The Most Amazing Bill Evans Chords
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.พ. 2017
- Bill Evans was so creative in the way he chose voicings for chords. Let's take a close look at some of my favorite chord voicings from his playing and learn how we can improve our playing!
To get the worksheet from this video, email me at: aimeenolte@yahoo.com
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Aimee Nolte - บันเทิง
Bill Evans came to my college, North Texas, shortly before he died. He played and talked to us. We asked questions. It was a real treat. One of my all time favorite piano players.
You don t meet him every day... I would do anything to meet him. And play with him if he was still alive.
Never knew he came here.
Im in tbe wrong town.
Bill evens is possibly the most sensitive musician I have ever listened to. There is so much beauty in his playing and its all seriously understated.
My favourite Bill Evans chords are all of his chords
Poetic
All existing chords you mean
My thoughts exactly!
It's people like you that inspire others. Your passion and talent is flat out astonishing, not to mention your ability to teach. You are persistent with putting out quality videos ALL THE TIME. Your personality also seems very bright and full of positivity. It takes a certain person with incredible patience and drive to play jazz and understand it well, and that is no doubt what you are!
Robert Varon oh gosh. Thank you so much. ❤️
Robert Varon 😍🙏🏼🤗
RSProduxx what?
sry, answered to the wrong comment, deleted already :)
Robert Varon 87
7
These chords were all taken from my transcription of “How Deep Is The Ocean.” It was recorded live on May 26, 1967.
You find it on disc 4 of "Bill Evans: the Secret Sessions, recorded at the Village Vanguard 1966-1975".
This compilation was released in 1996.
Just telling me that this exists has been one of the greatest gifts I've received, thanks
Great job, bravo!
This was absolutely frikking delightful. I Love how you took the genius of Bill Evans and presented it in such an accessible way to learn, listen to and explore the beauty of those chords. Inspiring!!!
I'm a self-taught guitarist (retired from another profession) interested in the world of beautiful voicings. Boggled by Ted Greene's "Chord Chemistry", his playing, the playing of Ed Bickert. So much to learn. Thanks for walking me/us through these glorious Bill Evans chords. The more you look, the more there is. All the best, and thanks
And Allen Holdsworth has some interesting scales/chords too th-cam.com/video/wts2Mw6Nb5s/w-d-xo.html
I'm a guitarist and had been meaning to study Bill Evans' chord voicings in detail for a while now. Thanks for the brilliant video!
Try to hold the guitar backwards for a complete jazz effect.
Amazing video. Bill Evans was such an artistic genius. Very few jazz pianists have as much personality as him, with as much as listening to one of Bill Evans' chords you can already easily tell who's playing them, which says a lot about him as an artist. The way you analyze these chords is so clear and on point, for which I thank you. I'm definetly going to follow your channel from now on.
This is one of the most interesting music lessons I´ve watched.
IMHO the key to understanding Bill Evans' chords is looking at them HORIZONTALLY and not vertically. Then you'll quickly realize that his harmonic technique wasn't so much sophisticated block chords as much as it was sophisticated 4/5-part counterpoint that would create interesting chords by the action of tension-resolve.
Paolo Pizzi that's a really cool way to look at it. I just want to see if you have a video explaining it in that way, but couldn't find one. I would love to see you explain it like this. Sounds really fun to think about!
I'd suggest for interested parties to explore closely the 371 Harmonized 4-part Chorales of JS Bach. The very last word in tonal harmony and voice leading. Each voice (SATB) is a stand-alone melody in its' own right. Simple, gorgeous diatonic melodies that satisfy the mind and nourish the soul.
I believe Evans made a specific study of Bach for the very reasons given in your responses. I believe it was studies from the Well Tempered Clavier?
But he also showed his knowledge of Debussy and Eric Satie as well especially with the closed voicings.
