In Appreciation of Bill Evans

Bill evans jazz vinylI’ve been on a bit of a Bill Evans tangent recently. If you’re going to be on a tangent, you could do a lot worse. I’ve been listening to a lot of Evans, mostly the Riverside records,  and then I also put on Kind of Blue the other night and I recall thinking to myself that, in many ways, Kind of Blue sounds in some places more like an Evans album than a Miles album. I know there’s always been a bit of controversy about who actually wrote Blue In Green, but all it takes is a cursory listen to hear that it seems more Evans than Miles. Anyway, I’m not looking to open up old wounds or start new controversies. But I want to do two things: 1. Point you all to this very interesting article on the Influence of Evans, The Bill Evans Legacy, by Doug Ramsey in The Wall Street Journal the other day. It’s nice that his genius remains recognized and appreciated and still discussed in the mainstream media. 2: I wanted to post the great recording of My Foolish Heart from Waltz for Debby, just because I love it and wanted to share it with a bunch of my friends. So, enjoy:

Bill Evans, 30 Years Later

I was driving up to my home in The Berkshires for one of the last times this season on Friday and I had some music on the CD player and on came Waltz for Debby, the version with Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans on Riverside. And I turned to the lovely Mrs. JC and told her to listen to the rapport and warmth shared between these two giants and it was remarkable listening to this track, which I must have heard thousands of times — no exaggeration — with fresh ears once again. And it is, indeed, a thing of beauty. Then I looked through my email this morning, clearing things out, and I noticed that someone had sent me an article from The Wall Street Journal paying tribute to Bill Evans on the occasion of the

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Jazz Collector’s Greatest Hits

I was having trouble sleeping the other night and clicked on to Jazz Collector on my iPad to look and see if there were any comments or any other activity. There wasn’t much, so I started browsing around the site. How did I browse around the site? Good question. It’s not really that well designed for browsing, is it? If I wanted to look at, say, what makes an original Blue Note and original Blue Note, I would have to do a search on “Blue Note,” which would bring up just about every post over the past eight years. At some point I will put the time in to make it more browser-friendly. In the meantime, what I did was I clicked over to the right side of the page where it lists all of the Archives, month by month, and I picked random months and just went down from the top, looking at any article that piqued my interest. It was actually quite fun – particularly looking at some of the articles that generated a lot of comments from the community. It was kind of like a Jazz Collector’s Greatest Hits, going from post to post, not necessarily focusing just on which records are selling for how much money on eBay. I would suggest you do the same thing and see (and share), which posts capture your attention. Here are some of the random posts I settled upon:

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