In the days of my youth, I rocked, and I rolled. I also got gothic, I raved til dawn, I reggaed to the rhythm, and I funked it up. Pick a pop music style, and I gave it my best go.
These days, I get excited about old jazz piano records. Not that you can't be a hip young hellraiser and still be a jazz piano fan. Heck, back in the 1940s and 50s, all those jazz pianists themselves were mad, bad, and dangerous to know, striding the 88s and the mean streets like hopheads out of Naked Lunch. (Well, some of them were a little more mild-mannered than that.) All the same, 19-year-old me would be aghast to think that I could someday appreciate any such congenial-sounding music. But middle age comes for many of us, and great jazz piano is really fine stuff. Let me tell you about my favorite jazz piano players.
It all goes back to around 1700 in Florence, when Prince Ferdinando de Medici's favorite harpsichord tuner, Bartolomeo Cristofiori, came up with a new kind of instrument. A harpsichord is sort of like a zither that you operate with a keyboard: when you strike a key, a quill inside plucks the corresponding string. That makes a cool sound, but every note is the same volume—there's no way to play softer or louder or more expressively. Anything fast or complex winds up sounding like a big racket. Cristofiori's pianoforte, a word combining the Italian words for 'soft' and 'loud,' is more like a dulcimer that you operate with a keyboard. Or as he called it in full: gravicembalo col piano, e forte, that is, harpsichord with soft and loud. When you play the keys, felted hammers strike the metal strings inside, which are strung with great tension across a cast-iron frame set inside a wooden box with a sounding board. You can play gently or thunderously, staccato and dry or languorous with sustain and overtones. Whereas a saxophone plays a single melody line, more or less, on piano, you can play lead, harmony, and rhythm all at the same time, commanding the full range of modes and chords. It's a percussion instrument, a melodic instrument, and a harmonic world, with tone colors from rumbling bass to tinkling treble.
In 1747, Bach tried the piano and liked it. He was about 55 then and had spent most of his career composing for harpsichord and organ. While visiting the court of King Frederick II of Prussia, he fooled around on some newfangled Silbermann pianos and shortly thereafter composed his first great piece for piano, the Musical Offering, incorporating a theme improvised by the king. Mozart and Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and John Cage would follow, as the piano was steadily developed into a bigger, brighter-sounding, more resonant instrument with 88 keys across seven and a quarter octaves.
The middle class blossomed in the 19th century, and the piano came to be seen as a symbol of prosperity, a necessary furnishing for any civilized parlor. Society's most eligible entertained their circle; schoolchildren were drilled in scales and given recitals. Then, around 1899, the Victorian piano boom collided felicitously with the birth of jazz.
The twentieth century was ablaze with great jazz pianists, famous names that every music fan knows. Innovators like Jelly Roll Morton, born Ferdinand LaMothe in New Orleans, fused bits of classical music, spirituals, musical theater, and pop songs into a new style called ragtime, syncopated and improvisational. Harlem stride pianists James P. Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith played it harder and more swinging, the left hand striding relentlessly back and forth between bass notes and chords. Fats Waller achieved stardom as a virtuosic performer and composer. Art Tatum is still the gold standard of technique, playing impossibly fast and precise runs with both hands sweeping up and down the keys. Duke Ellington led his own jazz orchestra for decades, composing and arranging a whole canon of standards along the way. Two pianists adapted Charlie Parker's new bebop style to the piano in very different ways: Bud Powell attacked the keyboard, playing fast, chromatic runs with his right hand and block chords with his left. Thelonious Monk's style and compositions were brilliantly strange, full of odd pauses and dissonances as idiosyncratic as his haberdashery, a kind of futuristic devolution of old-time stride.
Since the 50s, a whole galaxy of jazz piano stars has followed them across the heavens: Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, George Shearing, Ahmad Jamal. Farther-out players like Keith Jarrett and Cecil Taylor expanded the possibilities. And jazz piano is still going strong today, with the likes of Brad Mehldau and Vijay Iyer putting their own contemporary spin on the tradition.
All those folks are fantastic, of course, and most of them you've probably heard. The stuff I will be recommending is maybe a bit lesser-known. I tend to favor a particular kind of sound, which I can only describe as a dry, mellow, midrange, midcentury plonk. To me, a dusty old upright recorded on basic gear in a basic 1940s studio sounds more appealing than a rich, crashing Steinway concert grand recorded in the latest maximum fidelity. There's something about that plaintive, dinky, rainy afternoon sound of an old piano record—the mood feels moodier, and the strangeness rings stranger.
