Monday, July 1, 2013

Ray Bryant's Mother Was St. Cecilia





His chord voicings are rich like a chocolate ganache cake. So unique and original. This is interpretation at its best. The levels of intrigue keep building as he plays. And the source theme is so simple...AAAB. Question, question, QUESTION, ANSWER. And the larger form builds from simple to complex with the harmonization. It's really a statement by Bryant that you can play all the Rachmaninoff you want but it still amounts to tension/release...dissonance/ consonance ....fragments/unity....conflict/harmony. Those dualities are the nature of music and life.



When Ray Bryant was faced with a choice between a paycheck and learning to play the piano better I bet I know what he did. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child who turned his back on his Knabe piano for a handful of gold.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.