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Published: Tuesday, 03 December 2024 at 11:57 AM
Best jazz pianists: 15 of the greatest piano players in the history of jazz
The piano has been central to the development of jazz music, but just who are the best jazz pianists of all time? Here are, or what we think are, the greatest jazz pianists ever, but have we ever missed your favourite?
Best jazz pianists: the top 15
15. Dave Brubeck (1920-2012)
Dave Brubeck was incredibly well known for most of his career. His early success with college audiences – the Brubeck Quartet virtually invented the campus circuit – catapulted him on to the cover of Time magazine in 1954. (The pianist’s reaction was embarrassment: he felt Duke Ellington deserved the honour.)
In 1960 his star status increased with the album Time Out. Brubeck’s mixture of asymmetrical rhythms and catchy tunes won international renown, though the disc’s biggest hit, the sinuous ‘Take Five’, was written by the quartet’s alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, with some structural advice from his boss.
But, as all too often in jazz, popular celebrity inspired critical condescension. He was slated for his ‘academic’ approach – he had studied with Darius Milhaud, classical composer and member of the French collective Les Six – his use of such classical devices as counterpoint and polytonality, his sometimes thunderous keyboard attack and disinclination to swing in a conventional manner.
Critics damned his lyricism with faint praise and dismissed him from the jazz tradition. However, over the years, as the idea of a monolithic tradition has become suspect, Brubeck has come to be seen as a remarkable, original talent.
Far from being some kind of uptight academic, he had trouble reading music and was one of the most purely intuitive pianists jazz has produced. His style was founded completely on a commitment to musical expression, fuelled by a belief that, as he once put it, ‘jazz should have the right to take big chances’ – even going beyond what has been considered jazz.
Where to start with Dave Brubeck
A handsome survey is contained in The Essential Dave Brubeck, a two-CD set selected by the pianist, ranging from a freewheeling trio in 1949 to the recent quartet. Particularly impressive is his partnership with Paul Desmond, whose wit, swing and invention provided a lucid foil for Brubeck’s experimental ardour. The classic quartet, with Desmond and super- drummer Joe Morello, is well represented, including tracks from Time Out and Time Further Out.
14. Chick Corea (1941-2021)
Acoustic, electric, latin, free – Chick Corea’s career seems to have touched all the bases in today’s jazz scene. Yet that variety is firmly centred in some abiding principles: a passion for music, the piano, and performance. They were a kind of birthright.
The son of a professional musician, Corea grew up surrounded by music. Piano lessons instilled his well-grounded technique and love of the classical tradition. At the same time, he got into jazz, particularly the hard bop attack of pianist Horace Silver.
Formal education frustrated Chick Corea. After a few weeks first at Columbia University, then at Juilliard, where he’d been accepted to major in the piano, he left to commit himself to jazz. Working with all kinds of bands, and absorbing all kinds of styles – with a special fondness for fiery Latin rhythms – Corea built a reputation as composer and player, confirmed in such albums as Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, with bassist Miroslav Vitous and master-drummer Roy Haynes.
In 1968, Corea’s career took a leap with a call from Miles Davis. Corea’s tenure with Davis included the epoch-making Bitches Brew, but he found the electronic ambience too fragmented, lacking ‘romance or drama’. He sought those qualities in solo improvisations and with Circle, a free-form trio, then subsequently formed the quintet Return to Forever in 1972.
The latter featured electric instruments, a vocalist and such exuberant originals as ‘La Fiesta’. But Corea still found drama in acoustic music – scintillating duets with vibes virtuoso Gary Burton and his reconstituted trio with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes.
Where to start with Chick Corea
For the last 20 years Corea has followed his instincts in multiple directions, touring solo, and with both ‘Elektric’ and ‘Akoustic’ bands. Corea once said he sought to combine ‘the discipline and beauty of the classical composers with the rhythmic dancing quality of jazz’ – which is an apt description of the recordings in his personal ECM compilation Crystal Silence.
Ranging from Return to Forever’s joyously lyrical ‘La Fiesta’ to the extraordinary trios with Vitous and Haynes, their impassioned creativity continues to inspire to this day.
13. Cecil Taylor (1929- 2018)
It might seem odd to include an entry for a musician whom a fair number of critics don’t consider a jazz musician at all. But in a way, that’s jazz – a question-begging activity, defying easy categories with the force of its energy and excitement.
