Thank you for this. Chris was my teacher and mentor, for both music and life. It was like a thunder struck when I first heard his music. The sensation led me to search for him, determined to study with him. Years later, I met him at Bradley's and begged him for just one lesson. And then, it was every week, we got together, played side by side, song by song, for hours. How precious, his words, his music. His warmth, beauty penetrated in each tone, note and harmony. I hear you, Chris. Those days are like gems to me. Your music lives, no question about it. It keeps me going. Thank you, thank you and thank you.
Chris was my friend and a main inspiration, especially on ballads. He was a beautiful, sensitive person, with many physical maladies but also an elfin humor as unique as his playing. His touch, his improvising WITH the harmony, devices like top pedals, sudden departures from the tune, blues interpolations in the unlikeliest places that anyway fit perfectly. the cinematic quality, how SLOW he took things---therapeutic! And his license came from KNOWING every nuance of the basic tune as written---melody, original changes, lyrics (he sang on Love Locked Out) There'll never be another...
I so absolutely and thoroughly agree. Harold Mabern was my teacher for a good many years. He called Chris "a harmonic genius." His other great influence, of course, was Phineas Newborn, poles apart from C.A. I listen to Chris Anderson's solo albums just before I go to sleep. He is an intensely meditative pianist; listening to him is to hear cathedrals of sound, and the thought occurred to me last night that he really understood on such a profound level the physics of sound in space. I could go on and on but I'll stop here. He is just brilliant.
Herbie’s lecture series brought me here. His harmonic structure is as Herbie described, very heavily influenced by Ravel and Debussy which Herbie said influenced jazz musicians in the 20s and 30s but was shelved sometime thereafter. Planning to listen to lots more Chris Anderson.
I'm a new fan of Chris Anderson. I found Chris through Barry Harris - and love his patient way of voicing, moving harmonies. While watching a Barry Harris clinic on UA-cam (BarrisHarrisVideos - Stella by Starlight) I discovered Chris Anderson. While reharmonizing Stella by Starlight...Barry turns to his students and very affectionately refers to Chris, "You should hear Chris Anderson...he had a way and voiced chords a certain way..." Coming from bebop monster like Barry Harris (also Herbie Hancock) it inspired me to explore the piano playing of this late (lesser known) jazz pianist, Chris Anderson.
Love your post, Kellymusicworks -- and the comment it elicited from Paul Lammers ("2 months ago") Just discovered Chris Anderson this night -- watching and listening to this video. Posted a note of my own, above. Thanks for sharing, guys. And thanks to Karen for posting this. -- Mark B of the frozen North
The fine Chicago trumpeter Art Hoyle described his music to me as "like a beautiful little butterfly on the keys." I was lucky enough to hear him at a Chicago Jazz Fest (in Ira Sullivan's Band, I think) and at Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase in the "after-fest sessions). He was very special.
I got to see Chris Anderson play in a trio with Jimmy Lovelace and Walter Booker Jr years ago at the Jazz Gallery (original location downtown on Hudson St). It's stuck with me to this day, the memory of just seeing and hearing nothing by pure, deep melodicism and lyricism pouring out of Chris fingers at the keys.
The first person to tell me about Chris is a guy from Memphis named Tony Garrett. When I moved to New York in 1993-94 the second person was Jason Lindner. The next person was Larry Willis. I never sat with him for a lesson yet one only needed to be in the room as he manipulated a song in and out of his harmonic suggestions while emotionally ‘changing the room’. I did have the opportunity to sit in with Little Jimmy Scott at the Blue Note. I got the same feeling from this experience as well…life-changing. Beautiful to see people recognizing his greatness now although we students of the university of the ‘streets’ have carried this awareness for many years. Herbie Hancock lecturing at Harvard may have needed to happen to bring more awareness to such a monumental figure yet it is also ok to listen to lesser known beings that simply share this unique history with an incredibly unique spirit while he roamed the planet-Chris Anderson..
@ Karen Grigoryan: thank you very much for this upload. And for your comprehensive, well-written bio of Mr. Anderson. One is deeply moved both by his artistry and his life. How grateful we can be for even the few recordings extant of his music. I, faithfully, hope that the proposed extensive collection of his artistry will indeed by fulfilled. Again, thank you. And may Chris Anderson forever play... in peace.
