Showing posts with label Bill Evans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Evans. Show all posts

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Plaintive Melodies


As much as we enjoy returning to live on our boat in Connecticut, the worst thing about summer is leaving my piano behind.  If I was a professional, or played nearly at that level, it would be intolerable.  But I remember having once worked with the great harpsichordist, Ralph Kirkpatrick (in the capacity of publishing and cataloging the works of Scarlatti), visiting him at his home in Guilford CT which was populated by harpsichords and grand pianos.  He had made lunch for us, with some wine, and before we got back to work I timidly asked him whether he might like to play a piece.  He looked at me as if I had lost my mind, saying he never gives private audiences and especially not after a glass of wine.  I wondered, doesn't the love of music transcend everything else? 

Contrast that experience to the one I had with Henry Steele Commager, who was the dean of American intellectual historians.  I used to visit him in Amherst and we would work in his study on the second floor.  On the first floor he had a baby grand piano and one day, again after lunch, I asked him whether he played.  He raced to the piano and I quietly sat listening to him play a Beethoven sonata, and very competently. For Commager, playing the piano was his creative outlet and during that moment historian took second place.  I understand that.

My piano has been good to me this past year and in fact we've been partners, preparing programs that I performed at the Hanley Center in West Palm Beach, a rehab facility, and at The Waterford in Juno Beach, a retirement home.  Actually, most of the music I played at the Hanley Center was impromptu from fake books but at the Waterford I gave musical presentations with some commentary (Ann frequently helping me with the latter), something I really enjoyed doing, and now have programs for the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein, George Gershwin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude-Michel Schönberg, and songs of the Great American Songbook as immortalized by Frank Sinatra.  

Next season, I'll do others and perhaps record another CD at a professional studio.

Of course I have no illusions about the enduring value of such recordings, other than having goals keeps one young, and it is a joy to be able to play.  Luckily for me, my kind of piano playing -- reading the melody line and improvising with chords -- is sort of like riding a bicycle; once you know how to ride, you can do it anytime without frequently practicing.  So, a summer away from my friend doesn't really set me back in terms of my ability to play. 

Nonetheless, as we prepare to leave, I look at my piano with a melancholy regret and I tend to play pieces that reflect that mood. Recently, I found myself playing some Bill Evans songs, constantly reverting to his "Time Remembered" -- a piece with abstract, floating harmonies, not exactly melodic.  It reminds me a little of Debussy, but in a more abstract form, so I found myself fiddling around with some classical music, not one of my musical strengths, but what better piece to play than Debussy's "Reveries" as a bookend for the Bill Evans piece.  From there I turned to one of Stephen Sondheim's most beautiful ballads, "Johanna" from Sweeny Todd,  much more structured than the Evans piece, but all three musical compositions share this sense of the plaintive. 

I set up my camera and recorded the Sondheim piece, a brief rendition (BlogSpot has restrictions on video size).  It is less than two minutes. and as I never play a piece the same way twice, improvising much of it, when recording (especially video with just a digital camera in our echoing living room), some self consciousness encroaches.  Nonetheless, I include this below as a musical statement of the moment and particularly because "Johanna" most accurately captures my mood.   Whoever said Sondheim can't write a beautiful melody is crazy as this is one of the most haunting songs I know.  It is also one of his few outright love songs.


We'll be on the road soon and the blog will go quiet for a while.




Thursday, September 29, 2011

Catching Up...

The last few weeks went by in a whirlwind. During that period we took a two week cruise in the Baltic region, trans Atlantic flights to Holland and back, packing up from our summer on the boat, and then closing it up involving a myriad of operational chores best left unsaid and then driving the 1,250 miles home, 800 miles on the 2nd day -- made pleasurable by Stephen King's audio edition of On Writing read by the author himself -- arriving to assess all the work to be done in and around the house, particularly on the tropical overgrowth of landscaping, courtesy of the humid Florida summers.

