The Last "Real" Bebop Pianist

[Peter Friedman]

Earlier today I was listening in my car to this album - Rein De Graaff Trio - Chasin' the Bird. It is my impression that De Graaff is the last living true bebop piano player.

He follows directly in  the footsteps of Bud Powell and Barry Harris.

I hear no evidence of his being influenced by Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner ,Herbie Hancock, Oscar Peterson or Keith Jarrett. He is a true bebop player.

If anyone can think of another living jazz piano player as strongly tied to the Bud Powell, Barry Harris bebop tradition, please share that with us.

 

[mhatta]

I'm not sure what you mean "bebop piano", anyway how about this:

 

[T.D.]

Toshiko?

[JSngry]

What about that Tardo Hammer guy?

[Dan Gould]

57 minutes ago, JSngry said:

What about that Tardo Hammer guy?

This.

[sgcim]

With all the hundreds of clinics Barry Harris did all over the world, there must be thousands of pianists playing in his style.

At one of his clinics, a friend of mine said BH yelled at a kid for sounding like Bill Evans. "No Bill Evans here!" BH declared.

Edited 21 hours ago by sgcim

[JSngry]

?

OTOH, in 2025, what is "real" bebop anyway

?

[jlhoots]

55 minutes ago, JSngry said:

?

OTOH, in 2025, what is "real" bebop anyway

?

Agree!!

[Gheorghe]

3 hours ago, sgcim said:

With all the hundreds of clinics Barry Harris did all over the world, there must be thousands of pianists playing in his style.

At one of his clinics, a friend of mine said BH yelled at a kid for sounding like Bill Evans. "No Bill Evans here!" BH declared.

my trumpet player played with Barry Harris in Olanda I think. 

Bill Evans, such a great musician, but I must admit it´s not exactly my brand...... 

If BH yelled "No Bill Evans here" what did he want to get ? Someone who copies Bill Evans or someone to copy BH ? 

I´ll never know, I never had studied piano with anybody. But my mentor was the late great Fritz Pauer, and what he told me was to be open for all styles. It was thru him that I got my first gigs and after hearing some of them he told me " you sounded good you got tons of talent....BUT....somewhere in the future there will come the moment when you got your own shit". 

 

[Niko]

regarding that last anecdote, how did Pauer say "your own shit" in German/Austrian? 

regarding Bebop piano players, there is also Sacha Perry...in places, his album with Aaron Johnson from last year is so purely Bebop it's almost comical

https://aaronjohnsonjazz.bandcamp.com/album/nightmare

Edited 14 hours ago by Niko

[clifford_thornton]

20 hours ago, T.D. said:

Toshiko?

yeah, though her work spans a wide range of music, I would tend to agree.

Rein de Graaff is excellent, though. The albums I have under his leadership date to the early 1970s and certainly fit into a post-Coltrane/Tyner approach.

[Niko]

46 minutes ago, clifford_thornton said:

yeah, though her work spans a wide range of music, I would tend to agree.

Rein de Graaff is excellent, though. The albums I have under his leadership date to the early 1970s and certainly fit into a post-Coltrane/Tyner approach.

indeed, I just thought about those albums with Dick Vennik from the 70s, those don't qualify as pure bebop, someone might have owned a John Coltrane record here

his later music is again more boppish... funnily enough, a few years back, I was going through all the boxes with cheap jazz records in a store in Rotterdam and the owner approached me afterwards whether I'd seen Chasin' the bird in there... Apparently, de Graaff had just called because he no longer owned a copy and was looking for it.

this is a cool video I just found, apparently from de Graaff's own account

the music is all from the Hank Mobley in Holland CD but the footage in the first minutes or so shows de Graaff visiting New York's East Village in 1967, meeting Walter Davis Jr, Herbie Lewis and Hank Mobley...  

 

[clifford_thornton]

Yeah, that footage with Mobley is very cool. I recall when it first popped up.

[sgcim]

15 hours ago, Gheorghe said:

my trumpet player played with Barry Harris in Olanda I think. 

Bill Evans, such a great musician, but I must admit it´s not exactly my brand...... 

If BH yelled "No Bill Evans here" what did he want to get ? Someone who copies Bill Evans or someone to copy BH ? 

I´ll never know, I never had studied piano with anybody. But my mentor was the late great Fritz Pauer, and what he told me was to be open for all styles. It was thru him that I got my first gigs and after hearing some of them he told me " you sounded good you got tons of talent....BUT....somewhere in the future there will come the moment when you got your own shit". 

 

BH didn't like things that didn't fit within the strict bebop style.

[Niko]

 

still on youtube, this is an interesting 1972 video of a band of Dutch bop advocates like Frans Elsen (who later organized many workshops with Barry Harris), Eric Ineke (dr, long time drummer with de Graaff e.g. on Chasin the bird) and Wim Overgaauw (g, heard in that Mobley clip) revealing that some of them might have owned some of the more recent Miles records.... no contradictions from my point of view, one can feel things differently in one decade vs the other... but I always thought that the European jazz musicians of those generations were unusually open to new ideas even late in their careers... after all, they built a career on absorbing ideas from far away quickly and convincingly... and later the guys here discovered that Bebop was the essence (or, to quote a recent Ineke answer to a question about advice for young musicians: "Bird is the word.")