|
i think of "jazz piano" in a kind of big sense...
the greats:
sun ra: i love love love sun ra. i cant say enough about what a great player the ra was.
cecil taylor: unit structures, live in montreaux
technically and conceptually, cecil is on a different plane than most jazz players. if anyone builds a vocabulary using clusters, they sound like bad cecil impersonators. he is that good. part of the reason why i like crispell and schweitzer so much is that they manage touse this vocabulary and take it somewhere that is very different from cecil--that is quite difficult to pull off.
thelonious monk; blue note sessions, brilliant corners
monk.
damn.
duke ellington: i like money jungle alot. i like alot of duke's work, tho--his playing is fascinating. i almost think that no matter how great the bands were, no matter how effective the arrangements, i almost wish they weren't there and i could hear duke play stride more.
marilyn crispell--the recordings with the braxton group. wow.
irene schweitzer--a great, very underrated swiss player.
bud powell---the few recordings you can get of powell in his prime are all amazing. i like "mad bebop" alot.
james p. johnson: best stride player i have ever heard. bar none.
try playing stride and you'll understand why this is so imposing.
mccoy tyner: every once in a while, you can hear him break out of the 4-maj7 chord thing he likes so much and do two-handed work--the last live recording he did with coltrane before elvin jones quit the band, for example. can't remember the title. it's from 1965. people tend to forget that tyner was about 17 when he started playing with coltrane. what a great pianist--i just--o i dunno--got tired of the same thing all the time. so i like best those places where you can hear something else in his playing.
bill evans is a great player that i dislike intensely. too much debussy, not enough schoenberg.
i kind of outgrew keith jarrett. i still think his playing on arbor zena and with the american quartet is lovely, however.
corea: i like his early stuff, with circle and the solo improvisations--and with miles davis (the ring modulated fender rhodes playing in the newly released live at the fillmore from 1970 for exampe).
he is a hell of a pianist technically.
i just dont really like alot of his stuff, and less and less of it as you get closer to the present.
great pianists you may not know much about:
herbie nichols
andrew hill
thinking. may post more later.
nice thread. btw
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|