The ports we visited deserve their own commentary and as I pull together photos another posting with a description of the ports will be forthcoming, but a few preliminary words on the cruise itself. We've taken many and of course beside the interesting ports, ship life and days at sea are high points to me. We try to confine our cruises to the "smaller" ships, in this case the MS Rotterdam. This particular ship accommodated "merely" 1,380 passengers on this trip, her displacement at 61,849 tons. We had been on this ship once before, almost ten years ago, through the Panama Canal. She is still an elegant ship, although refitting and updating will be needed soon.


Our cruise covered 2,998 miles (remarkable as I did not realize the region was so large). We arrived in Amsterdam after the fastest trans-Atlantic flight I've ever been on as the tail winds were over 100 miles per hour, only five hours from JFK. They served drinks and then dinner shortly after departing, turned off the lights for this "overnight" flight and it seemed as if only a half hour went by before they were turning on the lights for breakfast. At one point our air speed was 720 miles per hour. I felt like Chuck Yeager about to break the sound barrier. I hadn't flown KLM in some time, a very decent airline, but well worth the few dollars to upgrade to "economy comfort" seats.

We arrived in Amsterdam very early in the morning and had to wait several totally disorganized hours for the pre-arranged bus connection we had made through Holland America to finally depart for Rotterdam where our ship awaited. One would think that at least this part of the trip would be under control -- after all HA has done this before.

The cruise took us to Copenhagen, Warnamunde (Berlin's nearest port), Tallin, St. Petersburg, and Stockholm. We were supposed to go to Helsinki as well, but weather prevented the visit, for reasons I will explain when I write up our port visitations.

Embarking in Rotterdam, our ship life began by locating our cabin (mid ship, Ocean view), and as we live on a boat during the summer, we found it commodious by comparison --including several spacious closets and lots of drawer space!

There are so many things to do, even on a relatively small ship such as this, but our routine was to have a set dining time, a table with three other couples, nice people with whom we could exchange pleasantries about the trip, but politics and related topics were strictly off limits. After dinner most people went to the musical production shows but we discovered a great jazz trio in one of the lounges and became regulars there. Every evening they took requests from the great American songbook, the music we love so much.


The drummer (Seth) and the pianist (Jane) are a married couple who do gigs in Nantucket when they are not traveling on a cruise ship (the bass player was from Spain, hired by the ship, and fit right in). Jane is one of the best jazz pianists I've ever heard on a cruise ship and she plays requests from "lead sheets" or "fake books" which is the way I play, taking the melody line and the chords and improvising (although her skills are head and shoulders above mine). But she does all this from an iPod which has searchable PDFs of thousands of songs. I requested (among many others) the little-played "Cottage for Sale", a rendition we loved having been recorded years before by Julie London. To our amazement, Jane came up with the song immediately...

"A little dream in a castle
With every dream gone
It is lonely and silent
The shades are all drawn
And my heart is heavy
As we gaze upon
A cottage for sale

The lawn we were proud of
Is waving in hay

Our beautiful garden is
Withered away.
Where we planted roses
The weeds seem to say..
A cottage for sale"


Jane's style is so reminiscent of Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson. Her voicings are superb. In fact she played several Bill Evans pieces, including Waltz for Debby. These are not the kind of offerings one normally finds on a cruise ship. More information on Seth and Jane can be found here.

When I am away from everyday life while cruising, particularly the day to day gyrations of the market and politics and my beloved computer, reading becomes a pleasure, interrupted only by port visits, the obligatory meals, and jazz delights. The rest of the world goes by as contact is mostly limited to CNN International on board, a 4 page summary of the New York Times, and, of course, occasional, but very expensive and slow, Internet connections via satellite. Still, I tried to keep up with the baseball scores and the pennant races while on board, and the latest machinations of the approaching presidential election.

