In Europe, you have to wait until the 1950s to have pianists of a specific class (except the British George Shearing, who emigrated to the United States in 1947). The striking Bernard Peiffer precedes in France the most original European pianist, Martial Solal. Raph Schecroun, who has become Erroll Parker, moves away from the bebop and Paris to have many cutting-edge experiences in New York. André Persiani, Claude Bolling, Raymond Fol, René Urtreger, Maurice Sardaby, Alain Jean-Marie, appreciated by American soloists, have their say. The 1980s instead made Michel Petrucciani, Antoine Hervé, or Zool Fleischer famous. The German Joachim Kühnü the English Gordon Beck, John Taylor, the Spanish Tete Montoliu, the Italians Franco D’Andrea, and Enrico Pieranunzi, and many others demonstrate the vitality of the European piano. In America, Richie Beirach, Kenny Kirkland, Mulgrew Miller, Fred Hersch, Michele Rosewoman, Geri Allen have the wind in their sails and veterans Kirk Lightsey, and Kenny Barron, find a second youth. Aside from the generation of Hoagy Carmichael, a particular type of school of pianists-singers has developed, often also composers: Mose Allison, Bobby Troup, Dave Frishberg, Bob Dorough, Ben Sidran, without forgetting the great, unparalleled, Nat King Cole; among women: Julia Lee, Cleo Brown, Gladys Bentley, Rose Murphy, Nellie Lutcher, Blossom Dearie, Nina Simone, Carmen McRae, Shirley Horne, Jeri Southern, Meredith d'Ambrosio, etc. Many jazz artists have played a commercial genre called society music, cocktail lounge, piano bar, and often despised by lovers of jazz music. These include Lee Sims, Cy Walter (whose harmonic science, halfway between Gershwin and Tatum, has undergone some influence), Bobby Short, Hazel Scott, Dorothy Donegan, Aaron Bridgers. To learn more about jazz on the piano, you can read Jazz Piano, A Jazz History (WC Brown, Dubuque 1982) by pianist Billy Taylor, and the People In Jazz dictionary, Jazz Keyboard Improvisors Of The 19th & 20th Centuries (Columbia Picture Publications, Hialeah 1984).
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[Ph.B.]

​The origin of the word itself is uncertain (to be blue, "see all black," or blue devils, leprechauns from an Irish ballad) and distant (early nineteenth century). At the same time, its meanings are varied and intertwined: we mention eight.

1. The blues is a sensation, an intimate feeling generally translated with melancholy, which corresponds to the spleen of the poets (Vigny, Baudelaire).
2. The blues is a generic term that characterizes and includes an original form of American black music, defined by specific musical, melodic, historical, sociological, thematic criteria... which contain it, but which it does not cease to overcome. So blues' official date of birth corresponds to the recording of a disc entitled Crazy Blues - by Mamie Smith in New York for Okeh, on February 14, 1920 - whose correlations with the music of the Mississippi delta are nothing but structure.

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It is in this city that the orchestras will be deeply marked by the blues, which evolves towards the shout, the only system that allows singers not to be suffocated by the orchestral mass. At the same time, the boogie-woogie becomes a determining element of the new musical language, based on simple themes, revalued and revived riffs intended to favor collective swing. This repertoire, illustrated by Walter Page's Blues Devils, Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds Of Joy (with Mary Lou Williams), Bennie Moten's formations, and Count Basie soon, becomes an integral part of the style of big bands around the middle of the 1930s. While, under the pressure of Walter Page and Jo Jones, we arrive at the definition of a rhythmic section in which the four tempos. Expressed in the same way, determine the fluidity and balance of the swing, a rule that will remain until the advent of the bebop. Two pioneers of which, Charlie Parker and Tadd Dameron, make their professional debut in the orchestras of Kansas City: those of Harlan Leonard, Buster Smith, and Jay McShann.

The Last Of The Blues Devils, Bruce Ricker film (1979), with, among others, Basie, Eddie Durham, Jimmy Forrest, Budd Johnson, Jo Jones, McShann, Paul Quinichette, Gene Ramey, Buster Smith, and Big Joe Turner, testifies quite well to this final chapter in the history of jazz. To read, by Ross Russell: Jazz Style In Kansas City And The Southwest (1971).
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[P.C.]