And even listeners who dispute Cecil Taylor’s jazz credentials wouldn’t deny his creative intensity. They’d just protest that his furious, free-form piano improvisations, pummelling the keyboard with fingers, fists and forearms, bearing no relation to metre or melody and often lasting well over an hour, belong to the European avant-garde, not African-American tradition.
But Taylor himself has always disagreed. Though conservatory-trained and possessing a virtuoso technique, he regards jazz as black music, his way, he once said, ‘of holding on to Negro culture’. His fascination with the rhythmic and harmonic abstractions of Stravinsky and Bartók, Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano gave way to the potency of African-American pianists: Ellington, Monk, Horace Silver.
Revelling in what he called ‘the physicality, the filth, the movement in the attack’, the young Taylor made it his own. He viewed the piano as percussive – ‘88 tuned drums’, his style an amalgam he dubbed ‘rhythm-sound-energy’.
His ultimate inspiration was the very force of nature: ‘music is as close as I can become to a mountain, tree or river’. Though that kind of mysticism may seem a long way from blues and swing, Taylor’s work has its own intoxication. And in his debut album, Jazz Advance, from 1956, blues and swing are still manifest – his trio and quartet, with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, tackle a programme by Taylor himself, Monk, Ellington, even Cole Porter.
Where to start with Ceil Taylor
But Taylor’s approach is already breathtakingly unique. Every tune becomes a Taylor original, recreated by the pianist’s knack for generating new shapes, solos which follow their own motivic logic, oblique, asymmetrical, framed by rhythmic precision and the clarity of his touch.
His coherence is not about spinning out licks or getting in a groove. He hollows out his own musical dimension, startling and exhilarating. Jazz Advance is an ideal introduction, a prelude to the torrential flights which have made Taylor legendary.
12. Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941)
As a matter of right, Jelly Roll Morton would have assumed that any jazz starter collection would begin with him. After all, he once proudly proclaimed, ‘I myself invented jazz in the year of 1902’. Grandiosity was his lifelong style: pianist, composer, leader; pool-shark, pimp and hustler – there was something mythic about Jelly, right down – or up – to the glittering diamond in one of his front teeth.
People resented his arrogance, but as one of his musicians put it, ‘Sure he bragged, but he could back up everything he said.’ And while he may not have invented jazz, he was arguably the first great jazz composer, the man who proved it was possible to realise both a compelling structure and spontaneous excitement.
The key to his achievement was a many-sided and acute musical imagination, steeped in the cultural melting pot of New Orleans. Morton absorbed all the riches the Crescent City had to offer – blues, ragtime, marches, grand opera, quadrilles and the ‘Spanish tinge’ he maintained was essential to jazz. His piano style displays all these influences, at once refined and raffish, encompassing elegant turns and trills, barrelhouse chords and a strain of melancholy lyricism.
The same qualities suffuse his orchestral works. Morton first formed the band he called Red Hot Peppers in Chicago in 1926, and their recordings will come as a revelation to anyone who thinks of early jazz as raucous and one-dimensional. Morton’s men were all masters of the vibrant New Orleans style, and gave his compositions just the right interpretative and improvisatory gusto.
The pieces themselves are at once joyful and subtle, strutting and sonorous, demonstrating Morton’s instinct for structure, detail, colour and dynamics. ‘Black Bottom Stomp’ or ‘Grandpa’s Spells’ provide textbook examples of a superbly crafted sequence of instrumental effects and combinations, building to an exuberant climax.
Where to start with Jelly Roll Morton
The whole of Morton’s recorded output from 1926 to 1930 is available on a five-CD set from JSP. In it, Jelly stakes his claim not only to be ‘Dr Jazz’ (as he crows on one of his most famous discs), but the creator of a unique corner of 20th-century music.
11. Fats Waller (1904-1943)
Depending on his mood, Fats Waller could be ‘the cheerful little earful’ or ‘the harmful little armful’. Usually, he was both, winning a huge following in the 1930s and ’40s with his high-spirited, satirical takes on run-of-the-mill popular songs. He transformed his material with a sense of humour, ebullient vocal style and the infectious swing enshrined in the name of his jumping sextet: Fats Waller and His Rhythm.
