
“I adored Mr. Perlman, and of course I had my preconceived notion of what he would be like,” said Goosby. “But for me he was one of the most down-to-earth, relatable, comforting beings.”
In an interview, Perlman recalled being impressed with Goosby’s sound. “The most important thing for me with any musician is the sound,” he said. “And he’s beautiful. It hits the listener immediately. “
Perlman shares the teaching duties with Catherine Cho, who has also become a close mentor of Goosby for the past decade; their lessons relating to life in general can take on the feel of therapy sessions. When she first heard him play, she said, “the level of his talent was clear.”
“You can tell so much from the way someone sets up their violin,” added Cho. “The way he approaches the instrument is very personal. When he then hangs up his and plays a note, you can hear this spark that he has something to say and is passionate about saying it. That’s talent. “
So Cho and Perlman took Goosby as a student, with the goal, Cho said, of “cultivating his gift and not screwing it up”.
Not screwing it up successfully is more complicated than regular classes. Beyond technology, Goosby looked for work-life balance. He avoided the label “child prodigy”, which was added to him after the Sphinx competition, and just called it “the P-word”. And from his father he learned the importance of making time for friends and hobbies like basketball.
His sound, he thinks, has yet to be worked on – an elusive, almost magical ingredient in music that really sets students apart when they come to a place like Juilliard where he is aiming for an artist diploma. It was the focus of a recent lesson with Cho, their first face-to-face encounter after months of Zoom sessions.
The two spoke mostly in poetic language. After playing a striking passage from Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s showpiece trio “Blue / s Forms,” she asked if he felt fire or cool, and he replied, “There are so many tones, it looks fiery, but on that one But inside I think I feel cool. ”Then she asked where the energy was coming from, and after a thoughtful pause he said,“ Lower abdomen, core area ”. The questioning was immediately evident in Goosby’s play, which audibly had more clarity and focus.
IN ONE WAY, Goosby could not have made a major concert debut; “Roots” came about last year when meeting an orchestra was next to impossible. But even without the pandemic restrictions, he said he was more interested in telling a story – about the way the artists in his program influenced each other “in a trickle-down effect over time”.
“For me, the easiest way to tell the story would be through something that means something to me personally,” he said. “I could have recorded all three Brahms sonatas. This story has been told countless times and there are people who want to hear this story in a certain way. “
The program is more constellational than chronological, starting in the present with Foley’s earwig “Shelter Island” and continuing with “Blue / s Forms”. Then come the arrangements of the great violinist Jascha Heifetz of songs from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” – together with Dvorak, who was suggested by the label to offer the listener something familiar – and William Grant Still’s Suite for violin and piano; World premieres of three warmly melodic and eclectic pieces by Price; an adaptation of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Deep River”; and Dvorak’s American-inspired Sonatina in G for violin and piano. (Zhu Wang is a pianist throughout.)
Some of the works, being adopted from songs, bring out the seductive lyricism of Goosby’s playing, which has an air of Golden Age tenderness and expressive portamento. In the coming season, audiences around the world will hear this voice in concerts by Brahms, Bruch, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges – another long-overlooked black composer.
Goosby has signed a multi-album deal with Decca and his next recording is likely to be a concert program. “We talked about ideas from Mozart and Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Coleridge-Taylor and the late Romanticism,” he said.
“One thing I know,” he added, “is that it has to have a story.”