New tunes from Chris Anderson's Paradise Archives are being introduced monthly. "Have you Met Miss Jones," is the first... ua-cam.com/video/lzfEX4NTtbI/v-deo.html
LOVE LETTERS redux Happiness is discovering something musical that is wonderfully new. You never heard before. Poignancy is realizing you can't compliment the artist, 'cause they're no longer with us. The wonder that is today's 'shuffle play' at UA-cam just offered me this: as if to say, "You like to hear piano as 'orchestra' -- you might enjoy this!" Someone I never heard of but who (it turns out) was the primary influence on my life-long jazz hero Herbie Hancock -- only jazz artist to win overall Album of the Year at the Grammys (for his celebration of the music of Joni Mitchell a decade ago). I imagine walking into a hotel bar and there is a pianist -- all alone -- playing this -- orchestral variations on LOVE LETTERS. I'd tell him "You are the greatest pianist in the world!" [note on video (below) posted two years ago] Shared this night at SinatraFamily.com -- "Forum" in the Siriusly Sinatra folder, in the thread titled: "My Favorite Versions -- Yours Too?" Thanks Karen for sharing! sinatrafamily.com/forum/showthread.php/50225-My-Favorite-Version-%28yours-too-%29?p=1272801#post1272801 Karen Grigoryan Published on Mar 12, 2017 'Chris Anderson was born in Chicago on February 26, 1926. He passed away just before his 82nd birthday two years after suffering a stroke. His lifelong fascination with harmony, sparked by movie scores, began well before the age of 10. He was already teaching himself to play on the family piano, so well indeed that he never took lessons -- a clue to the startling originality of his harmonic ideas. Before Chris finished high school, he was playing blues gigs in South Side bars. An after-high school job in a record store exposed him to Nat King Cole, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington; from then on, jazz was his music. 'After those first three great mentors, Chris rarely listened to pianists. As he put it, "I'd be more interested in listening to an arranger than to a pianist. Gil Evans for example, or Nelson Riddle -- they fascinated me. The things Riddle did for Sinatra knocked me out." Consistent with his interest for harmony and arrangement, his classical listening favored the great impressionist orchestrators, Debussy and Ravel. 'By the time he was 18, he was playing piano for Leo Blevins, an influential Chicago guitarist who knew almost all the Jazz stars. That year, due to Leo, Chris started playing with Sonny Stitt. Within two years, he was playing the famous Pershing Ballroom concerts with Charlie Parker and Howard McGhee; two of these have been preserved on record. He was 20, and due to steadily worsening cataracts, became completely blind. 'For the next 15 years as house pianist for several of Chicago's best jazz clubs, Chris played with a steady stream of the greats: Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Gene Ammons, Max Roach, Stan Getz, Johnny Griffin, Roland Kirk. 'At the same time he was playing with and influencing a whole generation of young Chicago musicians, many of them destined for greatness. Among them were Wilbur Ware, Clifford Jordan, Von Freeman, Billy Wallace, George Coleman, Wilbur Campbell and Harold Maburn. Chris, with characteristic modesty, speaks of them not as followers, but as close musical brothers. "Heck, they influenced me as much as I influenced them." 'In 1960, Herbie Hancock heard Chris Anderson play. "Chris' music has affected the core of my music very deeply. After hearing him play just once, I begged him to let me study with him. Chris Anderson is a master of harmony and sensitivity. I shall be forever indebted to him and his very special gift." 'In 1961, Dinah Washington, having run through several piano players in the previous year, asked Chris to tour with her. Despite Chris' brilliance as a singer's accompanist, the musicians in Chicago were betting that he wouldn't last two months with the evil-tempered Dinah. Sure enough, in New York six weeks later, she fired him. Chris decided to stay on and play in New York. His crippling bone condition limited his ability to work, though he appeared regularly as a soloist in Barry Harris's annual concerts and made the most of the gigs he had at Bradley's, the Village Vanguard, the Jazz Gallery, and Smalls. Through these infrequent appearances his playing was able to influence a handful of younger musicians who were lucky enough to have seen or played with the master, including Ronnie Ben-Hur, Ari Roland and Jason Lindner. 'He left a small but significant number of recordings. Plans are in the works to make an extensive collection of his music available for posterity.'
@ Karen Grigoryan: One can also hear the influence of impressionists Debussy and Ravel in the work of the classically trained jazz pianist Bill Evans. The sublimely sensitive ear and depth of beauty in the work of both of these enormously gifted yet deeply humble artists is truly phenomenal. Evans was born in 1929. As a contemporary of Anderson's, I have, however, yet to come across any information about either having crossed each other's paths in person, or their thoughts of each other's work - including in concert pianist Peter Pettinger's stupendous biography: "Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings." That said, I can appreciate Anderson's little need or interest to listen to other pianists, following the seminal influence of Cole, Tatum & Ellington upon him. Indeed, once a true artist finds his/her own voice, the focus is to improve and refine one's hearing of that voice toward and to its hilt. Accordingly, distractions to that natural, internal imperative and its (indeed, divinely-sourced) creative drive fall by the way side. Still, I would be sad to read that either Anderson or Evans did not, at least once, hear the other play in-person. Short of that, they surely must have held each other's work in deep respect. Perhaps more so, given their kindred harmonic sensibilities, if not also the weight of their respective personal trials...