Although Bill Evans had already taken part in modal experiences with George Russell and Miles Davis, the real news will be Coltrane's partner, McCoy Tyner, another pivotal pianist with immense electrocution ability. Instead, free jazz is personified by the pianist-lighthouse Cecil Taylor, the only one who has immersed himself in this music. We also mention Sun Ra, Dave Burrell, Bobby Few, Muhal Richard Abrams, Don Pullen. Herbie Hancock is among the many pianists discovered by Miles Davis. Who perfectly assimilated the inventions of his predecessors and managed - at ease in all genres - to impose a new piano classicism thanks to the ability to preserve the intrinsic qualities of jazz: swing and sense of blues. Among the pianists who have developed a singular aesthetic that resists classification attempts, we still mention Roger Kellaway, Randy Weston, Ran Blake, Jaki Byard, Marian McPartland, Joanne Brackeen, Stanley Cowell, Kenny Barron, Carla Bley, and the influential Paul Bley. Andrew Hill, Monty Alexander, and Dollar Brand have enriched jazz with folkloric elements from their countries. Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett are catalyst pianists and excellent composers. The former, often Spanish, has been able to integrate Monk, Evans, Tyner, Hancock, the free and Bartók, completely master of ternary, binary, and Latin music, like most pianists from Hancock onwards. The second, Jarrett, a great stylist with alternate moods and perfect romantic excesses, is original for the way he blends perfect dissonances and chords and integrates the guitar elements of the country style.
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The blues derives from the art of the griot (poet-musician), of the African narrator, and evoking the figure of the Provencal troubadour of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it is there as soon as black speaks to itself. Still, he could not find his identity and his space, if not starting from the character of his inventors. As a slave, black is nameless; it does not belong to itself; as a free man, even if his condition is not the best, he can sing saying "I" that does not oblige "us" also if he invokes him, a singer who expresses a group whose expression he is at the same time. So he can tell his story and the history of his people. Create myths and poems. To say what lives, pains and joys, and to exalt love, for a woman as for her language, greedy love on which humor depends; because the blues, born of pain, can only exist in the freedom of the individual.
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Meeting of two agglomerations, Kansas City (Kansas) and Kansas City (Missouri), separated by a border parallel to the Kansas and Missouri rivers. This twin city has been a site since the late nineteenth century of a remarkable exodus of black peasants - around 40,000 - who came from the banks of the Mississippi to respond to the appeal of the prophet Benjamin Singleton. That urges them to migrate to a new promised land, Kansas. This concentration is the development of black music, in the cultural and social scenario of the still raw blues, and for a mainly black audience. High center of cattle trade where breeders and traders meet, Kansas City (Missouri) has offered entertainment and nightlife since the beginning of the century that have nothing to envy in New Orleans. Ragtime pianists, orchestras, and fanfares are multiplying. Become a meeting point for musicians from New Orleans, St Louis, Texas, and local artists and territory bands that travel the Middle West, Kansas City becomes in the 30s, the theater of intense musical activity, in the cabarets of the 12th and 18th Street (Sunset, Lonestar, Subway, Cherry Blossom, Hawaiian Garden, etc.) So much so that, during the years of Prohibition (1920-30), the corrupt administration of Tom Pendergast, which lasted until 1938, left inconceivable freedoms in other cities of the United States. It is in Kansas City, laboratory and veterinarian of nascent black music, that most of the middle jazz formulas that will develop later in New York and the rest of the country are grown. Kansas City nights are the privileged moments of historic jam sessions, often Homeric and similar to marathons. They bring together notable soloists such as Pete Johnson, Sammy Price, Joe Turner, Jimmy Rushing, Hot Lips Page, Dick Wilson, Herschel Evans, Ben Webster, Lester Young, etc.
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The birth of hard bop and funky style with the return to origins will determine the appearance, from the beginning of the 1950s, of many pianists capable of mastering the bebop, excellent bluesmen and perfect companions: Horace Silver, Red Garland, Mal Waldron, Kenny Drew, Junior Mance, Horace Parlan, Sonny Clark, Wynton Kelly, Ray Bryant, Cedar Walton, Bobby Timmons. The importance of Ahmad Jamal, which coincides with the beginnings of hard bop, will not always be well understood. At the head of one of the perfect trios in the history of jazz, he invents a left-hand style whose syncopated revolts will make school, keeping the right hand very high on the keyboard. If his pauses and his silences have not followed, Jamal, also thanks to Miles Davis, who is his most faithful follower, has a strong influence, especially on Red Garland, Horace Parlan, Gene Harris, Monty Alexander. Sometime later, he appeared the most influential pianist of the time, inventor of an aesthetic of the trio of balance so perfect that his influence is always valid: Bill Evans. Whose extraordinary harmonious sense produces generations of hyperarmones, such as Clare Fischer or Warren Bernhardt.
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In the beginning, the roots of the blues sink into the songs, music, and dances of the African lands raided by slave traders. Removed from their context and their socio-cultural function, emptied of their rituals, generally prohibited, they have remained only in the memory of the slaves and in their unconscious. In contact with the new continent, they mixed and transmitted to the sounds, songs, dances and music of the American lands: English, French, German, lullabies, nursery rhymes, hymns, songs and ballads, gavotte, waltzes, quadrilles and polkas, classical and famous works of the European orchestral repertoire.  The blues emerges from this heterogeneous ensemble in a composition whose genesis cannot be traced, but whose crystallization marks the inscription of black in its new society. People treated as "capital" and not as human beings. To be exploited at a worker or agricultural level does not prevent blacks from belonging to the 20th century, its culture, and its values, whose frame defines the space within which they can hope to change their social position: and music is a means. Music begins to take shape through the songs of the work. The shouts and the calls that rhythm the work in the fields or on construction sites, with the melopee. With the warbling of the small arias mentioned by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia and which describe black life people. With the violin that distracts and makes the masters dance and which, together with the banjo and the pieces of wood or bone that make up the drums prohibited by the "black code," also enchants slaves. Thus appear the Minstrel Shows, first white with a darkened face (February 6, 1843), then black (Georgia Minstrel, 1865). And finally, thanks to the church and evangelization, the spirituals, whose first organized event will be the Fisk tour University Jubilee Singers on October 6, 1871; finally, jazz and then blues, born no doubt between 1865 and 1870, that is, after the Secession war, after the abolition of slavery.
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​On the other hand, essential developments of the blues were born in the City of the Winds. The result of a dynamic similar to the instrumental styles that came out of New Orleans that is the choice of more new formulas. From the rural art of Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind John Davis, Lonnie Johnson, Tom Dorsey, Ma Rainey emerge, on the one hand, a piano genre, the boogie-woogie, illustrated by Pinetop Smith, exploited by Big Maceo, Jimmy Yancey, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, later developed by orchestrations for large and small groups, and on the other, urban vocal blues. The latter flourished during the 1950s with the fashion of the electric guitar and amplified harmonica. In the South Side and West Side (black neighborhoods) night clubs, Smitty's Corner, Pepper's Lounge, Tic Toc Lounge, Zanzibar, Lincoln Village, Trocadero Lounge and Theresa's Tavern a new way of blues, violent, a dramatic expression is imposed. Which often draws its rhythm from the formulas of the boogie-woogie (the shuffle). There are two specialized labels. Chess and Vee-Jay discs help spread this genre and introduce Muddy Waters, Washboard Sam, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Maceo, Jimmy Reed, Memphis Slim, Buddy Guy, Little Walter, Freddie King, Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Luther Allison, Koko Taylor, Willie Dixson, Otis Spann, BB King, Chuck Berry... Translation, with the help of modern techniques, of a peasant and proletarian folklore that was to have a predominant influence on rock and roll in the United States as in Europe. In which English groups such as Animals, the Kinks, those of John Mayall or Rolling Stones, new "Chicagoans of the blues," drew the essence of their inspiration. It can, therefore, be said that Chicago, on several occasions, profoundly marked the evolution of jazz and popular music.
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[F.T.]

