Ben Tankard ✝️ Gospel, Jazz, Electro and a Keyboard-Fueled Leap of Faith
“When my hands touched the keys, they became very warm, and I began to play like Joe Sample or George Duke—right there in church.”
There’s a fine line between divine intervention and pure creative instinct—and somewhere along that line sits Ben Tankard.
Towering in stature (he’s 6’6”) and even taller in ambition, Tankard’s story reads like something scripted for Sunday morning TV: a rising basketball star struck down by injury, left homeless and adrift, only to discover a miraculous talent for the piano during a church service he attended for the free fried chicken dinner.
Legend? Marketing spin? Maybe a little of both. But listen to the music Tankard went on to create, and it’s hard not to believe something extraordinary happened that day. He didn’t invent gospel or jazz—but he did splice them together into an electrified hybrid that still ripples through contemporary music.
And few documents capture that embryonic moment quite like his 1989 indie debut, All Keyed Up.
From Tuba to Trail Blazers
Tankard was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, into a big family headed by a minister father and missionary mother. Money was always tight. He grew up waking before dawn to help his parents, and though music surrounded him—drums at church, tuba at school—poverty made the idea of a music career feel out of reach.
“Most of my exposure was to band music and drum and bugle corps,” he remembers, “though I loved gospel like Andraé Crouch and Walter Hawkins as well as Stevie Wonder.”
Basketball seemed like the ticket out. His height and athleticism won him scholarships and eventually a shot with the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers. But just as the dream was taking flight, a knee injury in training camp crashed it all down.
Tankard suddenly found himself broke, homeless, and sleeping in his car.
The Church Service That Changed Everything
It was at rock bottom in 1984 that Tankard stumbled into a church revival, lured partly by the promise of a free fried chicken dinner.
“I was nearly starving with no job or income, so I went to the service only for the free meal,” he said in later interviews.
Once inside, the preacher’s sermon about bouncing back from disappointment struck a chord. Then came the unexpected call from the pulpit:
“The preacher called me up and told me to sit down at the keyboard and put my hands on the keys ‘by faith.’ I was hesitant—but after all, I had nothing to lose.”
What happened next is the stuff of music folklore.
“When my hands touched the keys, they became very warm, and I began to play like Joe Sample or George Duke—right there in church. It was a miracle. No lessons—just instant awareness and divine download.”
That’s gospel, jazz, and miracle converging in real time.
“Since it was jazzy in nature, yet inspired in the church, I decided to call it ‘gospel jazz.’”
It’s a story so dramatic, so impossibly cinematic, that it almost sounds too good to be true. But then you hear him play—and it’s hard to argue.
Recording on a Shoestring
After his revelation, Tankard landed a job at a local music store, where he soaked up everything he could about multi-track reel-to-reel tape machines and early MIDI rigs. Soon he was making demos for local artists and itching to record his own material.
“I couldn’t afford live musicians,” he says. “So I programmed the entire record myself on a keyboard—and called it All Keyed Up.”
Unlike the high-budget jazz-fusion productions of the era, Tankard’s sound was lean, quirky, and undeniably personal. He describes his musical process as a sort of spiritual transmission:
“Whenever I sat down to the piano and played, God would just add knowledge to my mind. The more I played, the more He sent.”
A Genre Meld, Peanut-Butter-Cup Style
Where many gospel artists might dabble in jazz for a track or two—or jazz players drop in a gospel-flavored piece—Tankard went all in, merging gospel’s melodic and spiritual core with jazz’s improvisational flow.
“I didn’t invent gospel or jazz,” he says. “I just merged them like peanut butter and chocolate—which became Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup!”
It’s a fusion that feels organic rather than forced. As he puts it:
“Jazz is the vehicle. Gospel is the passenger. My style of play is jazz…but my message is good news.”
All Keyed Up
“Eden Celebration” serves as the EP’s spiritual and sonic centerpiece. It opens with the gentle sounds of flowing water and a playful chorus of animal calls, before morphing into a pulsing, jazz-fusion-meets-electro-house groove. It’s simultaneously meditative and danceable—a track Tankard envisioned as “a soundtrack for deep thought, meditation, and change.”
The title track, “All Keyed Up,” begins spare and pensive, then bursts into a joyful storm of synth bass, funk riffs, and Don Blackman-esque piano runs. It’s a snapshot of Tankard’s fearless blending of genres—even if his studio gear was far humbler than that of his jazz-fusion heroes.
“Melodic Heaven,” meanwhile, pairs lo-fi synth textures and boogie-fied basslines with Tankard’s elegant piano flourishes.
And in Time Capsule fashion, this EP closes with a little contemporary magic.
The Time Capsule Touch
While the original All Keyed Up album is available on streaming platforms, the Time Capsule EP digs deeper—and adds something new to the story.
Our release features carefully selected cuts from the original album, plus a fresh reimagining of the title track. The Time Capsule Seaside Mix—crafted by Kay Suzuki & Pol Valls in 2019—transports Tankard’s piano-led jam straight onto the Balearic coast.
Expect slow Linn Drum beats, washed-out echoed snares, and a gentle tide of synth textures that ride in like a warm breeze. It’s an extended slice of Balearic bliss that might just convince you to swap your church pew for a deckchair.
This EP is almost sold out from our HQ. kind of washing away with the waves of time… we hope someone can still grab it by the beach.
If you’d like to dig deeper into Tankard’s unique place in the jazz-gospel continuum—and his unexpected connections to dance music—check these excellent features:
Tankard has since released over twenty albums, earned Grammy nominations, produced gospel stars like Yolanda Adams, become a motivational speaker, a fashion designer, a licensed pilot (often flying himself to gigs), and even starred in the reality TV series Thicker Than Water.
(I know…!)
But it all started here—in a humble home studio, with a man determined to turn personal salvation into a new sound.
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