It’s been quite the eventful month at The Jazz Post. As of about a week ago I’m now eighteen years of age — and in about a week I’ll be donning the iconic graduation gown and retiring the title of this blog’s “high school jazz musician.” Although it’s a bit sad to let it go, [...]
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Vijay Iyer had a distinctly different demeanor from many musicians that I’ve met in the past. It wasn’t that difficult to spot him from my table when I arrived at the Birdland Jazz Club — he looked exactly the way I’d seen him in pictures: sharp, clean-cut, emanating professionalism. In fact, his image was so [...]
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The Village Vanguard immediately fulfilled some of my expectations the moment I went through that red door. It was crowded with people — a few college students, but mostly those beyond twice my age — nearly all the way to the back of the room by the time I arrived. It was frozen in time, [...]
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I was at a neighbor’s house Sunday night for a light get-together and a hearty barbecue — the same neighbor, Richard, who was the first to toss some jazz classics in my direction. Throughout the night, several names were thrown about and excitedly discussed — Toots Thielemans, George Benson, and Rod Piazza, to name a [...]
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I recently sent in a self-recording for an All-California Jazz Band audition (check it out at CBDA.org) — it was the first time I’d ever done a recording for anything to do with jazz. Like any good musician, I waited until the weekend before the audition tapes were due to begin recording — because recording [...]
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For Gordon Goodwin, it was probably just another solo. But for me, I couldn’t fully grasp it — I was sitting on the same bench as him, watching him improvise on the keys of the old upright Yamaha that I play every morning. I was balancing myself on the edge of the bench so I [...]
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It’s pretty difficult to describe who Bill Evans is. Yes, he’s a jazz pianist from the twentieth century; and yes, he’s arguably one of the most influential jazz pianists in the history of jazz itself. But his story is probably one of the most tragic ones despite his success in music. As you can tell [...]
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I was flipping through Downbeat today (the 75th anniversary collector’s edition; seriously, I’m going to keep this thing forever) and I read this short blurb about Toshiko Akiyoshi, a female jazz pianist from Japan (Toshiko: Japan’s First Gift to U.S. Jazz). In a nutshell, Akiyoshi’s pretty amazing – in 1952, Oscar Peterson discovered her playing [...]
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If I were stranded on a desert island and I could only take one jazz pianist with me, it’d be Thelonious Monk. Why? It’s all in his sound. When you hear him on the radio, you know it’s him. Unlike Leonard Bernstein or Emanuel Ax, Monk had unusually small hands for a pianist (a problem [...]
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