Also, this is the mild list, not the wild list. These records are not especially confrontational or acrobatic, but some of them are still pretty advanced. Cecil Taylor famously dissed Bill Evans' gentle, understated playing as "cocktail music." I guess if you agree with that allegation, then this is happy hour. (Miles Davis, for what it's worth, called it "quiet fire.")
You can enjoy these recordings on the library's streaming partners, hoopla and Freegal, always accessible with your library card—and if you can find them on old vinyl records instead, they sound even better that way!
In no particular order:
Hank Jones
Hank Jones' playing is melodic, wistful, sprightly, and assured; he's sometimes compared to Art Tatum, though less flashy and more down-to-earth. His two younger brothers, trumpeter Thad and drummer Elvin, also had impressive careers, especially Elvin's work with John Coltrane's classic quartet on Impulse! Hank enjoyed increasing renown toward the end of his long life, passing away in 2010 at the age of 91; as a result, it's a lot easier to find albums from his later career. But that stuff pales in comparison to the magic of his early small-group sessions and solo recordings from the 1950s. He's perfectly paired with Johnny Smith or Barry Galbraith on guitar, spinning an easy, lyrical conversation through a set of lovely tunes. Check out Urbanity or The Talented Touch on hoopla—they feel like a stroll through the West Village on a spring day.
Lennie Tristano
Lennie Tristano is a musician's musician—and not an easy one to find on vinyl because he didn't record very much, and much of what he did release is abstruse and difficult. But he was very influential as a teacher and a theorist, and his handful of recordings from the late 1940s, accompanied by Billy Bauer on guitar and/or Lee Konitz on alto, are absolute knockouts. Tristano was a true original, building a bridge from highly disciplined modal improvisation all the way to what would later be called free jazz long before anyone else. Blind from the age of 10, he got his master's degree at the American Conservatory in Chicago and then moved to New York. Charlie Parker liked Tristano's angular, analytic approach to bebop, a rare instance of someone not trying to bite his own flamboyant style. Even Aaron Copland was impressed by Tristano's unprecedented recordings from 1949, in which the members of his group would plan only the timing of their entrances and improvise everything else—harmony, tempo, key, and melody, held together only by their telepathic contrapuntal interplay. Live, they would often intersperse these with Bach fugues. The sonic blasts collected on Very Best have a delightful wandering, disorienting quality, threatening to fly apart but somehow staying on the bop rails. He often gets lumped in with cool jazz, but his stuff is stranger than that. Tristano's antipathy to the record industry, as well as what many perceived as an overly cerebral quality to his playing, kept him from wider fame, but his prescience and adventurousness made him a touchstone for like-minded musicians from Charles Mingus to Anthony Braxton.
Mary Lou Williams
There aren't a lot of well-known female jazz piano players, a symptom of a pervasive bias that some attribute to women's supposed aversion to the rough-and-tumble late-night world of the working jazz musician and others to piano keyboards that have long been designed to suit larger male hands. But it's certainly not for lack of female talent, creativity, and drive, as brilliant players like Mary Lou Williams, Nina Simone, and Blossom Dearie proved. Mary Lou Williams would top any list of accomplished musicians, not just a list of female ones. Born in 1910 in Atlanta, she started playing piano as a child out of necessity, as she recounted to the Jazz Oral History Project: her white neighbors would throw bricks through the windows of her family home, and she got them to stop by giving them concerts and playing at their parties as "The Little Piano Girl." She toured the Orpheum circuit in her teens, impressing the likes of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, for whom she would later write and arrange. In the 1930s she was playing with Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy in Kansas City, putting her at the epicenter of a crucial new scene where she befriended a young Charlie Parker. Later, in New York in the 1940s, she had her own weekly radio show and mentored a coterie of younger bebop pioneers, including Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie. Because her career overlapped the transition from early jazz to bebop, she was comfortable in both worlds, as demonstrated on her wonderful 1955 album A Keyboard History, in which she traces its evolution from ragtime to stride to bop. For a while in the 1950s, she lived and toured in Europe, where she recorded the sparkling, wistful music collected on I Made You Love Paris. In 1954, she took a hiatus from performing and felt the call to convert to Catholicism. After she returned, she composed only sacred music, but just as joyfully and successfully as she once pounded out swinging rhythms in smoky dance halls. As she told Time in 1964, her playing was always soulful: "I am praying through my fingers when I play... I try to touch people's spirits." Mary Lou, along with Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and many lesser-known but similarly deserving talents, gets a chapter in the new book Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives, an enlightening corrective to the male-centric story of the piano by pianist and music critic Susan Tomes.