But jazz fans and musicians prized Waller’s glittering piano style. He was a product of the demanding school of New York stride players, whose formidable technique was matched by competitive zest. They challenged each other wherever there was a piano and Waller often prevailed with his sparkling invention and the dexterity, power and finesse you might expect from a sometime pupil of Leopold Godowsky. Waller’s taste for classical music was as natural to him as his genius for swing.
He rated JS Bach the third greatest man in history (after Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D Roosevelt) and performed his works on an organ at home. And his own evergreen compositions – such as ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ – exhibit the same kind of refinement as his piano touch. Some of his colleagues believed that his subtler side was frustrated by the non-stop levity that his popular reputation required.
That frustration may have fuelled the heavy drinking which, along with his exhausting routine, led to his death at 39 in 1943. But his many recordings display all the facets of a unique personality, from his demolition of woeful tunes like ‘The Curse of an Aching Heart’ to such famous taglines as ‘One never knows, do one?’, which crowns ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’, to the sheer rampaging abandon of ‘Shortnin’ Bread’.
Where to start with Fats Waller
All these gifts from the Waller legacy are included in a selection called Ain’t Misbehavin’, with sterling performances of ‘Blue Turnin’ Grey Over You’ and ‘Jitterbug Waltz’, which features Waller on organ. And gleaming everywhere are the delights of his playing, which set a standard for those he inspired. As the greatest of jazz keyboard virtuosos Art Tatum once put it when asked about his influences, ‘Fats, man, that’s where I come from. Quite a place to come from.’
Best jazz pianists: the top 10
10. Count Basie (1904-1984)
Count Basie’s name brings to mind associations that might seem contradictory: a famously minimalist piano style and the celebrated big band he led for 50 years. In fact, the two were perfect complements. The Basie band took much of its character from the subtle way the Count’s pithy, elliptical attack framed his shouting brass and saxes. More crucially, Basie’s touch set the tone for the band’s rhythm section; the light, insistent pulse that generated the irresistible current of swing that lifted soloists and ensemble to heights of inspired excitement.
That excitement hit the big time beginning in 1936, when the Basie crew came east from Kansas City (KC). Their success was based on a simple formula of creating in an ensemble the spontaneity and fire of small-group jazz. The key was the band’s line-up of great soloists, including tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans and trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry Edison.
Original tunes, uncomplicated but driving, provided a jumping-off point for solos backed by riffs which seemed a corporate extension of the solos themselves. And underpinning the whole was Basie and his floating, insinuating rhythm. The results can be heard in any number of records, including Basie’s famous ‘One O’Clock Jump’, a string of solo choruses building to a churning climax. But that unique sound depended on the strength of its components.
When his stars departed, and the swing era waned, Basie changed tack. While the Basie band of the ’50s boasted first-rate players, it emphasised power, precision and well-crafted arrangements. The Count’s deft piano still produced an infectious rolling swing, but many jazz fans felt this sleek unit was a different creature from the lean, mean cat from KC.
But the latter group had some appealing hits, including ‘April in Paris’, with Basie’s ‘one more time’ tag, and the languid arrangement by Neal Hefti, ‘Li’l Darlin’’.
9. Earl Hines (1903-1983)
A few years ago a correspondent to Radio 3’s Jazz Record Requests described Earl Hines as ‘underplayed, largely unavailable and probably underestimated’. It’s a fair summary of a situation that, in the 1930s, would have been unthinkable.
Then, Hines was riding high, the king of the keyboard, a byword for invention, technique, daring and dazzlement – the man who turned piano playing into a kind of Olympic event, inspiring a whole generation.
A groundbreaking series of recordings, both solo and with his fellow trailblazer, Louis Armstrong, catapulted him to fame in the ’20s. Through the ’30s and ’40s, Hines led a big band, which, in its latter days, included such bebop pioneers as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In 1948, he joined forces with Armstrong again, as a member of Louis’s All-Stars, and then in the ’50s he went off on his own.
Musical fashion restricted Hines to the well-trodden paths of Dixieland, and by 1960, he was thinking of retiring. But in 1964, a sensational set of solo concerts in New York put him back on top, where he stayed, playing with authority until his death in 1983, short of his 80th birthday.