While away it seems that President Obama proposed a job-creation, infrastructure-fixing plan, with tax implications for the wealthy, one that was immediately shot down by the Republicans. How one can be so against a more progressive tax structure -- albeit with fixes of loopholes and some of the complexity along the way -- while 46 million Americans are living at the poverty level is beyond me. We had lunch with a woman one day who pontificated that half of Americans don't pay any taxes and that is why we should have a flat tax (very regressive in my mind). Hence, politics and the economy were off limits discussions (for me at least -- no sense on such a trip). However, on board I managed to see parts of the "Republican presidential debates" which were laughable as moderated by Fox, most candidates invoking God and the Constitution as their very own personal, exclusive allies.

So it was no wonder, off with the TV and on to some good reading. The first one I tackled, sort of an underground classic for which I thank my blogger friend, Emily, was J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country. This is written in the tradition of Thomas Hardy, a wonderful tale about a medieval mural of the apocalypse which was painted on the ceiling of a church in the countryside somewhere in England and whitewashed over. The man who is hired to restore the painting, in the process, resurrects his own soul in the bargain. He is separated from his wife, Vinny, and recovering from his experiences during WWI:"The marvelous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny had done to me and begin where I'd left off. This is what I need, I thought -- a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won't be a casualty anymore. Well, we live by hope." It is a little gem of a redemptive novel.

From the sublime to the entertaining I picked up another Jonathan Tropper novel, This is Where I Leave You. Here is yet another clever novel by him, the focal point of which is our hero, Judd Foxman, sitting a seven day shiva with his dysfunctional family, as his marriage is falling apart. Tropper is known for his smart witty dialogue and this novel delivers. Although comic, Tropper is an observer of the manners and mores of modern times and I almost think of him as a Jane Austin type, delectable to read, with stinging observations. For example, this is his riotous description of sitting shiva (sat on chairs lower than their visitors) on one particular day: "The parade of weathered flesh continues. Sitting in our shiva chairs, we develop a sad infatuation with the bared legs of our visitors. Some of the men wear pants, and for that we are eternally grateful. But this being late August, we get our fair share of men in shorts, showing off pale, hairless legs with withered calves and thick, raised veins like earthworms trapped beneath their flesh who died burrowing their way out. The more genetically gifted men still show some musculature in the calf and thigh areas, but is more often than not marred by the surgical scars of multiple knee operations or heart bypasses that appropriated veins from the leg. And there's a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display. The women are more of a mixed bag. Some of them have managed to hold it together, but on others, skin hangs loosely off the bone, crinkled like cellophane, ankles disappear beneath mounds of flesh; and spider veins stretch out like bruises just below the skin. there really should be a dress code." A laugh a minute because it is so true.

My final novel for the cruise was one I've been saving for years for the right moment, a mass market paperback edition, small and portable, although some 500 pages, so ideal for carrying on a trip -- Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline. I've read most of Conroy and when he writes autobiographical material, he is at his best. I'm sure many of the episodes he chronicles in this book, one about a boy coming of age in a military college in Charleston, SC, come right out of his own life experiences. It is powerful and fast-moving, a page turner, beautifully written, Conroy being one of our most lyrical writers today. It is about the true meaning of honor, a painful lesson our protagonist, Will McLean, learns in the real world. Will is not from the elite society of Charleston as are some of his classmates. He is on scholarship as the point guard on the basketball team, as was Conroy himself was when he went to school. Although Conroy's autobiographical My Losing Season primarily deals with that subject (basketball), well worth reading, this novel devotes only a dozen or so pages to the topic, but perhaps the most vivid, accurate ones I've ever read about playing the game. Still, it is the beauty of his writing that glued me to the pages of this novel: "The city of Charleston, in the green feathery modesty of its palms, in the certitude of its style, in the economy and stringency of its lines, and the serenity of its mansions South of Broad Street, is a feast for the human eye. But to me, Charleston is a dark city, a melancholy city, whose severe covenants and secrets are as powerful and beguiling as its elegance, whose demons dance their alley dances and compose their malign hymns to the far side of the moon I cannot see. I studied those demons closely once, and they helped kill off the boy in me."

