Stan Getz-"La Fiesta"

1972's "Captain Marvel" album featured Stan Getz with much of what was Chick Corea's first and best version of his famous "Return to Forever" group (Corea-keyboards, Stanley Clarke-bass, et al). Chick also wrote most of the material on the album, including this tune. To my ears Getz draws an eloquence and depth from the tune perhaps lacking in even the original RTF track..

This tune ended up being recorded by pretty much everybody, with noteworthy treatments by Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson. My own favorite, other than Getz', is this one, with Corea, and Gary Burton on vibes.

Lopes Graça Piano Concerto No. I /Miguel Henriques, piano. Orq Sinf Portuguesa, Directed by Ola Rudner

Fernando Lopes-Graca (1906-1994) was a Portuguese composer and conductor. I happened to come across the CD this piece came from quite by accident-I saw it in a music store and bought it on impulse.

The piece is "genuine Iberian"-I'm not endorsing any silliness about "cultural appropriation"-but it does seem true that most works intended to be in this style, by people from outside the region, are pretty cliche'-ridden (I do like Copland's El Salon Mexico). Now, the three note Moorish motif that the first movement of this piece is built upon might itself be thought of as a cliche', but it's the only one.

The concerto features a fair amount of dissonance, but stays true to its roots in both native folk music and Romanticism. If you like this you may want to try Lopes-Graca's Second Piano Concerto, a darker work, no doubt, but equally enjoyable.

Bill Evans Trio - "Autumn Leaves"

I usually avoid seasonally appropriate music posts, but I couldn't resist this one-the brilliant Bill Evans on piano and Scott LaFaro on bass. This is from Bill's 1959 album "Portrait in Jazz". 1959-the year of my birth-was a particularly good year in jazz history. I don't assert a causal connection between my arrival and this fact.  

Somewhere along the way Evans became my favorite pianist. I probably would've named Chick Corea as such a couple years ago. People who know more about modern harmony than I do can tell you about Evans' approach to his instrument-how he often didn't play the roots of chords (leaving that to the bass player), his use of chords voiced in fourths instead of thirds, etc-and that's all very interesting-but technical analysis of music doesn't get you very far. Does it, for want of a better word, grab you, or not?

Nina Simone - "Here Comes The Sun"

It's nice to note that this treatment (please don't call it a "cover"-did Ray Charles "cover" songs? Did Sinatra?) of "Here Comes the Sun" by the great Nina Simone has over 17 million views on Youtube. Maybe it will introduce people to Nina. Cool little gospelly piano solo by Nina as well.

I've never been a big fan of George Harrison as a songwriter-he tended towards the preachy and pretentious-but this is a good one. The most obvious comparison is to Macca's "Good Day Sunshine"-very much an inferior song.