Where to start with Earl Hines
Naxos’s compilation, The Earl, presents a vintage selection of performances from 1928 to 1941, showcasing his trademarks – the ‘trumpet-style’ right hand, which projected melodies with the bright, attacking power of a lead instrument, cascading, asymmetrical forays which could start and stop anywhere, overturning metre and harmony, and a left hand which seemed to operate independently, launching off-beat chords and chromatic runs.
It was exhilarating, as though the oom-pah rhythms of stride and ragtime had gone cubist. Hines loved the sense of drama palpable on ‘Weather Bird’, his duet with Armstrong. As the pianist once put it, ‘I go out in deep water and I always try to get back’. He always did, with every wrong-footing flourish finding its way home.
The Naxos disc includes tracks by his big band but I prefer his solo piano magic, which abounds in the set he made in the ’70s devoted to Duke Ellington. A blend of audacity and majesty, exuberance and meditation, it’s a monument to the legacy of Hines.
8. Art Tatum (1909-1956)
There was something almost mythic about Art Tatum from the beginning. Pianists hearing his first solo recordings in 1933 assumed there had to be more than one person playing: such terrifying virtuosity could not come from a single pair of hands.
And yet the amiable prodigy from Ohio – virtually blind from birth – soon became a familiar if still incredible presence on New York’s scene and beyond. Though his style was based on the high-powered facility of such stride masters as Fats Waller, Tatum took their keyboard feats to another level, not just in digital dexterity but in a harmonic and rhythmic command which produced spontaneous transformations of standard tunes.
Dazzling sequences of new chords and keys defied the barlines before returning, with nonchalant precision, to the original structure. Tatum’s mastery was universally acknowledged. When he entered a club where Fats Waller was playing Waller announced, ‘I play piano, but God is in the house tonight.’ And his reputation extended beyond jazz: experiencing Tatum in a 52nd Street club, Vladimir Horowitz exclaimed, ‘I don’t believe my eyes and ears.’
- Vladimir Horowitz finished high in our list of the greatest pianists of all time
Tatum was essentially a jazz musician, relishing musical immediacy. He loved to hang out in after-hours clubs, seeming to take delight in coaxing wonders out of clapped-out pianos, transcending their stuck keys and dodgy tuning till they glittered like concert grands.
Where to start with Art Tatum
Toward the end of his life – which came prematurely in 1956 at the age of 47 – Tatum was recorded at length in scrupulous studio conditions. But a pair of happy sessions from the same period occurred at the home of a Hollywood music director and Tatum devotee. Issued as a two-CD set on Verve, the occasions were an informal homage.
The sound is good and the atmosphere makes up for the few blemishes inevitable in live recording. One gem succeeds another: the likes of ‘Tenderly’, ‘Too Marvellous for Words’, and ‘Body and Soul’ shine with the pianist’s brilliance. They leave you awestruck, shaking your head and inclined to agree with the critic who declared, ‘Ask ten pianists to name the greatest jazz pianist ever and eight will tell you Art Tatum. The other two are wrong.’
7. Oscar Peterson (1925-2007)
When Oscar Peterson died, he received the kind of multi-column obituaries that are usually reserved for star entertainers, not jazz musicians. But he was a special sort of jazzman, a pianistic phenomenon who spent his long career bestriding mainstream culture, equally at home in a club as the Albert Hall.
The most obvious key to his renown was his amazing technique, an awesome facility rare in jazz, but which Peterson simply regarded as a measure of sincerity. As he once put it, ‘the whole idea of jazz is that if you think of a phrase, you should be able to play it’. He had no patience with half-articulated fumbling, and his racing mind was matched by his flying fingers.
Classical lessons began early in his native Montreal, with a teacher who had studied with a pupil of Liszt, to whom he saw a resemblance in the young Peterson. In 1949, at the age of 24, Peterson made a sensational US debut, bringing the house down at a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert (JATP) in New York.
- Franz Liszt: five essential works
- How Liszt invented the piano recital and became a 19th-century pin-up
The JATP’s founder, Norman Granz, became his mentor, and the star’s career took off, accompanying a host of jazz legends and leading his own groups. He expanded his partnership with the bassist Ray Brown to create two trios, the first with guitarist Herb Ellis, who was replaced in 1958 by drummer Ed Thigpen.