Thanks to these three novels, the jazz trio, my ship time was spent in good company (and with Ann of course). Ann wrote a detailed email to her friends about our trip, describing each port, and I am going to draw heavily from her observations when I get around to editing and selecting photographs, as well as adding my own thoughts.

But I will say one thing as a teaser for a future piece. The high point was St. Petersburg where we hired a private guide for two ten hour days. One cannot tour Russia without a Visa or a registered travel guide (or one of the ship's bus tours, which we did not want to do). Our guide turned out to be as stunningly beautiful as she was knowledgeable, a graduate of St. Petersburg University, with a degree in Art History, and with excellent English skills. Each place of visit was accompanied by her knowledgeable narrative. It started with an early morning visit to the Peterhof Palace, with its lush gardens and magnificent furnishings, these two exterior photos hardly do it justice, but, as I said, this is merely foreshadowing of a more detailed account in a later entry.


















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Thursday, February 28, 2008

How His Heart Sung

My favorite gifts -- to give or to receive – are books and music. This past holiday Ann, and her best friend, Maria, who was visiting us from Sicily, gave me Peter Pettinger’s biography Bill Evans, How My Heart Sings (Paperback; Yale University Press, 2002) and a collection of sheet music and books on theory, including the Bill Evans Fake Book, transcribed and edited by Pascal Wetzel from Evans’ recordings. (A “fake book” gives the melody line and the basic chords, without arrangement, which the musician then has to improvise.)

Between the biography and the fake book I have a greater appreciation of Evans’ musical genius and can understand why he has been called the Chopin of jazz. I highly recommend the biography to anyone who has admired Evans, although you should be aware that as Pettinger was a concert pianist, the biography delves as much into the intricacies and structure of Evans’ music as it does his life.

His life was tragic as he began a heroin habit in an effort to “fit in” when he first played with Miles Davis’ group. This ultimately contributed to his early death at 51. But, oh, his music, the extent of which I was not fully aware until reading the biography and working on the fake book. His compositions are melancholy and ethereal, frequently changing keys and tempo, with unique chord voicings abandoning the root note. This leaves the listener with a feeling about the sound rather than a musical denotation, almost like comparing poetry to a short story. His classical training clearly comes through and one gets a sense of his Slavic heritage as well. As Evans said, “I have always hoped to visit Russia, to feel at first hand the roots of this part of myself.”

Before the gift of Bill Evans Fake Book I was already familiar with his well known “Peri’s Scope” and “Waltz for Debbie,” with the latter being part of my regular repertoire. Here is a wonderful video of Evans playing “Waltz for Debbie,” probably his best known composition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH3GSrCmzC8

Delving into the fake book I discovered other gems and my favorite piece now is “Bill’s Hit Tune,” which Evans described as having “a quality of a French movie theme if played slow.” A performance of the piece by Evans is also on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuprXet5_YQ

Then there is “Comrade Conrad,” with its changing keys and alternating sections of 4/4 and 3/4 time. The soaring “Turn out the Stars” seems to evolve almost on its own accord and as abstract as it might be, it all makes sense. I think this piece reflects his deep classical roots and it might be his masterpiece. I also love his plaintive “Funny Man” and fragile “Time Remembered.”