Barry Harris
Detroit is famous for soul music and rock & roll, but its jazz scene was always overshadowed by those of New York, Kansas City, New Orleans, and even Chicago and Los Angeles. One of its longstanding pillars was the great pianist Barry Harris, who, despite not being a household name, recorded with everyone from Miles Davis to Lee Morgan and mentored the likes of Donald Byrd and Joe Henderson. He was even Thelonious Monk's roommate for a while. Like Monk, he played bebop in a simultaneously old-fashioned and forward-thinking way, taking the jaunty style of Fats Waller but improvising something new in the nooks and crannies. I particularly love his high-flying reinvention of a chestnut like "The Londonderry Air" on Listen to Barry Harris... Solo Piano from 1961. Unconstrained by a rhythm section, he expands the tune to the shape of his imagination, each adventurous new motif seamlessly triggering another.
Dodo Marmarosa
The tragically forgotten but hugely inventive bebopper Michael "Dodo" Marmarosa is one of my very favorite piano players—and Charles Mingus' too, as he wrote in his enjoyable memoir Beneath the Underdog. His nickname probably didn't help. While Charlie Parker got the cool handle "Bird," Marmarosa was given the disparaging one "Dodo" for his big head and beaky nose. But musically, he was just as brilliant, and he even played on Bird's landmark sides, "Ornithology" and "Yardbird Suite." He grew up in Pittsburgh, displayed sufficient virtuosity in his teens to join Gene Krupa and Artie Shaw's big bands, and moved to Los Angeles in 1945. Playing in trad swing bands was a living, but after hours, he relentlessly pursued more advanced, abstract improvisations. As a leader, he ventured out into fascinating modernist waters, crisply navigating unusual changes and beguiling moods on the sides collected on The Complete Dial Sessions. Dodo was more than a little eccentric, as one of his drummers recalled: "He heard things in his head that he wasn't able to play, and it frustrated him… Once, he got mad at the old upright piano we had and chopped it up with an axe." Another bandmate recalled that he had a favorite telephone pole out in front of the club that he liked to talk to between sets. His oddities were likely set in motion years earlier by a terrible beating he got from a group of sailors on a Philadelphia subway platform, who mistook him for a draft dodger; it put Dodo in a coma for a day. In the early 1950s, its aftereffects began manifesting as mental and physical illness. He stopped recording and started behaving erratically, disappearing for weeks at a time and giving away his money. By 1963, the pianist who once topped the DownBeat polls was living in obscurity at his sister's home in Pittsburgh, playing occasionally at a local restaurant. He only recorded two more albums in the decades after that, and his passing in 2002 surprised many music critics who had assumed he had already been long since deceased. In The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Dick Katz wrote, "In the opinion of many, Dodo Marmarosa was the most gifted of all the pianists who figured in the bebop saga. Blessed with a beautiful legato touch and a fluid technique, he developed an original style, which [...] blended perfectly with the bop idiom... He combined advanced chordal and scalar elements with graceful rhythmic phrasing."
Charles Mingus
You know who else is a pretty good piano player? Charles Mingus! The irascible bassist was best known for leading large ensembles, blasting out his wildly ingenious and often irreverent creations. But in 1964, he surprised anyone who was listening with Mingus Plays Piano, which sounds like it might be the title of one of his pranks but turned out to be a superbly expressive solo piano album. It opens with "Myself When I Am Real," a hauntingly intense and tender seven-and-a-half-minute exploration with eerie shades of Debussy. Trills and thunder interlace with meditative passages on this spellbinding set, for which Mingus pours out a heartful of pure music. A unique item in his catalog.
