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June 28, 2005

I dig Bill Evans

I just love this music. The song is “Some Other Time” by Leonard Bernstein, and comes from The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album (1975), a simply fantastic record of duets (and which, of course, gets filed in my collection under Evans and not Bennett). I included this recording rather than the one which appears on Everybody Digs Bill Evans (1958) because, as with many versions of songs by vocalists, the melody line is clean and unadulterated by excessive fills, trills, and frills. It’s beautiful, of course, but also easier to hear the substantive content when it’s not muddled by a horn player showing off.

This second recording, “Peace Piece” also comes from Everybody Digs Bill Evans, and here Bill has reworked the initial vamp from “Some Other Time” into a six and a half minute improvisation that takes him into some really impressionistic melodic ideas overlaid on the simple harmonic structure. I don’t consider this a deconstruction of “Some Other Time”, although certainly one could argue differently. But listening to it now after 25 years of the development of hip-hop, I hear this more as Bill having “sampled” the vamp and performed a freestlye flow over it.

The links from the album titles above take you to the Amazon music store; if you want to buy either of these records, do me a small favor and do it via these links—if you do, I’ll get a little love from Amazon. :)

Posted by alex at June 28, 2005 05:54 PM

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Posted by: mammalman at June 29, 2005 10:02 AM

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