I had never heard of Chris Anderson before this evening. I have long considered Bill Evans’ work to represent the zenith of both what the piano has to offer and, especially, what the human soul is capable of. I now understand that Chris Anderson sits atop that throne as well. As with Little Jimmy Scott, some artists are simply too highly developed to be understood by more than a handful of souls.
New tunes from Chris Anderson's Paradise Archives are being introduced monthly. "Have you Met Miss Jones," is the first of many... ua-cam.com/video/lzfEX4NTtbI/v-deo.html
Read the Chris Anderson Interviews: tedpanken.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/two-interviews-with-pianist-chris-anderson-from-1986-on-his-87th-birthday-anniversary/
Thank you for this. Chris was my teacher and mentor, for both music and life. It was like a thunder struck when I first heard his music. The sensation led me to search for him, determined to study with him. Years later, I met him at Bradley's and begged him for just one lesson. And then, it was every week, we got together, played side by side, song by song, for hours. How precious, his words, his music. His warmth, beauty penetrated in each tone, note and harmony. I hear you, Chris. Those days are like gems to me. Your music lives, no question about it. It keeps me going. Thank you, thank you and thank you.
Barry Harris brought me here!
He was right when he said.. "I've never heard anyone play like that in my life."
Me too. Grateful to have discovered Chris.
Flowing like the FEEL of clean COOL water on your skin on a hot day. With a rainbow in the sky ✅
Incredibile......❤Immenso Artista.....😮
The Hidden Gem of Jazz Piano Legacy.
I’m here love
Chris was my friend and a main inspiration, especially on ballads. He was a beautiful, sensitive person, with many physical maladies but also an elfin humor as unique as his playing. His touch, his improvising WITH the harmony, devices like top pedals, sudden departures from the tune, blues interpolations in the unlikeliest places that anyway fit perfectly. the cinematic quality, how SLOW he took things---therapeutic! And his license came from KNOWING every nuance of the basic tune as written---melody, original changes, lyrics (he sang on Love Locked Out) There'll never be another...
I so absolutely and thoroughly agree. Harold Mabern was my teacher for a good many years. He called Chris "a harmonic genius." His other great influence, of course, was Phineas Newborn, poles apart from C.A. I listen to Chris Anderson's solo albums just before I go to sleep. He is an intensely meditative pianist; listening to him is to hear cathedrals of sound, and the thought occurred to me last night that he really understood on such a profound level the physics of sound in space. I could go on and on but I'll stop here. He is just brilliant.
A postscript: I LOVE his voice. His phrasing is in itself full of genius.
@@ellencantarow5160 ❤️
@fasstrack Fass ❤️
Thank you for your comment :)
Chris Anderson's work should be more widely recognized and celebrated. He is an American national treasure. Thank you for posting this Karen G.
Herbie’s lecture series brought me here. His harmonic structure is as Herbie described, very heavily influenced by Ravel and Debussy which Herbie said influenced jazz musicians in the 20s and 30s but was shelved sometime thereafter. Planning to listen to lots more Chris Anderson.
Jacob Collier - Harmony to 5 People one of whom was Herbie. Herbie referenced this cat. Man o man what a find.
exact reason I'm here. He solved a compositional rut I was in. Inspiration is everywhere. wow.
Same. I'm glad he did.
I got here the same way. How did I not find him before? No matter - here is now!
Me too!
Same
How did I live my life without this man?
Barry Harris brought me here ♪
same!
rt
Likewise haha
Me too!
Me elso
I'm a new fan of Chris Anderson. I found Chris through Barry Harris - and love his patient way of voicing, moving harmonies. While watching a Barry Harris clinic on UA-cam (BarrisHarrisVideos - Stella by Starlight) I discovered Chris Anderson. While reharmonizing Stella by Starlight...Barry turns to his students and very affectionately refers to Chris, "You should hear Chris Anderson...he had a way and voiced chords a certain way..." Coming from bebop monster like Barry Harris (also Herbie Hancock) it inspired me to explore the piano playing of this late (lesser known) jazz pianist, Chris Anderson.