Paolo, how do we go about figuring out how Bill Evans brain was working in real time? Is there any good material out there about playing jazz music 'horizontally' like that? Did he really improvise 5 melodies at once?
Great artist and wonderful pedagogue , thank you so much , dear Aimée Nolte
Super Aimee. Thanks for sharing the genius of Bill Evans with us. You're a sweetheart!
Thanks for this video! Love it! Almost 40 years have past and we are all still learning from Bill...... remarkable.....
I love this kind of stuff, and with Bill Evans, you can always hear something new.
Three videos in and im in love with this channel I have never seen anyone break down music the way you do....Im going back to the beginning of your channel and watching all of them from there
Working these out on guitar is some of the most fun I've had in a while. Thank you, Aimee!
Niiiice!
The closer intervals are definitely difficult on guitar and require some crazy stretches, but I've always loved Bill's playing so its always great to have new information :)
EXCELLENT Aimee! Many thanks for sharing!
This was like a short master class on the great Bill: Glad I found you, Aimee
Where were you 30 years ago when I was struggling to learn Jazz piano. You'd definitely made my life easier. You are a great teacher. Thanks.
The comments from subscribers below are absolutely terrific. They are an education in themselves and brilliantly complement your tutorials.
Richard Lovegrove AGREE
Most amazing video up until now. Thank you so much!
This is my idea of fun. Keep up the great work Aimee Nolte!
EXCELENTE. My favorite jazz piano player is Bill Evans, and it's great to know some of his voicings to improve my skills. Thank you.
josue zambrano you are very welcome. He is definitely one of my very favorites as well!
I hope you come out with more voicings in the future. This great.
Aimee, beautiful work and voice and free flow and simplifying JazzEvans :) Happy Cluster! Merci Beaucoup
I love this and i actually got some things out of this. Mostly it got me to realize I must view many of your other posts first. And you have many ! Thank you !
Jack Kehoe oh good! :)
This is so good. Much more interesting than trying to learn from text. You have a way of explaining things to hold the listener's interest.
Love your singing examples. What a great teacher you are!
ahjooma I really appreciate the feedback. Thank you so much.
A wonderfull exercise to me was putting this chords on the guitar. Some really nice ideas came. The most difficult part is that the closer the notes are (b9 #9 for example) more stretchy the hand need to be. Thanks Aimee!
wow great ! Thanks a lot Aimee
Love your explorations and delights at discovery! Bob Ross vibes here... Thanks for spreading the joy. Truly, everybody digs Bill Evans!
Thanks for showing this, one of my favorite songs of his is A Time For Love, the first time i heard this tune was actually in a Yamaha Clavinova Demo Cassette but at that time didnt know what the tune was actually called.
I really enjoyed this. Bill Evans is such an inspiration to me. Thanks for breaking down his chords. Great info.
No problem! I’m so glad you enjoyed it.
What’s the roots of this chord?
Yes
Thank you for this. This is how I torture my less chord passionate friends! By the way, on guitar the 7#9 is really common, rock players call it the "Jimmy" chord. For blues it's like a major chord with a b3 up top. I like it as a tritone sub...
Thank you this is wonderful and helpful.
as a non keyboard player i found your harmonic offering wonderful. thank you very much.
His most amazing chords are the ones you don't know are there... the ones that make the piano melt as medium and is just a portal to the universe.
Like the good explosives experts. =P
Such a lovley voice.. Would love to hear more ❤️
Thank you, Aimee Nolte for this great lesson on the voicings of one of my favorite musicians!
Thank you .. Wonderful work !!
I like you and your instructions! Thanks.
Hi Aimee, I'm learning Bill Evans' "Here's that Rainy Day" and "My Foolish Heart" and so this tutorial is really useful in explaining his voicings. I have to say that identifying chords by reference to their extended sharpened 11ths or 13ths etc make me go swivel eyed and this old memory bank of mine between the ears often goes AWOL when I read the notes on the page. But slowly, slowly, things are improving and this is largely down to your wonderful tutorials. I'm sending you a small donation on PayPal as a small token of my thanks.