‘This might just be the way Liszt would play jazz’
But the pianist did have his detractors, who resented his accomplishment: for some, his cascades of notes seemed superficial, compared to the craggy directness of, say, Thelonious Monk. But his accomplishment was real, an authentic expression of his love of jazz and performance. He was a great communicator, and his sense of joy as well as his gifts earned him an audience of millions, and the respect and admiration of his peers.
Where to start with Oscar Peterson
Though bad health – including a stroke in 1993 – slowed him down, he continued to delight his fans until close to his death, aged 83. And there is plenty of delight in such recordings as Night Train, a 1960s array of blues and standards. As Peterson shakes the piano with a chorus of thundering, double-fisted tremolos, you may think, ‘well yes, this might just be the way Liszt would play jazz’.
6. Erroll Garner (1921-1977)
Since Erroll Garner left the scene nearly 50 years ago in 1977, it’s hard to convey what a phenomenon he really was. Without making any conscious attempt at celebrity, the elfin pianist became that rare thing: a jazz musician who was also a household name. He attracted a huge audience solely by exuberant improvisation, love of good tunes and utterly infectious swing.
Garner’s talent for giving musical pleasure appeared early. From the age of ten, in his native Pittsburgh, he was a radio star, building a daunting reputation in local jazz circles during the 1930s. When an aspiring pianist named Art Blakey came up against Garner at a jam session, he decided he’d better switch to drums.
In 1944, Garner made his move to New York, impressing contemporaries with an originality that, in its wit, drive and virtuosity, harked back to giants such as Fats Waller and Earl Hines. Yet his quick-silver harmonic sense and twisting, questing lines struck a chord with the young lions of bebop. Indeed, some critics dubbed Garner a ‘disciple’ of bop’s chief keyboard luminary, Bud Powell.
But at a private piano conclave, Bud hid in the kitchen after Garner played, to avoid following him. Finally, the young pianist sounded like nobody but himself, and assumed top-rank status, performing with the likes of Charlie Parker.
Where to start with Erroll Garner
Even more remarkably, he became popular with the mainstream public, winning a devoted following in person, on records and TV. That quality of sheer delight informs every moment of Erroll’s celebrated Concert by the Sea, recorded live in California with a trio in 1955. Here are all the Garner trademarks – the impish, stalking introduction to ‘I Remember April’ which segues into feather-light melody, driven along by the pianist’s pulsating four-to-the-bar left hand; the shifts in dynamics, Romantic flourishes, plunging asymmetrical octaves; dancing, blues-inflected lines that sweep forward to a chordal climax.
And the hushed, spellbinding ballads that conjure Debussy one minute, Rachmaninov the next. Outside of the music, all we hear is Garner’s occasional guttural rasps and the palpable rapture of the audience which, even today, I’m sure you’ll share.
Best jazz pianists: the top five
5. Keith Jarrett (b. 1945)
Depending on your view, Keith Jarrett’s status is either problematic or exalted. Is he a pianist whose gifts are compromised by grandiose flights of whimsy or, as a critic put it, one who ‘uniquely connects to a type of universal/musical consciousness’? For Jarrett, jazz is not a tradition or a vocabulary, but a spiritual process that involves opening yourself to true creativity; ‘an attempt,’ he said once, ‘over and over again, to reveal the heart of things.’
When I first encountered Keith Jarrett at a Stan Kenton music camp in 1961, he was a bright 16 year-old who could play brilliantly in any style, jazz or classical, not to mention his own. No surprise that he became a star with the Charles Lloyd Quartet, from 1967-70, whose flower-power ethos suited him perfectly. Subsequently, he led his own groups, but it was with his solo concerts from 1972 that he reached cult celebrity.
Jarrett’s free-form improvisations would start with no prior theme or direction and cover all manner of idioms, from gospel vamps to Romantic rhapsodies, propelled for up to an hour by an intense lyricism. Just as intense was his manner – flailing, moaning and gasping. The heady atmosphere came through on record: his 1975 Köln Concert sold over a million.
Solo improvisation continued to be central to Jarrett’s work. Besides piano, he’s recorded on clavichord, pipe organ and soprano sax, plus – on the home-made multi-tracked project Spirits – ethnic flutes and percussion.
