Benton really likes this one. (So do I!) He ran to get one of our melodicas to play along with you. I took a pic...we'll send it to you. :) We've played it 4 times already!
It breaks my 70 year old heart to hear this brilliant young pianist play this fiendishly difficult piece so spectacularly yet he gets nothing but “nice” in the comments? Oh dear.
Max, this is the best possible compliment I could ever receive! Beautiful singing, arrangement, everything & everything in-between…I feel very lucky to be your friend! 🥲
Really enjoyed listening to this! Genuinely breath-taking, I can't imagine how much work this must have taken. Love the nuance from using different stops
Brilliant, Max. Amazing. Nobody played After Hours with the commanding and compelling earthiness of the master, Phineas Newborn, Jr. And you have captured every note of that. You have made a very important contribution. To jazz aficionados, may I say that After Hours was considered "the Black National Anthem." That's how Charles Dungey, an African American bassist and educator, characterized it. It was often played at the end of a set. Especially at the end of the evening. Ray Bryant called it, "the greatest piano blues solo in the world." His version is on youtube. After Hours was written by the Chicago pianist, composer and arranger, Avery Parrish. He made the original recording, circa 1939, with the Erskine Hawkins Band. Listen on youtube if you like. What Max transcribed from was an old cassette recording I made of Phineas in 1973. I drove over to Mr. Newborn's house in Memphis that day and announced that I wanted to learn After Hours. He then sat at the piano in his living room that he learned on as a child. And went right into it. I held two mics plugged into my little Panasonic cassette recorder as he played. And he played it all the way through, solo piano, following the basic order of 12-bar blues choruses established by Avery in the Erskine Hawkins recording. After Hours, in addition to being a great blues composition, is an historic landmark in its own right. It is a living classic. And Phineas Newborn's interpretation of it is profoundly rich and magnificent. Amen.
The 12 Trascendental Studies of Lyapunov, in memory of Liszt and in the keys Liszt did not use in his set of 12 (thus completing the cycle of 24 keys), are very grand and challenging, and every bit as good as those by the famous Hungarian. The present one, No. 3, "Carillon", is my favorite of the set.
