Best Of 2012: Emily Carney

1. Music: The Very Best of Vince Guaraldi, The Very Best of Bill Evans, and The Bill Evans Trio, Moon Beams

In the last year, Concord Music Group re-released and compiled great jazz collections for those into mid-century modern jazz. The best offerings included Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts-infused classics and Bill Evans’ elegiac piano stylings. Moon Beams may be one of the saddest jazz records of all time, but it has some of the most elegant, beautiful piano chord progressions recorded in music history.

(more…)

Music Review: The Very Best of Vince Guaraldi and The Very Best of The Bill Evans Trio

By Emily Carney

In the last six months, Fantasy Records and Riverside Records (through Concord Music Group) released compilations detailing the best selections of jazz behemoths, including Vince Guaraldi (on Fantasy) and The Bill Evans Trio (on Riverside). Both compilations are great primers for those interested in getting a feel for both artists.

Vince Guaraldi was a jazz pianist and immortally associated with “Linus and Lucy,” otherwise known as the music from the Charlie Brown TV specials. This disc, featuring 14 of his best cuts, reflects that fame and has the iconic songs from those shows (“Linus…” as well as “Charlie Brown Theme,” “Christmas is Coming,” and “Christmas Time is Here”).

(more…)

The Bill Evans Trio, Moon Beams

By Emily Carney

By 1962, jazz pianist Bill Evans was emotionally bereft by the car crash death of his bassist, Scott LaFaro. Indeed he was so devastated, he wouldn’t perform for months. He was already in the grips of a powerful addiction to heroin, which he wouldn’t overcome until the end of the 1960s; however, this addiction would be replaced by another: cocaine. No one was shocked by Evans’s death in September 1980, characterized by one of his peers as “the longest suicide in history.”

After LaFaro’s death, Evans had reformed his trio, adding new bassist Chuck Israels. While Evans and his distinctive style of piano playing—hunched directly over the keys—may be a ghost in the machine, this reissue of 1962’s Moon Beams takes the listener back to his melancholy brilliance.
(more…)

Tony Bennett, Isn’t It Romantic?

By Melissa Bratcher

Tony Bennett‘s Isn’t It Romantic? hit my doorstep on Valentine’s Day. It is fair to say that there isn’t a finer collection of romantic, swoon-worthy songs than this. Isn’t It Romantic? is an excellent, entry level primer of Tony Bennett’s catalog for those whose interest may have been piqued by his recent Grammy win for Duets II.

(more…)

Tony Bennett, The Best Of The Improv Recordings

By Paul Casey

“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more. There’s a feeling in back of it.”
—Frank Sinatra in Life magazine, 1965

(more…)

Bill Evans Trio, Explorations

By Paul Casey

Explorations was Bill Evans‘ second album with his most famous trio. It was recorded in one day, on February 2, 1961, in between recording Know What I Mean? with Cannonball Adderley. Explorations was a follow-up to the seminal Portrait in Jazz, Evans’ vision of a three piece that spoke as if with one voice. This was also the last studio recording to feature Scott LaFaro as bassist, as he died tragically in a car crash in the summer of ’61. He was 25.

(more…)

Cannonball Adderley with Bill Evans, Know What I Mean?

By Paul Casey

Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans worked together on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. That should be enough of a reason for you to seek out and listen to Know What I Mean? As the cover reminds us, Bill Evans accompanies that fearsomely moustachioed fellow, Cannonball Adderley, who first transfixed me with his earlier Somethin’ Else album.
(more…)

The Definitive Bill Evans on Riverside and Fantasy

By Paul Casey

“I believe that all people are in possession, of what might be called a universal musical mind. Any true music speaks with this universal mind, to the universal mind in all people. The understanding that results will vary, only insofar as people have or have not been conditioned to the various styles of music, in which the universal mind speaks. Consequently, often some effort and exposure is necessary in order to understand some of the music coming from a different period or a different culture, than that to which the listener has been conditioned.

I do not agree that the layman’s opinion is less of a valid judgment of music than that of the professional musician. In fact, I would often rely more on the judgment of a sensitive layman than that of a professional, since the professional, because of his constant involvement in the mechanics of music, must fight to preserve the naivety that the layman already possesses.”
—Bill Evans

(more…)