Where to start with Keith Jarrett
Revealingly, such tracks comprise the bulk of the material Keith Jarrett selected for his 2-CD retrospective in ECM’s :rarum series. But there are also examples of his ensemble partnerships with saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and the Standards trio, which Jarrett formed in 1983 with his fellow virtuosos, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette.
The Standards trio has become the pianist’s regular touring group, exploring tunes from the treasure trove of American popular songs and classic jazz themes as well as originals. On albums such as Up for It, the results are sublime: focused and intelligent, spontaneous and inspired, joyful and swinging. Whether you accept all Jarrett’s views on jazz, this music is the real thing.
4. Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
Since jazz is usually celebrated as an improvisor’s art, it may seem paradoxical that one of its major figures was a composer. Though Duke Ellington was a notable pianist, he declared, ‘My band is my instrument,’ and for over half a century he made it the medium of a peerless body of work.
For Ellington, composition was never an abstract process, but a direct response to people and situations. He once said, ‘I see something and want to make a tone parallel,’ and the titles of his works are a catalogue of incidents, encounters and atmospheres. ‘Haunted Nights’, ‘The Mooche’, ‘Daybreak Express’, ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ – every Ellington piece enshrines a life in motion, pursued with spontaneity.
And Ellington’s lifelong companions were the members of his band – among them the gutbucket growls of trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams, the arching sensuousness of altoist Johnny Hodges and the rumbling majesty of Harry Carney’s baritone. As individual and sometimes contrary a set of virtuosos as ever shared a bandstand, he composed with these sounds and personalities in his head, writing specifically for them.
And they provided the raw material for his astonishing originality in harmony and orchestration. To many, Ellington may have been known for such lush popular hits as ‘Sophisticated Lady’, but his colleagues recognised an attainment of another order. As Miles Davis put it, ‘Some day all the jazz musicians should get together in one place and go down on their knees and thank Duke.’
Where to start with Duke Ellington
Many critics think Ellington’s finest period was 1940-42, and The Blanton-Webster Band offers a complete chronicle of magnificent music, a sequence of three-minute masterpieces which still dazzle by their variety, daring and sheer creative brilliance.
But for a single-disc overview of the ducal experience, try a compilation which was linked to Ken Burns’s BBC documentary from 2000. Jazz: The Definitive Duke Ellington includes masterpieces from 1927 to 1960, featuring the major Ellington voices and providing a compelling cross-section of an extraordinary accomplishment.
3. Bud Powell (1924-66)
All too often, the begetters of bebop confirmed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Many, such as Charlie Parker, died young, burned out by the music’s drug-ridden lifestyle. But the fate of Bud Powell, who had as revolutionary an impact on the piano as Parker did on the saxophone, may be more poignant.
A shy, reclusive personality, Powell’s career was blighted by a police beating, periods in mental institutions, alcoholism and TB. During his last decade, his playing veered between flickers of brilliance and painful, fumbling approximation, until his death in 1966 aged 41. There wasn’t a single jazz pianist who didn’t bear the imprint of his fiery creativity. He set both the terms for the modern keyboard style and, in his heyday, an almost terrifying standard of performance.
A Powell piano solo wasn’t so much played as unleashed, its momentum combining dazzling imagination and uncanny technical lucidity. His up-tempo feats were astonishing, as his right hand sent lines spinning over the keyboard, with riffs and bursts of melody punctuated by his left. That non-stop linear virtuosity became the hallmark of bebop piano, but what made him unique was his variety of accent and nuance. This was no mechanical stream of quavers, but a torrent of ideas – accompanied by the pianist’s groans, as if reflecting the intensity of his inspiration.
Where to start with Bud Powell
And his ballads were no less highly charged, if more lush and rhapsodic, conveying a trance-like immersion in his instrument. All those qualities illuminate Tempus Fugue-It, a Properbox chockful of vintage Powell. Even early on he is centre of attention, and his later work with Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins does justice to his gifts. His invention is exemplified in two takes of ‘Fine and Dandy’ made within minutes of each other, pairing Powell and tenor saxist Sonny Stitt. Unfazed by the lightning tempo, Powell comes up with equally amazing solos each time.