Richard Lovegrove thanks so much, Richard. 🙏🏼
Ha! Nice reference at 15:03. Love the information on this channel. Appreciate you.
Another fabulous tutorial.
Richard Lovegrove thanks so much, Richard.
You are amazing, Aimee!
I enjoyed this. Thank you. I am a drummer however. We are easily pleased. I got the first chord as a Gmin and thought of it as maybe sixth degree of g melodic. The second chord I realised could have G harmonic minor played over it. Did not get the Eb7.
8:43 you could also write this as GminMaj13 (or G-Δ13). All of the notes in the chord come from G melodic minor. There is no other scale choice since G harmonic minor doesn't have the right 13th for a minor-major chord, so I think that contains all of the information needed. Thanks for the video!
Great video, thank you!
On the first chord you covered a Dmaj arpeggio sounds nice too. i love these textures .
Lotta comments! Harmony/ blues/ gospel R&B; more my thing than bebop; Bill certainly a master & joy to hear..kudos to you and anyone who studies him and captures some of th lightening.for us
great video lots of info, going to spend abit of time to learn them in all keys and try them in some bill tunes! and you have a lovely voice!
+GintokiPianist what a good idea! And thank you.
If you want to get really deep into this the thing about Bill Evans is his absolute mastery of voice leading. I think Keith Jarrett somewhere said that Evans had the best voice leading. Hal Galper said that Evans inspired Galper to think more horizontally and about inner voices more and this was many years late into Galper's career after he had mastered so much so much already about the music - with Phil Woods no less. Evans thought like a composer. There was an orchestral dimension to his playing that isn't discussed that much since he is known for modern types of voicing and doesn't appear to play in an older fuller bodied Teddy Wilson/ Tatum style. Yet Evans retained from that earlier Swing era an emphasis on being aware of every part, one reason he was such a great piano solo artist. (Intros to MY Romance Paris Concerts at the end of his life!) That's why I love Aimee that you mentioned that he worked out all arrangements for the legendary Tony Bennett albums ahead of time. Aimee if you keep going at the rate you're going, what is it a video a day? that's crazy ! the IAJE is going to give you some kind of special medal or award or something.
m hampton so much good stuff in that comment. Thank you.
m hampton great comment this. Keith Jarrets playing is great too even if his posture is "bad" (who cares if he sounds like that lol?)
I enjoyed this video very much, Aimee, thanks. And also m hampton's comments here as well. Bill Evans of course was a genius talent, but it can also be source of fascination in itself to ponder and flesh out in detail "what" makes it genius. A rapture even. Which you have done very astutely here
Ben Sidran is the best interviewer of jazz musicians. He's a musician, he knows his stuff, he knows the music of the people he's interviewing, he asks good questions, and listens carefully to the answers.
Above all else, Bill was the king of harmony. If Debussy had played jazz, he would have been Bill.
Glenn Gould, who was a fan, described Bill Evans as "the Scriabin of Jazz".
And the Bronx songwriting genius Laura Nyro was the Bill Evans of pop - she learnt her hybrid chords from Evans and Debussy, and was a big fan of Miles and Coltrane.
Bill handed the crown to Jacob Collier
@@dion_mh Jacob is brilliant and he certainly has sophisticated and beautiful harmonies. But bill was the master of turning a photograph into a moving picture. The way he voiced tunes and created movement within them to build intensity was other-wordly. He certainly learned a lot from Bach(his favorite composer) in regards to counterpoint and voice leading. For me, bill Evans is still the king of harmony. Jacob has openly admitted that he still has a lot to learn in regards to creating movement within tunes. He stated that he often feels tempted to play all of the notes available within the chord at once. And this is precisely what bill was the master of. Holding back using all the notes available within the chord in order to be able to use the remaining notes as a means of creating beautiful harmonic movements.