Teddy Wilson
The "Gentleman of Swing" had a lovely touch and an elegant, well-paced style that made him the perfect accompanist for singers, notably Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Inspired by Art Tatum and Earl Hines, he developed his own chromatic take on stride, embellished with cascading runs. After an enjoyable jam session with Benny Goodman at a house party in 1935, Goodman decided to form the Benny Goodman Trio with Wilson and drummer Gene Krupa, which would take the stage to play in between sets by Goodman's popular big band. This made Wilson one of the first musicians to be prominently featured with a white band, a bold move in the extremely segregated music scene of the time that probably only someone of Goodman's stature could have pulled off. Wilson admired the creativity of bebop and played in some sessions, but eventually, he became an elder statesman, teaching at Juilliard and music directing for the Dick Cavett show. Though he's known for his ensemble work, I prefer his steady but effervescent solo recordings, like the ones on Piano Moods and Solo Piano—The Keystone Transcriptions. Hear his classic recordings with Billie Holiday on Fine & Mellow: 1936-1939.
Al Haig
It's a fine line between cocktail piano and cool jazz, and Al Haig walks it perfectly on the gentle, crystalline standards of 1954's Jazz Will O'the Wisp. But he has bebop bonafides, having played in Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool nonet. Early in his career, Haig was very in demand and often considered to be as good as Bud Powell, with whom he tied in several readers' polls. Then, in 1969, his career was derailed when he was charged with murdering his third wife and later acquitted. His second wife came around to thinking that he really did it and wrote up her suspicions in a 2007 book called Death of a Bebop Wife. His fourth wife published no opinion on the matter. Haig made something of a comeback with a run of pleasant albums in the 70s, but his early stuff is still his best. Whatever you make of his guilt or innocence, it would be a crime not to enjoy Jazz Will O'the Wisp when autumn rolls around.
Jaki Byard
The eccentric yet deeply erudite Jaki Byard was distinctive for his bright, clear tone and his kaleidoscopic montaging of styles from classical and ragtime to Cecil Taylor-esque dissonance, often to humorous effect. He started as a sideman on piano and tenor saxophone, playing and arranging in Maynard Ferguson's band. In the 1960s, he was featured on albums by Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and Roland Kirk; his own recordings as a leader got no traction at the time, but are nowadays enjoying reappreciation for their fluid blend of experimentation and historicism. A recent multidisciplinary survey of African American art at MOCA, for example, took its title from Byard's first solo album, Blues for Smoke. In his later decades, he brought his encyclopedic knowledge of the piano to a teaching career at the New England Conservatory of Music, the New School, and Harvard, among other institutions. Early albums like Hi-Fly and Here's Jaki are a nice blend of well-wrought cool bop and unpredictable tangents dotted with his signature oddball flourishes. His version of Monk's standard "Round Midnight" is especially interesting, offering a baroque approach to the tune's essential spookiness in contrast to Monk's own caveman-on-drugs attack.
Nat "King" Cole
Most people only know Nat "King" Cole as a baritone singer of pop ballads, especially string-drenched weepers like "Unforgettable," which I'm sorry to say I find unbearably treacly. I have a similar aversion to Frank Sinatra; the two share a knack for sounding intimate, romantic, and spontaneous while seriously bugging me. So I was shocked to discover in recent years that I absolutely love his prior career as a jazz pianist leading the Nat "King" Cole Trio, trading nimble, exuberant interplay with bassist Wesley Prince and ace guitarist Oscar Moore. As with Lennie Tristano's band, there's something delightful about an instrumental trio that can generate a rock-solid rhythm without a drummer. Cole moved from Montgomery, Alabama to Chicago to Los Angeles, where he found nightclub work with the Trio and signed to Capitol Records. If audiences hadn't started gravitating to his occasional singing onstage, we might know him primarily as a pianist. But the singing and the strings took over, and the Trio fell by the wayside. He hosted his own TV variety hour on NBC for a while and appeared in some Hollywood movies. After achieving stardom, he had noteworthy brushes with racism; in 1956, he was attacked by white supremacists onstage in Alabama, and when he dared to buy a house in all-white Hancock Park, he was shunned by his neighbors, and a cross was burned on his lawn. Some civil rights activists criticized him for agreeing to perform for all-white audiences in segregated venues, which stung him, whereafter he joined the NAACP and the March on Washington. A lifelong heavy smoker, he unexpectedly sickened and died of lung cancer at the height of his fame at age 45. While not exactly a diehard crusader for racial justice, he had an interesting part in the story. But to my mind, nothing he did inspired, like his piano playing. Swinging, graceful, quick, and precise, he's truly a wondrous player. I once read a description of his playing that said, "Every note sounds like a raindrop," and now, when I put on a Trio record, that's what I hear. Best of the Nat King Cole Trio: Instrumental Classics
Chris Anderson
If Lennie Tristano was someone you might call a 'musician's musician,' I recently read a review of obscure but amazing Chicago pianist Chris Anderson that referred to him as a 'musician's musician's musician'! I guess that's meant to convey that he's one whole level more unknown to the general public than someone like Tristano. But his music is so much more lovely and approachable, and it's hard to believe he's not already in the canon. He was blind by age 20 and also stricken by a brittle bone disease that made it extremely difficult for him to play gigs, which explains most of it. But when he did play, word got around. No less a titan than Herbie Hancock, who was already pretty famous at that point, came to him for lessons in 1960, declaring that Anderson was a master of harmony and sensitivity that anyone could learn from. You can hear it as soon as you drop the needle on his early 60s albums My Romance or Inverted Image. His warmth and lyricism are qualities you also hear in Herbie Hancock's playing, as well as his confident touch and deft balance of the cerebral and the emotional. Listening to Anderson's music is like having a conversation with an old friend.