“Letter to Evan” is one of the few Evans pieces for which he also wrote lyrics. I think of it as a tone poem, beautiful in its simplicity. It was written for his son’s 4th birthday; tragically Bill Evans would be dead only one year later. His son is a musician as well, writing for films. He wrote a poignant essay about his father on the 21st anniversary of his death: http://www.evanevans.org/mind.asp?ID=16

Finally, I love playing the mournful, haunting “We will Meet Again,” which Evans wrote soon after his beloved older brother, Harry, committed suicide. Richard Kimball, a pianist and composer with both classical and jazz backgrounds, skillfully performs an arrangement of that piece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiN5DsOdM38&feature=related

For the amateur pianist, playing Evans’ work and trying to understand the structure of the music can be intimidating. I take encouragement from Evans’ own definition of jazz: “It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are used to using in jazz, is playing jazz.” So, I’ll keep trying to play jazz, “music of the moment” as defined by Evans, and hopefully learning with the inspiration of these two gifts, Pettinger’s biography and Wetzel’s transcriptions of Evans’ music.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

The Great American Songbook

Kate (the vocalist who I accompany on the piano) and I are preparing our next concert program, which will be devoted to Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin, indisputably the artists at the heart of the Great American Songbook (GAS).

We have worked together for the past three years giving benefit concerts, paying tribute to the music of that tradition. I met Kate by answering her ad in the Palm Beach Post for a piano accompanist who is familiar with Broadway and cabaret style music. She has used her soprano voice and clear phrasing to entertain audiences for more than twenty years, performing in a variety of community affairs. I feel honored to work with someone with such experience and have learned much about the art of being an accompanist from this collaboration. It’s about listening while one is playing, trying to stay out of the singer’s way on the one hand, and filling in while she is not singing.

While I am not a naturally gifted pianist or have I had much formal training, I continue to try to improve my skills by listening to a number of pianists I greatly admire such as the late Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans.

It was perplexing to read some obituaries of Oscar Peterson who died just last month. A few critics said Peterson’s work was derivative or unemotional. While I was in college I had the privilege of seeing him at Birdland and ever since I have been in awe of his incredible keyboard abilities and followed his recordings. More than forty years later in 2006 he made his final appearance at Birdland to celebrate his 81st birthday. This is after he had had a stroke in 1993, underwent extensive rehabilitation, and learned to play again with his left hand partially impaired.

All artists build upon the base of the past and if Peterson “sounded like” other jazz pianists at times, he also advanced the art to another level. I think he could play more notes within a measure than any other pianist, classical or jazz. And his light touch never strayed too far from the melody and the intention of the composer, perhaps a shortcoming of some later avant-garde jazz styles. Goodbye Oscar Peterson…. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ebo12xg4ws

Like Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans had extensive classical training and that was certainly evident in his interpretations and compositions. At times one can hear the spare, minimalist approach of an Erik Satie in his music, such as his rendition of My Foolish Heart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2LFVWBmoiw.

Evans is the consummate introspective artist, hunched over the piano as if he and it are one. His phrasing and chord voicing were innovative and unique. His numerous recordings, in my favorite jazz form, the trio, preserve his genius.

It was mindful of these two artists that I made two CDs at a professional studio last year. Not that my skills can be compared in any way to theirs. If you think of music as a language, they speak at a level I can only fleetingly understand, but I chose some of the pieces they’ve recorded and a few that they wrote. This was intended as an archival effort for private distribution to friends and relatives. The first album, Smile, was followed a few months later by Sentimental Mood.

The recording studio experience was intimidating, having about two hours to record the songs I selected for each CD and then an hour with the sound technician deciding what cuts to use and in some cases rerecording a song. I was given the option of wearing a headset to listen to what I recorded, and then merging different sections by picking up the song at a certain point. As I read chords and melody lines, and then improvise everything else, I rarely play a composition exactly the same way. Therefore, I opted to play each piece entirely through and then redoing it if I was not happy with the results. The six total hours in the studio were finally winnowed to two forty-five minute CDs. One of the pieces was an original composition I wrote to my wife, Ann: http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2008/01/annies-waltz.html

Rather than giving my own interpretation of the GAS, I reference the excellent article from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Songbook. My CD selections are simply my favorites, an eclectic group as evidenced by the list at the end of this entry.