If Debussy had played jazz, he would have been Debussy again because Debussy himself created most of the things in Jazz. Much love and respect to Bill Evans but Debussy was a true revolutionary and iconoclastic, we owe him big time and I don’t think you can replace him with another great name. He was Debussy :)
Thank you for posting!
Spell binding your an amazing teacher these are great thanks for doing these ..neat
ron frey you are quite welcome, Ron! They are neat, aren't they :-)
LOVE this analysis - great video! I might call the first one a Gmin(Maj13)? That sticks with the naming convention of chords w/fewer extensions, like a min(Maj7).
Interesting and informative. Greetings from Picayune Ms.
Saw Bill play a few times with Eddie Gomez. He and his brother
Harry went to school in Southeastern, La. There are some very
captivating videos when Harry is discussing Bill and their relationship,
musical and personal.
Thanks for teaching, beautiful chords with beautiful humans instrument
I would write that first chord Gm13(maj7) out of habit, although that wouldn’t clue in the voicing as well. Such a rad construction!
Thanks so much, great video
Bill Evans is so much Impressionism for me... Debussy would LOVE him and be jealous... Thanx for charing Aimee! XXX
Yes! We want more lessons analyzing Bill 😊
The feel of any note or combination of notes is a function of the notes that precede and follow .
The first chord can also be understood as a C13th#11th - (minus the foundational root and 5th in the bass, as is common in post-bop voicings).
Aimee this is such a great video. Would you be able to do a video on voice leading? That way we can start to transcribe some of this stuff ourselves
What a great video, thanks!
Hello , Fantastic , superb expositions , also your singing is lovely for real !
QMica thank you so much for saying so! :-)
Thanks!!! Thank you. I'm from Brazil and I'm enjoying your videos. Strong hug. Mauro Araújo.
+Mauro Araújo obrigado!
this is wonderful...
Awesome. Would love to see more videos on Bill Evans.
This is my fourth :)
great tutorial, thanks and blessings.
Aimee, when I play a half diminished chord, I normally play it the root position, but I typically substitute the fourth for the third which seems to achieve the same effect as what you described.
great video, thanks!
Bill could pull off the apparent dissonance because he did it so tastefully. THAT was his genius.
Evans used rootless chords; he would take any tritone and play the unaltered triad a wholestep above the unplayed root to make the 13th, #11 chord.
Great lesson, Aimee! It occured to me that that Gb triad over G could function as a Gm7b5(add #7). Tried it on my guitar and it seems to work, especially followed by a C7 with A (or F#) on the top.
Huge fan of your channel. Thanks for all the posts!
RE G-maj7 9 11
Parent scale is Bb Lydian Augmented
Bb, C, D, E, F#, G, A
THANK YOU!!!!
Jazz educator Bill Dobbins in his very excellent "Jazz Harmony" book does a very thorough analysis of this with reference to the top four notes in a voicing which can be a number of 7th chords(i.e., maj 7th, minor 7th, dominant 7ths, half diminished 7th and regular diminished chords. Then altered chords have as the top four notes like major 7th #5, major 7th b5, dominant 7th #5 or b5, suspended dominant 7ths and diminished 7ths. And then you can progress from closed voicings to drop 2's.
Thank You!
The chord designations are applicable to only a certain bass note as the character of each chord can be changed when applied over a different bass note. The tritone chords with 3 or 7 in bass show that 6 becomes #9 and 9 becomes b13 The 5 transforms to b9 The same exact chord is either tension or release. Walk these chords down in 1/2 steps and it is a wonderful sounding tension release endless V of V of V....etc
Dominant-ception.
Thanks, Amy - Love Bill a masters MASTER and I was listening 40 years ago or so and saw him in Toronto at Georges Spaghetti house ( Queen and Simcoe )- a small club where you could actually dine at little tables or stand at the bar for a $1.50 beer ....for Bill Evans WOW ...:) nice work.
