I was sitting backstage with Aaron Goldberg 10 minutes before his concert at Cafe 939's Red Room. Event organizers and promoters were dropping in and out of the back room, directing a barrage of questions at Goldberg while Berklee College of Music students bustled outside in the packed venue. He was pouring himself coffee and trying to convince an organizer to let one of his old teachers into the show. The young pianist hardly had time to speak with me, but he agreed to sit down for a couple of minutes for the interview that I had arranged with the help of a student publicist at Berklee. It was an opportunity that even the Berklee students who were privileged enough to attend a workshop with the jazz professional earlier in the afternoon envied. The Boston-born, New York-based Goldberg took a week off of his performing career and dedicated it to playing and working with Berklee students as a featured artist of the Marsalis Berklee Jams series, but not everyone had the chance to speak or jam with him.

"I never officially went to school here, but I spent a lot of time at Berklee," Goldberg said, explaining how his relationship with Berklee began when he was in college. "I met a lot of students here through a Berklee professor named Hal Crook, a great trombone player who teaches here."

Goldberg was studying history and science at Harvard College at the time-with a concentration in mind, brain and behavior-and would spend the weekends playing jazz in jam sessions and informal hangouts. "I played a lot at Wally's Café," he said. "A lot of Berklee guys used to go and hang out there, and once you know a few guys, you know everybody."

Goldberg got into jazz a long time before that. He started playing seriously in high school, and when he was 17, he decided to pursue music full-time at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City. After getting a taste of the big city, he moved back to Boston for school but returned to Brooklyn for a soon-to-be successful career after graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1996.

"I benefitted a lot from [Berklee], so it's great to give back," Goldberg said. His experience at Berklee and in Boston led to an illustrious career, playing with jazz greats such as Kurt Rosenwinkel, Joshua Redman, Wynton Marsalis, Tom Harrell, Freddie Hubbard and Mark Turner, to name a few.

When Goldberg received the invitation for Marsalis Jams, a program founded by Branford Marsalis that brings jazz artists to Boston for performances with Berklee students, it gave him the opportunity return to his hometown and reconnect with the school.

When musicians from New York came to "play a concert, give a couple clinics and participate in a jam session with the students . that was a major part of how the older generation of musicians used to grow and learn-playing in jam sessions with master musicians," Goldberg said. "The idea is to give these Berklee guys a chance to do the same with professional musicians from New York as if they were living in New York."

Like other oral traditions, jazz used to be a discipline passed down from a master to a mentee through intimate, hands-on experiences and almost never in a classroom. I asked Goldberg if that was how he learned to play.

"Most of my playing experience was not officially at jam sessions, but at what musicians call 'sessions'-meaning, have a couple of guys over playing at your house, rehearsing in a rehearsal space," he said. "It's not an open jam session open to everybody, but it is a chance to play with people that try things and experiment."

Goldberg emulated this type of collaboration by hosting workshops Wednesday afternoon and was impressed with how well the Berklee students played. "Everybody that sat in today will be an excellent professional musician," he said. "They're basically professional musicians who are going back to school and who don't necessarily need to be in school."

As I sat among these students before Goldberg's trio began its set, I noticed the pianist looking at the crowd with a twinkle in his eye. While introducing his group, he mentioned that musicians were always his favorite crowd to play for. Indeed, the intimate venue on the side of Boylston Street took on a whole new kind of energy that night, a type of passion that emanated only from those who understood and strove to imitate Goldberg's music.

Heads inevitably bopped, and people announced all sorts of oohs and ahhs in amazement when the performers hit particularly fiery spots in their solos. Bassist Reuben Rogers kept tight, melodious beats to complement drummer Eric Harland's (whom Goldberg said he "first met here at Berklee in one of the recording studios, back when he had just started playing acoustic bass, and his hands were bleeding because he didn't have calluses yet") otherworldly solos while Goldberg sometimes hit chords so hot he'd shake his hands as if to cool them off. It was a performance that the Berklee students clearly loved.

After I asked him about his new album, Home, Goldberg explained that the album is about returning from a long journey, coming back to "re-embrace your home and culture. It also has a lot of political overtone," he said. "A lot of this music was recorded right before [United States President Barack] Obama won, [when I was] getting reinspired about my own country."

Our agreement that the album makes the recent elections somewhat ironic was the last thing we discussed in our interview-an unusual place to end for a jazz musician.

I was cut short by a Berklee organizer, but Goldberg, a thoughtful speaker and provocative performer, gave me more than enough material to mull over.

I may not have been one of the lucky students who jammed with him after the performance, but talking with the pianist offered many insights. I look forward to seeing Goldberg in concert in the future.