I created lead sheets of his tunes and added them to my fake book collection. I would sit for hours at the piano transcribing Bill’s voicings and sketching out the changes as best I could identify them. To this day, I can still play much of that solo. I remember taping together that long trail of 18 transcribed pages and challenging myself to play it through without pause. Oscar Peterson’s great solo on Joy Spring was only a few pages away, but I was a Bill Evans guy after all. I bought John Mehegan’s book and memorized Bill’s performance of Peri’s Scope as transcribed withinin the book. From his Vanguard recordings to Portrait in Jazz, to the Tony Bennet sessions and Affinity to Conversations with Myself and many others, I was determined to understand what this man was doing with the piano. My history with him was through listening, analyzing, and integrating his harmonic approach into my playing as a means for me to learn to play better jazz.īill Evans’ recordings monopolized my college record collection. After all, he knew Bill and had Bill’s respect. These pieces on Bill are Richie’s observations and expert analysis. Once in a while I give Richie credit for a good idea. So I thought, why not create a compilation of both these pieces in commemoration of this day. The other piece is one of the chapters in our eBook The Lineage of Modern Jazz Piano. One was the eBook talking about the Nardis intros Bill played at the very end of his life. We discussed it for a minute and he reminded me that we’ve created two pieces featuring Bill. “Well, you should write something about it in your blog”, he told me. “Do you know that 40 years ago today, Bill Evans passed?” “No”, I said with a small amount of shame. Richie Beirach called me today and after our friendly banter, told me that in Germany it was September 15th.
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