Love your post, Kellymusicworks -- and the comment it elicited from Paul Lammers ("2 months ago") Just discovered Chris Anderson this night -- watching and listening to this video. Posted a note of my own, above. Thanks for sharing, guys. And thanks to Karen for posting this. -- Mark B of the frozen North
Me too. UA-cam can be a beautiful thing.
The fine Chicago trumpeter Art Hoyle described his music to me as "like a beautiful little butterfly on the keys." I was lucky enough to hear him at a Chicago Jazz Fest (in Ira Sullivan's Band, I think) and at Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase in the "after-fest sessions). He was very special.
Charles Lloyd's FB tribute post to Chris Anderson brought me here! Can't believe I hadn't heard this wonderful artist before...
So good to find you here, Chris. You will forever be in my heart...thank you for this love letter. Give Marten my best...
I got to see Chris Anderson play in a trio with Jimmy Lovelace and Walter Booker Jr years ago at the Jazz Gallery (original location downtown on Hudson St). It's stuck with me to this day, the memory of just seeing and hearing nothing by pure, deep melodicism and lyricism pouring out of Chris fingers at the keys.
wow, very nice thanks
tears . . .
The first person to tell me about Chris is a guy from Memphis named Tony Garrett. When I moved to New York in 1993-94 the second person was Jason Lindner. The next person was Larry Willis. I never sat with him for a lesson yet one only needed to be in the room as he manipulated a song in and out of his harmonic suggestions while emotionally ‘changing the room’. I did have the opportunity to sit in with Little Jimmy Scott at the Blue Note. I got the same feeling from this experience as well…life-changing. Beautiful to see people recognizing his greatness now although we students of the university of the ‘streets’ have carried this awareness for many years. Herbie Hancock lecturing at Harvard may have needed to happen to bring more awareness to such a monumental figure yet it is also ok to listen to lesser known beings that simply share this unique history with an incredibly unique spirit while he roamed the planet-Chris Anderson..
@ Karen Grigoryan: thank you very much for this upload. And for your comprehensive, well-written bio of Mr. Anderson. One is deeply moved both by his artistry and his life. How grateful we can be for even the few recordings extant of his music. I, faithfully, hope that the proposed extensive collection of his artistry will indeed by fulfilled. Again, thank you. And may Chris Anderson forever play... in peace.
tedpanken.wordpress.com/ Read the Interviews. . .Chris Anderson
Beautiful
I'm a new fan.
New tunes from Chris Anderson's Paradise Archives are being introduced monthly. "Have you Met Miss Jones," is the first... ua-cam.com/video/lzfEX4NTtbI/v-deo.html
Wonderful
Thanks for uploading! Nice picture of Chris Anderson
beautiful
Chris was "family" and one of our closest and dearest friends.
LOVE LETTERS redux
Happiness is discovering something musical that is wonderfully new. You never heard before. Poignancy is realizing you can't compliment the artist, 'cause they're no longer with us. The wonder that is today's 'shuffle play' at UA-cam just offered me this: as if to say, "You like to hear piano as 'orchestra' -- you might enjoy this!"
Someone I never heard of but who (it turns out) was the primary influence on my life-long jazz hero Herbie Hancock -- only jazz artist to win overall Album of the Year at the Grammys (for his celebration of the music of Joni Mitchell a decade ago).
I imagine walking into a hotel bar and there is a pianist -- all alone -- playing this -- orchestral variations on LOVE LETTERS. I'd tell him "You are the greatest pianist in the world!" [note on video (below) posted two years ago]
Shared this night at SinatraFamily.com -- "Forum" in the Siriusly Sinatra folder, in the thread titled: "My Favorite Versions -- Yours Too?" Thanks Karen for sharing!
sinatrafamily.com/forum/showthread.php/50225-My-Favorite-Version-%28yours-too-%29?p=1272801#post1272801
Karen Grigoryan
Published on Mar 12, 2017
'Chris Anderson was born in Chicago on February 26, 1926. He passed away just before his 82nd birthday two years after suffering a stroke. His lifelong fascination with harmony, sparked by movie scores, began well before the age of 10. He was already teaching himself to play on the family piano, so well indeed that he never took lessons -- a clue to the startling originality of his harmonic ideas. Before Chris finished high school, he was playing blues gigs in South Side bars. An after-high school job in a record store exposed him to Nat King Cole, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington; from then on, jazz was his music.
'After those first three great mentors, Chris rarely listened to pianists. As he put it, "I'd be more interested in listening to an arranger than to a pianist. Gil Evans for example, or Nelson Riddle -- they fascinated me. The things Riddle did for Sinatra knocked me out." Consistent with his interest for harmony and arrangement, his classical listening favored the great impressionist orchestrators, Debussy and Ravel.
