It wasn't the road to Damascus, she isn't Saint Paul, she wasn't riding a horse and though the bolt of lightning was purely metaphorical, it was nonetheless real. For Lynne Arriale, with a master's degree in performance under her belt and a career as a classical pianist beckoning, was simply walking along a street in New York one day when she thought she would try jazz.
"I just had a passing thought," she says. "You should study jazz. As suddenly as that. And I thought: `OK, that's interesting'. And I just took some lessons. Dave Hazeltine (a considerable jazz pianist in his own right) at the conservatory, he started me playing, like transcribing Charlie Parker and Bud Powell solos and writing them out and playing along."
Anything further removed from a classical background than the blues-drenched Parker saxophone, or the unforgiving, relentless intensity of the mentally fragile Powell's piano, would be hard to imagine.
But Arriale's route into jazz was hardly typical, in the sense that it had scarcely touched her life until then. There were no jazz idols along her musical path and no musical family background in Milwaukee, where she comes from. "I actually started playing when I was three or four on this little toy piano," she explains. "I insisted on having music played, like from musicals, before I would take afternoon naps, and I remember playing the tunes on this little piano. And I kept asking can I study with someone. I think by the time I was four or five I started studying."
It's no surprise, then, to discover that she has perfect pitch and that she relied so much on her ears during the years of classical training. That sometimes caused problems. "Unfortunately, the teachers didn't have the breadth of vision to include improvisation in that," she says. When she was 17, however, she met Rebecca Penneys - now on the faculty of the prestigious Eastman School of Music in New York - a teacher who influenced her profoundly. In her years with Penneys, she had her technique broken up and reassembled and was taught how to relax physically at the instrument. And then came the insidious thought that led her into jazz.
What she brought to the idiom, apart from a classical technique and a love of "Chopin, Brahms, Schubert, the Romantics, Rachmaninov", was an impeccable ear and a curiosity unpointed by any previous knowledge of the music. Which is why she doesn't sound like anyone else, although there are occasional touches of the late, great Bill Evans in the way she sometimes voices chords.
"Well, he influenced all the voicings," she responds. "All the modern jazz pianists use those voicings on the left hand - so how do you get away from that? But he's not a major influence on me. People often think he might be, because they think that anybody who plays lyrically, or who plays a ballad with space and lyricism, is like Bill Evans. I love his playing, but in reality my lines have absolutely nothing to do with him."
As her involvement in jazz has grown, recognition has followed comparatively swiftly. She got her first big break in 1991, when she was named as a substitute for the long-established Marian McPartland on the "Golden Fingers" tour of Japan. She shared the billing with such luminous piano talents as Cedar Walton, Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Barron and Hank Jones. Then, in the "1993 International Great American Jazz Piano Competition", she came first out of over 100 performers. Success has meant four trio CDs since then, all with Steve Davis, the drummer who was with her recently in Cork and will be with her in Dublin. "The trio's really growing in terms of how much we're touring in Europe and in the US as well," she says. "And it's what we've always wanted to do - festivals, concerts, clubs. From fall to next spring we're going to be back and forth four times to Europe and two or three tours in the States. And the records are doing great."
Life on the road can be tough. Home, however, is an apartment in Yonkers, four cats "with personality" and a piano. There she divides her time between practice, taking care of business, going over to Davis's place to play and, when possible, creating space for herself to compose. Right now, that means taking on board a Celtic influence - the likes of Clannad and the Chieftains, among others.
And aims? "I know we're going kind of to more intense improvisation - so what does that mean? That means going always deeper into the central core of our being, and so that means deeper and deeper connection. And that's what we're always looking for.
"And great technical strength, because then you can do whatever you hear. You don't have to think `oh, can I do this?' It's just there if you want it. And if you don't want it, it's just there anyway; you don't have to use it. And greater control of the keyboard. I want to have complete mastery - and I don't. That's a long-term goal." St Paul couldn't have put it better.
Lynne Arriale, with Dave Fleming (bass) and Steve Davis (drums), will play Renards on next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday
