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Category: piano

2009

Thursday, 11/26/09

Wobbly and splayed, this performance of the Jobim classic sounds more like a soundtrack for my life than the silky Getz/Gilberto original ever could.

Ran Blake, “The Girl From Ipanema”

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Stan Getz/Astrud Gilberto (with a very young Gary Burton on vibes), “The Girl From Ipanema” (1964 [charted at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100]; this is from the 1964 movie “Get Yourself A College Girl”)

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The immediacy of the e-world never ceases to amaze. After posting yesterday’s clip, I sent Sam Newsome an email—I’d happened upon his e-address at his website—to let him know that his music was being featured here. A few hours later, this was in my e-mailbox: “Thanks, Richard. It looks like I’m in good company. Peace, S”

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reading table

On this Thanksgiving Day, here’s a favorite quote.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.—Henry James

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2009

Thursday, 11/19/09

For Ursula Oppens, present and past aren’t far apart. In a concert I heard several years ago (at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall), she opened with Beethoven (1712-1773) and closed with John Adams (1947-).

Elliott Carter (1908-), “Retrouvailles” (2000)/Ursula Oppens, piano, live, New York, 2008

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[Elliott Carter, who will soon celebrate his 101st birthday,] heard pianist Art Tatum play on 52nd Street [in the 1940s] and . . . became a fan of Thelonious Monk.—Tom Cole, “Elliott Carter’s Century of Music,” NPR

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David Schiff, author of ‘The Music of Elliott Carter,’ said in the program that the ‘Piano Sonata of 1946’ ‘invoked jazz.’ And during a panel discussion he smiled and said he thought he heard some influence of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk in the piano part of Carter’s ‘Cello Sonata of 2000.’

‘I’ve never heard Carter say anything about it,’ Mr. Schiff later added in an e-mail, ‘but when I play through the part (in private!) I like to give the many staccato notes that mark the pulse a kind of Monk edge to them.’—Roderick Nordell, “99 years of Elliott Carter in 5 Days,” Christian Science Monitor, 1/26/09

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An (often-fascinating) conversation between Elliott Carter and Phil Lesh (Grateful Dead) can be heard here.

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2009

Wednesday, 11/18/09

While living in New York for a few months in the early 1970s (after my first year of college), I often heard Bill Evans at a place in Greenwich Village, the Top of the Gate, where, for the price of a beer, you could linger all night. Hunched over the piano, he looked at times as if he was about to fall inside and disappear.

Bill Evans, “My Foolish Heart,” live (TV broadcast), Sweden, 1964

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Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau: the list of piano players who wouldn’t sound the way they do but for Bill Evans, whose approach to harmony made him the most influential piano player in jazz since Bud Powell, goes on and on and on.

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The ‘open’ voicings that [Bill] Evans used [i.e., leaving out a chord’s root note] were not new . . . . They had been there in ‘classical’ music since the early part of the century, since Bartok and Stravinsky. But they were new to jazz, and they opened up melody and flow in new ways.—Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (2d ed. 1983)

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Bill [Evans] had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.

—Miles Davis (in Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography [1989])

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2009

Tuesday, 11/17/09

Some music is so beautiful that words just seem—no matter what you say—tawdry.

Chopin, Nocturne Op. 27, No. 2 in D flat Major (1836)/Dinu Lipatti (1917-1950), piano

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Want to hear Thelonious Monk play Chopin? Go here (a home recording [click on “LISTEN TO THELONIOUS PLAYING CHOPIN”]).

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Like all his [Monk’s] nieces and nephews, Teeny [Benetta Smith] treated her uncle as an uncle—not as some eccentric genius or celebrity. During one of her many visits in 1959 or ’60, when she was about twelve years old, Teeny noticed a book of compositions by Chopin perched on her uncle’s rented Steinway baby grand piano. Monk’s piano was notorious for its clutter. It occupied a significant portion of the kitchen and extended into the front room. The lid remained closed, since it doubled as a temporary storage space for music, miscellaneous papers, magazines, folded laundry, dishes, and any number of stray kitchen items.

Teeny thumbed through the pages of the Chopin book, then turned to her uncle and asked, ‘What are you doing with that on the piano? I thought you couldn’t read music? You can read that?’ The challenge was on. In response, Monk sat down at the piano, turned to a very difficult piece, and started playing it at breakneck speed.

‘His hands were a blur,’ she recalled decades later.—Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)

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2009

Saturday, 11/7/09

Want a break from music that’s busy, busy, busy, busy, busy?

Try this.

Here, it seems, almost nothing happens at all.