A Powell piano solo wasn’t so much played as unleashed
His trio performances are more remarkable, turning hoary standards like ‘Indiana’ into blazing revelations. Such achievements are what Bill Evans, one of his heirs, had in mind when he declared that Powell’s ‘insight and talent were unmatched in hard-core, true jazz’.
2. Bill Evans (1929-1980)
In the rakish, outsider’s world of jazz, Bill Evans seemed an anomaly. Bespectacled and unassuming, he had a clerical air which prompted a bandleader to nickname him ‘the minister’. Yet at the piano – head bent over the keys, eyes closed – he was the image of intensity, spinning out the luminous, questing lines Miles Davis likened to ‘quiet fire’.
It was his tenure with Davis’s legendary 1958 sextet that made Evans a star, particularly his crucial role in the perennially best-selling album Kind of Blue, recorded the following year. Davis brought the pianist back into the band for this project, knowing his touch would be ideal for its open-ended, modal lyricism. In a series of recordings made mostly with trios, Evans’s unique style won him a celebrity status of his own.
His purity of sound, and genius for harmonies and voicings, earned him a reputation as ‘the Chopin of jazz’. Indeed, Bill Evans knew much of the classical repertoire: he’d performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto at college and regularly practised Bach.
But his devotion to jazz was primary, as was his conviction that its essence was emotion. Though he took a rigorous view of what he called ‘the extremely severe and unique disciplines’ of jazz, and disparaged wild-eyed abandon, he regarded feeling as the ‘generating force’. That quality of feeling informs the trio recordings he made live at the Village Vanguard in 1961.
Evans’s group marked a revolution in trio-playing: the pianist encouraged virtuoso bassist Scott LaFaro not simply to lay down a beat, but to engage in dialogue. Their subtle interplay, with drummer Paul Motian, illuminates such tunes as Evans’s lilting ‘Waltz for Debby’ and LaFaro’s brooding ‘Jade Visions’.
Where to start with Bill Evans
Though some critics found Evans’s art too inward-looking, he could swing too. Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a case in point, with the pianist’s bright, sharp-angled attack supported by the straight-ahead drive of bassist Sam Jones and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
Yet the disc also features spellbinding ballads and Evans’s solo classic ‘Peace Piece’. Derived from Chopin’s Op. 57 Berceuse, it’s a mesmerising demonstration of why Bill Evans influenced every jazz pianist who followed him.
And the greatest jazz pianist of all time is…
1. Thelonious Monk (1917-1982)
Even people who don’t know much about jazz are aware that jazz musicians are meant to be ‘characters’ – free-spirited types whose absorption in music generates bizarre behaviour. Though this hipster mythology is exaggerated, it seemed made for Thelonious Monk.
His mystique was compounded by his unforgettable name (albeit the same as his father’s), his taste for exotic headgear, a penchant for breaking into impromptu dances on the bandstand and a jabbing, idiosyncratic piano style punctuated by the silences which also marked his everyday demeanour. But Monk’s media status as the ‘high priest of bebop’ obscured the real nature of his achievement.
At a time when modern jazz was dominated by harmonic legerdemain and omnivorous technique, he showed that a deep-rooted personal vision was still possible. Monk’s compositions were unlike anyone else’s, full of curiously stretched and sharply angled chords, wrong-footing rhythms, melodies that could be gnomic, rich or grainily lyrical.
He defied facility. When you played Monk, you played him on his terms, and his best interpreter was probably himself. His approach to the piano could seem splayed and halting – one fleet-fingered rival dismissed him as ‘hamstrung’ – but he could produce marvellous, probing colours, somehow getting in between the keys to make the piano seem the ultimate blues instrument.
And he swung enormously, with spikey accents and clangorous, tumbling runs. As a soloist or accompanist, his timing was perfect, and he could galvanise a rhythm section by knowing exactly when and when not to play. Listening to Monk can easily become a lifelong habit, since what he has to offer is unavailable anywhere else.
Where to start with Thelonious Monk
Perhaps the best place to start is with the Blue Note compilation Thelonious Monk – Finest in Jazz, a collection of classics (‘Round Midnight’, ‘Misterioso’, ‘Straight No Chaser’) imbued with his quirky magic. By now the cult of his supposed eccentricity has waned. Like all the best jazz, Monk’s music is a permanent presence.