'By the time he was 18, he was playing piano for Leo Blevins, an influential Chicago guitarist who knew almost all the Jazz stars. That year, due to Leo, Chris started playing with Sonny Stitt. Within two years, he was playing the famous Pershing Ballroom concerts with Charlie Parker and Howard McGhee; two of these have been preserved on record. He was 20, and due to steadily worsening cataracts, became completely blind.
'For the next 15 years as house pianist for several of Chicago's best jazz clubs, Chris played with a steady stream of the greats: Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Gene Ammons, Max Roach, Stan Getz, Johnny Griffin, Roland Kirk.
'At the same time he was playing with and influencing a whole generation of young Chicago musicians, many of them destined for greatness. Among them were Wilbur Ware, Clifford Jordan, Von Freeman, Billy Wallace, George Coleman, Wilbur Campbell and Harold Maburn. Chris, with characteristic modesty, speaks of them not as followers, but as close musical brothers. "Heck, they influenced me as much as I influenced them."
'In 1960, Herbie Hancock heard Chris Anderson play. "Chris' music has affected the core of my music very deeply. After hearing him play just once, I begged him to let me study with him. Chris Anderson is a master of harmony and sensitivity. I shall be forever indebted to him and his very special gift."
'In 1961, Dinah Washington, having run through several piano players in the previous year, asked Chris to tour with her. Despite Chris' brilliance as a singer's accompanist, the musicians in Chicago were betting that he wouldn't last two months with the evil-tempered Dinah. Sure enough, in New York six weeks later, she fired him. Chris decided to stay on and play in New York. His crippling bone condition limited his ability to work, though he appeared regularly as a soloist in Barry Harris's annual concerts and made the most of the gigs he had at Bradley's, the Village Vanguard, the Jazz Gallery, and Smalls. Through these infrequent appearances his playing was able to influence a handful of younger musicians who were lucky enough to have seen or played with the master, including Ronnie Ben-Hur, Ari Roland and Jason Lindner.
'He left a small but significant number of recordings. Plans are in the works to make an extensive collection of his music available for posterity.'
MABERN. NOT MABURN. (He was my teacher)
@ Karen Grigoryan: One can also hear the influence of impressionists Debussy and Ravel in the work of the classically trained jazz pianist Bill Evans. The sublimely sensitive ear and depth of beauty in the work of both of these enormously gifted yet deeply humble artists is truly phenomenal. Evans was born in 1929. As a contemporary of Anderson's, I have, however, yet to come across any information about either having crossed each other's paths in person, or their thoughts of each other's work - including in concert pianist Peter Pettinger's stupendous biography: "Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings."
That said, I can appreciate Anderson's little need or interest to listen to other pianists, following the seminal influence of Cole, Tatum & Ellington upon him. Indeed, once a true artist finds his/her own voice, the focus is to improve and refine one's hearing of that voice toward and to its hilt. Accordingly, distractions to that natural, internal imperative and its (indeed, divinely-sourced) creative drive fall by the way side.
Still, I would be sad to read that either Anderson or Evans did not, at least once, hear the other play in-person. Short of that, they surely must have held each other's work in deep respect. Perhaps more so, given their kindred harmonic sensibilities, if not also the weight of their respective personal trials...
tedpanken.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/two-interviews-with-pianist-chris-anderson-from-1986-on-his-87th-birthday-anniversary/ READ THE INTERVIEWS
I had never heard of Chris Anderson before this evening. I have long considered Bill Evans’ work to represent the zenith of both what the piano has to offer and, especially, what the human soul is capable of. I now understand that Chris Anderson sits atop that throne as well. As with Little Jimmy Scott, some artists are simply too highly developed to be understood by more than a handful of souls.
Thank you Barry Harris for the recommendation!
As good as it gets.
So many changes
too many he chopped this beautiful piece up. it doesn't sound right
I listened to herbie's harmony at 1:43.
Thanks for the bio.
Any progress on a collection for his music?
Yes please keep me informed as well when Chris Anderson's music collection becomes available.
New tunes from Chris Anderson's Paradise Archives are being introduced monthly. "Have you Met Miss Jones," is the first of many... ua-cam.com/video/lzfEX4NTtbI/v-deo.html
Read the Chris Anderson Interviews: tedpanken.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/two-interviews-with-pianist-chris-anderson-from-1986-on-his-87th-birthday-anniversary/
Who here understands harmony?
Chris does.
Yawn.......zzzzzzz
Bye.