I suppose every older generation has a level of intolerance of the music of the younger generation. My parents did not understand the Rock & Roll music of my youth, which we now refer to as the “oldies.” I am now guilty of not understanding today’s music ranging from rap to the fare served on American Idol. At least the oldies are memorable and singable. Will that apply to today’s popular music forty years from now?

A GAS melody is but one of the elements that makes the genre so timeless. Ultimately it is the perfect marriage of the melody and the lyrics, songs that carry meaning and drama, and can be interpreted by the performing artist. Thanks to the pioneers of the genre and their successors and performers, it will endure as long as people listen to music.

From Smile
Annie’s Waltz Music by Robert Hagelstein; Once Upon a Summertime Lyric by Johnny Mercer, Music by Eddie Barclay and Michel Legrand; A Day in the Life of a Fool Words by Carol Sigman, Music by Luiz Bonfa; Dindi Music by Antonio Carlos Jobim; How Insensitive Music by Antonio Carlos Jobim; Waltz for Debby Music by Bill Evans; Quiet Now Music by Denny Zeitlin; Someone to Watch Over Me Music by George Gershwin, Lyrics by Ira Gershwin; Love is Here to Stay Music by George Gershwin, Lyrics by Ira Gershwin; Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man Music by Jerome Kern, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; Ol’ Man River Music by Jerome Kern, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face Words by Alan Jay Lerner, Music by Frederick Loewe; Losing My Mind Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; Anyone Can Whistle Words and Music by Stephen Sondheim; Not While I’m Around Lyric and Music by Stephen Sondheim; I Won’t Send Roses Music & Lyric by Jerry Herman; Look for Small Pleasures Music by Mark Sandrich, Jr., Lyrics by Sidney Michaels; Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ Music by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; That’s All Words and Music by Alan Brandt and Bob Haymes; Blame it On My Youth Words by Edward Heyman, Music by Oscar Levant; Love Changes Everything Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart; Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lyrics by Charles Hart; The Point of No Return Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lyrics by Charles Hart; Memory Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Text by Trevor Nunn after T.S. Eliot; Someone Like You and This Is The Moment Lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, Music by Frank Wildhorn; Smile Words by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons, Music by Charlie Chaplin

From Sentimental Mood
In a Sentimental Mood by Duke Ellington, Irving Mills and Manny Kurtz; Time After Time Lyric by Sammy Cahn; Music by Jule Styne; Moon River Words by Johnny Mercer; Music by Henry Mancini; How My Heart Sings by Earl Zindars; Once I Loved Music by Antonio Carlos Jobim; English Lyrics by Ray Gilbert; Nobody’s Heart Words by Lorenz Hart; Music by Richard Rodgers; Old Cape Cod by Claire Rothrock, Milt Yakus and Allan Jeffrey; Charlie Brown Christmas by Lee Medelson and Vince Guaraldi; Take Five by Paul Desmond; Fortuitous by Bill Oliver; Laurentide Waltz by Oscar Peterson; Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most Lyric by Fran Landesman; Music by Tommy Wolf; A Cottage for Sale Words by Larry Conley; Music by Willard Robison; Bewitched Words by Lorenz Hart, Music by Richard Rodgers; Where Your Lover Has Gone by E.A. Swan; Mona Lisa by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans; Isn't It a Pity? Lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Music by George Gershwin; What's the Use of Wond'rin' Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Music by Richard Rodgers; Another Suitcase in Another Hall and Don't Cry for Me Argentina Words by Tim Rice, Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber; Tell Me On a Sunday Lyrics by Don Black, Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber; Not a Day Goes By Words and Music by Stephen Sondheim; They Say It's Wonderful by Irving Berlin; Like Someone in Love By Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen; My One and Only Love Words by Robert Mellin, Music by Guy Wood; Solitude by Duke Ellington, Eddie DeLange, and Irving Mills; Look for the Silver Lining Words by Buddy DeSylva, Music by Jerome Kern