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Related CD ID: HR021 HR025 |
This CD Set contains HR021 HR025
| Artists: | Mike Heffley |
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| Title: | Double Bill Heavens (2 CD Set) |
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| Released: | 2007/03 |
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Here are the people whose music and persons crossed my mind often while recording this music. Ten of them I know personally, seven have worked/played with. All of them contributed something substantial to the way I wanted to present this material, and why.
Art Tatum, for teaching two hands to dance like partners…according to certain steps on certain floors…
Fats Waller, for playing like a singer and singing like a player…
Nat Cole, for singing like talking without playing, though he could play…
Andrew Hill, for thinking things through playing them…
Don Pullen, for playing the keyboard like a harp…
Cecil Taylor, for being a one-man band with bandmates…
Keith Jarrett, for being a one-man (different) band without bandmates…
Borah Bergman, for being a two-hand band with and without collaborators…
Mal Waldron, for teaching me how to make peace and lively conversation between my two hands…
Anthony Braxton, for teaching me how to make life and peaceful interaction between my two brains…
Thelonious Monk, for showing me how Now was so much more than just The Time…
Alice Coltrane, for playing plucked harp, struck piano, and blown organ like the one instrument they are (thus demonstrating trinity)...
My Aunt Jaylene Sutton, for my first engagements with the piano…
Meredith d’Ambrosio, for singing and playing the best stuff without stress, strain, awkwardness or boredom…
Abbey Lincoln, for her sound and style...
Barbara Dzuro, for playing like a champ and then some (including being the only equal colleague who told me I could sing)…
Franya Berkman, for letting me use this piano, and her good taste in music, life, and people…
Leon Thomas, for the memory of his yodel…
Geneva Heffley, for informing my spins on the songs about children…
Wayne Heffley, for introducing his son to my hero Bill Evans when I was 15…
Bill Evans, for making my heart sing like a Russian's…
(oh, and all the women in the list together, for forcing me to develop my falsetto…)
HR021 recorded at home on the Korg Sampling Grand and GarageBand software.
HR025 produced by Randy Porter (randyporter.com); thanks for his excellent Steinway grand and recording studio and expertise.
All music by Bill Evans except Quiet Now (Denny Zeitlin)
Why 2 CDs of the exact same playlist? Because, again, this is the art of improvisation, thus of compare and contrast. The tracks are too similar to describe separately, but different enough to note their distinctions, so we’ll cover both versions in each track’s blurb.
As in the trio 2CD set, this solo offering originally included (four) tunes with lyrics that had to be withdrawn. The problem here is different; the Bill Evans estate stopped granting rights to any new lyrics shortly after Heffley had added his unauthorized ones. His way around the offending tracks here was to remix them without the vocals; I’ll comment on the musical results of those gestures, and will, again, supply the lyrics separately.
As a whole, the home version is generally warmer, more relaxed, slightly rougher in production value. If it is an opaque gem of pastel hue holding close its amber light, the studio version is a brilliant cut diamond, clear-through flashing with prismatic reflections. Unlike the home version (all overdubbed), all tracks but three in the studio (“Laurie,” “Turn Out the Stars,” and “Time Remembered”) were sung and played in real time. (This is the same kind of boastful point of fact as was the sentence on some of his earlier CDs announcing that he was playing a slide trombone, not a valve.)
(Portland engineer Randy Porter, himself a pianist extraordinaire, remarked on how unusual and pleasant a surprise it was when Heffley ran through the whole playlist in first takes that stood as the only takes, except for those three overdubbed second takes, in the end. Another aspect of the art of improvisation: he’d worked the material for a good year, and recorded it all at home himself, before coming into the studio. The overdubbed three were the most pianistically and vocally challenging both, and simply done best that way.)
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