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For Aaron Goldberg ’96, improvisation is not just musical technique, but an organizing principle of his life. An award-winning jazz pianist and Harvard College’s first graduate of the interdisciplinary program in Mind, Brain, and Behavior, Goldberg is no stranger to paving new pathways between the academic and artistic, analytic and emotional.

When The Crimson spoke to Goldberg, he had just finished teaching students at a school in Greece and was in Stuttgart, Germany to prepare for a concert with his jazz trio. Balancing teaching and performance, Goldberg recently spent a week in Cambridge, working with students in the Harvard Jazz Orchestra and Harvard Jazz Combo Initiative.

“It was a pleasure musically,” he said. “But it was even more of a pleasure to see how much jazz has grown at Harvard since I was around 30 years ago.”

Goldberg’s path to Harvard was itself a search for balance between structure and creative improvisation. Classically trained as a pianist, he discovered jazz in high school at Milton Academy through “a fantastic teacher,” Bob Sinicrope — math teacher by day and jazz bassist by night.

Soon, Goldberg began training rigorously under saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi and performing in gigs, and by the end of high school, he realized he wanted to attend music school. He wanted the chance, for the first time in his life, “to just focus on one thing.”

New York — the “heartbeat” of jazz — beckoned. At 17, he spent a year in the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, sharpening his skills and testing jazz as a vocation. But soon, Goldberg was ready for a chance to resume the academic endeavors he had left behind.

“None of the masters of this music actually went to jazz school. There were no jazz schools when Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock were coming up. What was necessary was to be in a community of musicians,” Goldberg said.

His compromise was Harvard. Determined to pursue a liberal arts education, Goldberg concentrated in Philosophy, but soon transitioned to the novel Mind, Brain, and Behavior track. At the same time, he continued to engage with jazz in the urban music ecosystem of Boston. 30 years ago, as he explained, Harvard’s jazz scene was rudimentary and mostly extracurricular. As such, Goldberg’s community formed instead at the New England Conservatory and Berklee College of Music, with him playing in gigs at Boston’s historic jazz clubs.

“I used to play in Wally’s Cafe every weekend while I was in college — Fridays, Saturdays. We play for five hours and make 15 dollars. It wasn’t remunerative, but it was an incredible experience. Play with great musicians and practice on the bandstand together, for that 10,000 hours of experience, that’s necessary,” he said.

Today, Goldberg says that he experiences a different jazz universe at Harvard. With full-time jazz faculty like Vijay Iyer and Yosvany Terry and a dual-degree pipeline from Berklee, Harvard now attracts academically inclined students whose simultaneous musical training rivals the education at top conservatories.

Ask Goldberg about jazz and it will be clear how he finds jazz beautiful, poetic, and nourishing to the soul. Jazz, as he frames it, is a conversational ethic — an art form that cherishes listening, responsiveness, and mutual care.

“You’re making music, beautiful music together in an act of love with your fellow musicians — all of whom are of different backgrounds, different races, genders,” Goldberg said. “It models the democratic process in a way that is rarely encountered in politics. Like you’re on stage, everybody’s supporting each other. Everybody has a chance to lead, everybody’s following — when they’re not leading. And there are moral values that guide the way a jazz band plays together that are kind of utopian.”

It’s also “part of a long, beautiful, essentially Black American tradition — maybe America’s greatest art form.” Contributing to that art form, he says, is “an honor.”

Jazz is rooted in the blues, a genre of music born from oppression, protest, and a stubborn insistence on joy.

“The reason it moves people is not just the virtuosity of the improvisation, but the soulfulness, ” Goldberg said. “If you were Charlie Parker, or Thelonious Monk, or Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, like you were one of the geniuses of music — of all human history — and at the same time, you’re being treated like someone below. That doesn’t even need to be stated. It’s being played through your horn.”

In this tradition, Goldberg is also a politically engaged citizen, and he brings this ethos to music.

“High artistry is a form of protest,” he said. “I don’t necessarily feel like the music needs to be overtly politicized, personally. I think the music itself embodies the values that I would like to see reflected in our society and in the world.”

Still, there have been moments when he has stepped directly into political life. In 2004, alarmed at the prospect of George W. Bush’s presidential re-election and the Iraq War, Goldberg began organizing fundraising concerts, trying to shake fellow musicians out of what he saw as apathy about electoral politics. Those efforts laid the groundwork for a wave of artistic engagement when Barack Obama ran in 2008. After the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake, Aaron also penned a letter to The Crimson encouraging the community to contribute to organizations promoting youth education on the island.

Though his politics emerge through his music, Goldberg finds that the reflective and recursive ponderings of academia are more subtly woven into his musical career.

“I intentionally kept my more academic interests separate from my music as best I can. When I go on the bandstand, I want to be a jazz musician, not an intellectual playing jazz,” Goldberg said.

Inspired by his early teachers, Goldberg would later employ the “aural and oral tradition” of jazz pedagogy in guiding the next generation of jazz musicians.

“There’s no real tradition of very clear jazz pedagogy. When you teach this music well, people progress quickly, and they love it more, and when it’s wrong, get led down blind alleys,” he said.

Recently, he has been constructing a philosophy course tailored for musicians for the upcoming semester at the New School, and he doesn’t deny the possibility of returning to Harvard as an instructor.

For now, Goldberg isn’t ready to give up the life of a traveling musician, though he’s eager to keep experimenting with teaching in jazz, philosophy, and the spaces where the two overlap. True to form, he will continue improvising wherever he goes, keeping us listening for where the melody carries him next.