In the 1950s, a group of pianists appeared who perfectly assimilated the harmony of Tatum and Ellington. But not as well as the bop elements. They form a new classicism (mainstream), and many of them are requested for the talent of companions: Hank Jones (indeed the most registered). Jimmy Rowles, Billy Strayhorn, Jimmy Jones, Billy Taylor, Gerald Wiggins, Ellis Larkins, Dick Hyman, Lou Levy, Tommy Flanagan, Dave McKenna, prefer musicality to prowess and ostentation. And are ignored by the general public who underestimate them. George Shearing and Oscar Peterson, who have had considerable success, can be classified separately. The first distinguished itself by the lovely and slightly aseptic formula of a quintet with harmony and very elaborate sound. The second is famous for his brilliant successive trios, for his excellent, somewhat verbose technique and for his tireless drive that must not hide the elegant, calm and attentive companion that he knew how to be. He left his mark also on Monty Alexander and the Europeans Tete Montoliu, Maurice Vander, Georges Arvanitas, and Marc Hemmeler.
At the end of the 1940s, Lennie Tristano appears one of the leaders of the cool movement. He is the first white pianist creator and also an unparalleled teacher. He influences Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Billy Bauer, etc. Mastering both the execution in single notes and the block-chords, both polyphony, and tonality, it influences Eddie Costa, Sal Mosca, Bill Evans, and even Herbie Hancock. For the cool period, and the Third Stream, we mention Dick Twardzik, John Lewis, Dave Brubeck, Ralph Burns.
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