Morton Feldman (1926-1987), Intermission 6 (1953)/Clint Davis, piano, live, Lexington, Kentucky, 2009

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To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he [Morton Feldman] turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound . . . . In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft.—Alex Ross

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Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room.—Morton Feldman

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2009

Friday, 11/6/09

Some performances are so intimate and so strange that part of you feels as though you should avert your eyes. But another part knows that you can’t.

Nina Simone, “Feelings,” live, Switzerland (Montreux Jazz Festival), 1976

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reading table

Here Robert Creeley reads his poem “Please.”

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2009

Wednesday, 11/4/09

For much of his life he wrestled with inner demons. Hospitalized repeatedly, he was treated with ECT (electroshock). But when he was seated at the piano, his fingers moved across the keyboard with the grace and elegance of a ballet dancer.

Bud Powell, “Anthropology,” live, Denmark (Copenhagen), 1962

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Bill Evans on Bud Powell

He was so expressive, such emotion flowed out of him! There are different kinds of emotion: there is the easy, superficial kind, and there is another kind, that doesn’t make you laugh or cry, that doesn’t make you feel anything but a sense of sheer perfection. It’s a feeling we sometimes get with Beethoven. . . . It’s not that it’s beautiful in the sense of pretty or brilliant, it’s something else, something much deeper. . . . If I had to choose one single musician for his artistic integrity, for the grandeur of his work, it would be Bud Powell. He was in a class by himself.—Bill Evans (in Francis Paudras, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell [1986])

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Sonny Rollins on Bud Powell

(The way Sonny, trying to describe Bud’s playing, shakes his head—first at around 1:35, then again at around 3:30—says more than any words could.)

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2009

Tuesday, 11/3/09

If you were a musician, could anything be worse than to find, one day, that unlike the day before, and the day before that, and all the other days you could remember, you were no longer able to play your instrument? That’s what happened, in 1958, to this man, the great British classical pianist Solomon Cutner (known professionally simply as Solomon). Then 56 years old and at the height of his career, he suffered a stroke. It left his right arm paralyzed, silencing him for the rest of his life, which lasted another 32 years.

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor (“Appassionata” [1804])/Solomon, piano

1st Movement

2nd Movement

3rd Movement

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Andras Schiff on Beethoven’s piano sonatas

In London a couple years ago, pianist Andras Schiff explored Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in a series of much-acclaimed lecture-recitals, which can be heard here.

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Thelonious Monk and Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, et al.

Thelonious Monk possessed an impressive knowledge of, and appreciation for, Western classical music, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of hymns and gospel music, American popular songs, and a variety of obscure art songs that defy easy categorization. For him, it was all music. Once in 1966, a phalanx of reporters in Helsinki pressed Monk about his thoughts on classical music and whether or not jazz and classical can come together. His drummer, Ben Riley, watched the conversation unfold: ‘Everyone wanted him to answer, give some type of definition between classical music and jazz . . . So he says, ‘Two is one,’ and that stopped the whole room. No one else said anything else.’ Two is one, indeed. Monk loved Frédéric Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Bach, and like many of his peers of the bebop generation, he took an interest in Igor Stravinsky.—Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)

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2009

Monday, 11/2/09

Here is the onliest Thelonious.

Thelonious Monk, “Epistrophy,” live (TV broadcast), Paris, 1966

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Thelonoius Monk, “’Round Midnight,” live (TV broadcast)

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You can tell a lot about Monk’s music—about the centrality of dance, about the interplay between melody and rhythm, about the way a melody’s irregular accents override the pulse (making the dance melodic)—just by watching, in the second performance, the way his right foot moves.

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He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to be.

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You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group—whatever the format—was his body.

—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

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2009

Wednesday, 10/28/09

The world became a less interesting place the day Lester Bowie died.

Digable Planets (with Lester Bowie [trumpet], Joe Sample [keyboard], Melvin “Wah-Wah Watson” Ragin [guitar]), “Flying High in the Brooklyn Sky,” live

Want to hear more of Lester? Here.

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Part of the job of a musician is that of a messenger. If you ain’t ready to be a messenger, forget it. You need to get a job in the post office or somewhere. If you ain’t ready to travel, pack up your family, or pack up yourself and hit the road, you’re in the wrong business. Because that’s what music is about. It’s about spreading knowledge and education, and re-education. It’s about spreading. You have got to travel with it to spread the word. Like all the people in the past that have had to travel to spread the music.

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It’s life itself that this [music] is about.

—Lester Bowie (in George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music [2008])

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