jazz piano

You left out what?

by Rachel Cantrell on August 6, 2009

So I was hanging out in the library the other day and I picked up a copy of Icons in Jazz: A History in Photographs 1900-2000, which pretty much sums up the big names in jazz — everyone from Cannonball Adderley to Lester Young. It’s a pretty great read if you want to get a [...]

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Bill Evans

by Rachel Cantrell on July 29, 2009

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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Reincarnation?

by Rachel Cantrell on July 17, 2009

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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Monk!

by Rachel Cantrell on July 15, 2009

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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Well, here goes.

by Rachel Cantrell on July 2, 2009

I come from a world of snazzy jazz band polos and squeaky wind instruments and smelly yellow school buses. Ah, high school jazz band. For the past two years, I’ve woken up to play jazz at the wee hours of the morning, puffy-faced and yawning, blindly fumbling with the F blues scale. You should hear [...]

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