Ilha-do-brás

(Source: bettybacall, via themaninthegreenshirt)

themaninthegreenshirt:

My 5 favourite piano players [in no particular order]

Herbie Hancock - One of the great composers of jazz, from both popular and artistic perspectives. As a player, he is one of the truly great “compers” and is a true innovator as a soloist, in his ability to synthesize a creative vision out of merging hard bop and European classical music. And probably the greatest quintet pianist ever, in the greatest quintets of jazz: those of Miles Davis.

Bill Evans - Everyone who plays a ballad plays some Bill Evans, but his influence was so much more than that. He was one of the greatest composers of jazz standards and perhaps the most important interpreter of jazz standards from the Great American Songbook. And a multiple reinventer of the piano trio, first with LaFaro and Motian, then with Gomez and Morell, and last with Johnson and La Barbera.

McCoy Tyner - Technically among the most proficient of the post-bop generation, Tyner developed, largely during his work with John Coltrane, a completely original style of harmony and melody that has affected almost all pianists since.

Sonny Clark - Hampered by a lifestyle that triggered a premature demise, Clark fell into obscurity in the ‘70s, but his reputation has been refurbished by the reissuing of all of his Blue Note output, which is amazingly good and consistent. Equally great as a trio and a quartet/quintet pianist, he was an inspired soloist and a great composer.

Thelonious Monk - Probably in the top five of most performed jazz composers, with an utterly original style grounded in the Harlem piano school but escaping to the outermost regions of logic and structure. He completely exemplified modernism within the bebop school, in an idiom melodically often quite separate from that of his close friend Bud Powell, who showed much of Monk’s influence in his own work. His style echoes in all great pianists today

(via themaninthegreenshirt)