Dave Brubeck (1920-2012) will of course be remembered as a brilliant musical explorer, a virtuoso improviser, a prolific composer with a fondness for odd time signatures and a great ambassador for jazz music in general. Yet, Dave Brubeck still regarded himself simply as "a composer who plays the piano". The pianist is also often …
Sam Jackson: The Gramophone
Sam Jackson is a Dublin based pianist, but when I heard "The Gramophone" for the first time on the radio, I mistook it for what could have been a track from an early recording from the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Sam Jackson's music is of the same calibre. "The feeling I have something to say, the great difficulty …
Brad Mehldau: River Man
Any version of Nick Drake’s River man will always stop me in my tracks. The unusual time signature and the eerie contemporary classical arrangements to the original song make it such a rich ground for covers. If Norma Waterson’s version introduced me to the song, it is Brad Mehldau’s cover I keep coming back to. The American …
John Cage: In a landscape
Referring to classical Indian thought and influenced by Gita Sarabhai, the Indian musician he was tutoring in the mid-1940s, John Cage formulated the idea that the purpose of music was to “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences”. Written as a clear homage to Erik Satie, “In a …