Jeff Goldblum Has a Number One Jazz Album. It Only Took Him 50 Years

Jeff Goldblum has a daily routine that includes working out in his home gym and spending an inordinate amount of time at the piano. “I play every day,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It’s part of

my life. I know what gratification comes from a routine and making something a habit and I play first thing in the morning.”

Goldblum’s love of jazz goes back decades. Beginning in the mid-1990s, acting on the advice of fellow jazz aficionado Woody Allen, Goldblum and actor Peter Weller began playing standards by

musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk at various Los Angeles clubs. Allen suggested the duo set up a residency. And while Weller would eventually drop out, Goldblum, never one to

shy away from an ostensibly left-field idea, ran with it.

His weekly gig with the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra at L.A. club Rockwell is hardly a vanity project — “If I’m not out of town doing something, I’m there every week” — but the 66-year-old

actor has taken the idea to its logical, if odd, conclusion: his debut album that recreates the Rockwell vibe in a studio with a live audience.

Bolstered by guest vocalists Haley Reinhart, Imelda May and Sarah Silverman alongside trumpeter Till Bronner, Goldblum’s The Capitol Studios Sessions — which hit Number One on Billboard’s

Jazz Albums chart — blends standards (Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” Charles Mingus’ “Nostalgia in Times Square”) with the actor’s goofy, whimsical crowd banter.  Imagine if Tom

Waits’ Nighthawks at the Diner swapped a rumpled shirt and newsboy cap for a tuxedo with tails for a start. We’ll let Goldblum take it from there.

I learned how to start to put together chords and inversions and what scales might go in different things in the right hand and how to improvise. There was something about that that I had a

natural enthusiasm for and appetite for. I’d “play for company” when my parents’ friends came over and I remember locking myself in a room one afternoon and getting the Yellow Pages and

turning to cocktail lounges around Pittsburgh and I went from A to Z.

I maintained this group and it grew and [at one show] they said, “We need a name to put in the program,” and I thought about this woman whom I knew in Pittsburgh; a friend of my mom’s

[named] Mildred Snitzer. I thought that was a funny name and then this idea of the orchestra was funny. I said, “Mildred Snitzer Orchestra,” and it’s kind of stuck since then.

[Friend] John Mastro would write out some quizzes or questions about jazz or literature and I’d just cold read and have a little hangout with the audience and then we’d pick up another song.

It’s become the version of the show that’s evolved and people over the last several years would say, “Gee, this should be a TV show,” or something. I’ve never been careerist or strategic or

futurist about this at all.

“I start talking to the audience … at 8:30 and I just keep going till 11:00. I make sure that I’ve peed before and I just keep going.”