Jazz Pianist Fans?
 

Right now I'm listening to Bill Evans' CD entitled, "Alone". What GREAT talent!!

A couple of my other favorite jazz pianists are McCoy Tyner and Monte Alexander. A local guy I like a lot (though not strictly traditional, with bit of fusion and classical mixes, is Stefan Scaggari.

Anyone else love traditional jazz piano and who are your favorites?

one word: MONK

for more modern flavor- oscar peterson and ellis marsallis

I knew there was one I forgot!

I love jazz, especially straight ahead jazz. All of the above, and I would like to recommend Brad Meldhau's Art of the Trio series of recordings.

A great jazz pianist often overlooked is Andre Previn, most recently best known as music director for the LA Philharmonic. He's arguably the best crossover artist ever.

Saw him in concert one winter back in college. What talent!

Concert was delayed an hour due to the weather, but when he arrived on stage, he quipped that it was really due to the fact that he was driving the tour bus! :p

(for those of you who don't get it, George is blind...)

Vince Guaraldi. Underrated.

There are note for note transcriptions of some of Bill Evans' recordings. I have a number of them and work with them quite a bit. His inventions are every bit as amazing as the music that I play professionally (stuff written by guys named Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, etc.). In some ways they are more amazing because unlike some of the other work I refer to, a great deal of Evans' creations were instantaneous, in the very moment it was recorded. It wasn't worked over, edited and 'perfected." True composition in a sense.

Someone mentioned Rubinstein - agreed. My favorite pianist of all time, though, is a guy I heard play jazz only once. My teacher, Leon Fleisher.

Wow, Leon Fleisher? A real prodigy. If I remember correctly, he debuted with the NY Philharmonic under Pierre Monteux when he was only 16! And all that classic work he did with George Szell - some of my favorite performances of Beethoven's Piano Concertos. How's his hand doing nowadays?

Zach - Fleisher
 

Zach: FYI - Fleisher is a Bay Area native. He was born and grew up in San Francisco.

The story of Leon's hand is pretty interesting. I understand that he submitted to Rolfing, which, while painful, had a positive effect on the wrist and allows him to play occasionally. I'm going to miss it, but one of the weeks at the Aspen Music Festival, he and his wife and another woman are playing the Mozart Concerto for Three Pianos. Fleisher plays two-handed repertoire occasionally and sparingly. I don't think his right hand is all that reliable, but I'm not sure. The last time I saw him was actually in January/February in Seattle when he played the Ravel Left Hand Concerto with the Lyon Orchestra. I've heard him play the Ravel Left Hand about 5 or 6 times now and each time it gets more and more interesting. There isn't a better recording of the piece (or of piano playing in general) than his one in the last 5 years or so for Sony with Ozawa and Boston.

Sorry to lead this thread astray, but I (from my biased position) have always thought that Fleisher's recordings of the Brahms piano concerti with Szell were the best of those pieces ever made. I mentioned that to him once (while he was autographing an LP version - this was in the late 70s...). He asked me why I loved them so much. From the perspective of a person now in my late 40s, I can perhaps suspect he was fishing for a compliment from one of his disciples, but perhaps not. I told him that the architecture of the performance was clear, inevitible and beautiful and I was amazed that he could be so accurate at such a pace. He laughed and said thank you, but, he said, remember that he was just a twenty-something year old pianist and that Szell was calling all the shots and even though Fleisher was the "soloist," he was just hanging on for dear life. There was no arguing with Szell. And "there were more wrong notes than you can imagine, too." I heard him teach and coach the Brahms concerti a number of times; each time he was teaching a student much more advanced, or talented than I was, so he dug into the real meat of the pieces. I think I have a little idea what they would sound like if he were to play them now and I think those performances would be even more satisfying, regal and structurally unshakeable than the Szell collaborations. He'd probably play some of that stuff slower and more accurately, too.

(Read the liner notes from the relatively recent CD re-release of the Fleisher/Szell Brahms concerti. Pretty interesting.)

Ummm
 

Does the name Oscar Peterson ring a bell?
The albulms with Ray Brown, who just passed on, and Ed Thigpen are fantastic.

If you are unfamiliar with this giant your education is incomplete. No offence intended.

As an aside. Oscar was the first jazz musicain to take a camera everywhere that he traveled and documented everything. A very good photographer.

Anybody like Joe Sample?

He has a song that many "Smooth Jazz" stations play called "Hippies on the corner".

I also like two other guys, although they are not strictly Jazz pianists:

George Winston

and

David Benoit

i like all the pianists mentioned so far. there was a guy in the 80's and 90's they called "the wild man" bobby enriquez, whom i liked. i also recently picked up a cd by michel camilo and it was refreshingly good...

I'll second Joe Sample. If you care to widen the scope to include keyboard players in general I could come up with a big list.

If you've got a bigger list of great pianists, post it! :)

I can't believe I forgot this pianist. He is amazing, with a spectacular bassist!

His name is Jacques Loussier. He takes classical music (primarily Bach, who many will agree has some very jazz-like overtones) and plays it as jazz. Very talented.

Here's the link to amazon.com:

click here for Jocues Loussier

Widening the scope a little myself:

Keith Emerson, from Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

Great talent on either piano or synthesiser. I heard once that he refuses to use modern synthesisers (sp?) because they simply don't sound the same as the ones made a couple decades ago.