John Lewis
The leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet was an interesting guy. He grew up in Albuquerque, where his parents gave him a love of classical music at an early age, and graduated from the University of New Mexico with a major in anthropology—talk about being off the beaten path of classic jazz locales. But after a stint in the army, playing in the band with future MJQ drummer Kenny Clarke, he wound up as an in-demand pianist in New York City, playing and arranging with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, who admired his ascetic sense of dynamics and restraint. Lewis formed a quartet within the Gillespie big band with vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Ray Brown, and Clarke, who would play cooler, more minimalist jazz between the big band sets of hot dance music. The MJQ stepped out on their own to play Lewis' vision of chamber jazz, spacious and structured, a kind of fusion of composer-led classical music and improvisational jazz. Lewis and Jackson made a good pair for this, with Jackson's swinging ebullience the foil to Lewis' apollonian detachment on stately compositions like "Django." For a while, like-minded players and arrangers such as Gunther Schuller and George Russell thought this could be a whole new genre of music, which some started calling "third stream." In retrospect, the MJQ mostly just sounds like very chill, cerebral, disciplined jazz. Pleasant though! You can really appreciate Lewis' clarity and gracefulness on an album like 1959's Improvised Meditations and Excursions and hear some of the baroque, saturnine grandeur towards which he always strove.
Steve Kuhn & Gary McFarland
A one-off collaboration that frames the knotty, pointillist playing of pianist Steve Kuhn in the charmingly autumnal arrangements of the late great Gary McFarland. Together, they make a bittersweet October Suite that perfectly captures its time of year, the swirling leaves and lengthening shadows at summer's end. I put this album on every October 1 to properly set the mood for the season! Gary McFarland was a genius in the mold of Vince Guaraldi, Burt Bacharach, or Lalo Schifrin—deceptively simple tunes arranged with childlike grace and a touch of beatnik humor. He was an up-and-coming arranger getting into film scores until he died under strange circumstances in Manhattan in 1971, poisoned in a Christopher St. bar. Steve Kuhn (still going) is a spiky, avant-garde leaning player in the mode of Keith Jarrett. His acerbic playing is the secret spice in McFarland's gentle mood piece for strings, harp, and woodwinds, and the result is an exquisite October fantasia.
Paul Bley
Deeply original keyboardist Paul Bley is best known for his bracing free jazz on piano and Moog synthesizer, and his ex-wife Carla Bley was an even more adventurous avant-garde composer and player. But back in the early 50s in Montreal, he was a young, cool bop virtuoso playing with Charlie Parker, Jackie McLean, and Lester Young. His first three albums are cerebral, impressionistic small-group chamber jazz, evincing only occasional touches of the experimental approach he would soon dive into. Introducing Paul Bley from is a nice trio session with Charles Mingus and Art Blakey, and shows off his thoughtful, restless playing in a straightforward setting, a few years before he would start working with more audacious agitators like Ornette Coleman, Marshall Allen, and Milford Graves. Pleasant, modernist cool bop is not the Bley most of his fans are here for, but this album works for me.
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