Jake JDS What a nice memory! I live in Toronto, and have only lately come to appreciate and love Bill Evans. It would be wonderful to turn back the clock and see him at George's!
Hi Aimee, thanks again for giving us all something 'new' to work with. I love all the voicings here but I'm concentrating on the Gmi6Ma9,11 chord.. which is found in at least 2 scales: G Mel Min and G whole/half symmetrical Dim..(double diminished etc).. Via the G1/2/whole scale. I'm concentrating on the top 4 notes of this first voicing you visit us with: (from the bottom: Bb F# A C..) and looking for places in this Dim scale where equal interval shapes exist. By putting (everybody does this) one of the available roots as in C, Gb, Eb, A.. Dominant 7th chords can be either be duplicated in a minor 3rd root sequence the C root produces notes applicable to a C13(#11) (and transposed at a min 3rd correspondingly: Eb13(#11), Gb13(#11) and A13(#11)..or if the original (4 note) shape is played with those Dominant roots, That chord voicing, with that same mysterious sound (but possible with that 9th stretch over the hand), will produce (or allow) apart from C13(#11):.. Eb13#9#11, Gb(7)#9#11, and A13(b9#9)... In a sense this voicing has a universality to it. Producing tonic min Gmi6Ma9(11), and dominant C13(#11) and associated min 3rd roots, and as a tonic chord per say, as a BbMa9+ (needs a one 1/2 step resolution) and as an interesting sounding Emin7b5 = Emi11(b5)(+5 [b13])...So it is capable of creating a texture in soloing also..I think.. Keep up the good work !! I enjoyed your 'Have You Met Miss Jones'.. awesome !!
How cool👍🎸😉 little Skriabin sound!)
Thank you so much!
You referenced Bill's version of "People" as an example, I hadn't heard it. Mind-blowing, really. An analysis of some of the modal elements and soloing techniques in Peace Piece (originally wrote Peace Peace, he got me) one day would be amazing. Thanks for the cool stuff.
thank you for this very inspiring video.
Dear Aimee; Please check out Fred Hersch fantastic chords in his solo version of Cole Porter's So In Love. I would love to see a tutorial on them. thank you. th-cam.com/video/zuOZBgsIgeY/w-d-xo.html
First chord C13#11 in first inversion
Like your Lesson !
But, to my ear the chord more naturally resolves to an A chord, not to from a Gm as she says, which would want to go to C something. I think it is an enhanced Em7 with a flat 5th, with elements of the first inversion as you said, but again, to my ear, it most normally wants to resolve an A chord.
Well l, considering how complex the harmonic structures are, you should really look at the context in which the chord is used. If you don’t know its function in the piece, it could really be anything... Anyway, as you pointed out, thinking of it as a C chord would simplify everything
Amy thank you for a very interesting lesson. You reminded me of an unfinished part of my life (music major) in college that I left with a broken heart, would like to return to.
Where do you teach?
Thanks !!!
Just started re-introducing myself to Bill Evans. I have heard Bill use something similar to that first chord with a C in the root in Danny Boy. It's not taking me long to learn the B flat section. Hoping to move on to B natural and then F.
sharp 7th on a minor chord sounds so cool
wonderful
That first chord totally reminded me of the awesome 12 tone row Alban Berg used in his Violin Concerto! (to the memory of an angel, a beautiful piece). It's built on triads which connect upwards on the 5th (G Bb D F# A C E G# B) and then a whole tone row at the top (Db Eb F) to get back to G. As you can see, you get G-, D, A-, E triads in that first part, and this chord contains all the notes of the first 3 triads, except the D. I wonder if Bill was a fan..
also thank you Aimee, I love your videos!
Keep up the good work
I love his voicings, great video! Did you put that worksheet up for download somewhere in the end? 👍🏻🌞
Speaking of notation, I'm pretty sure I saw some images of some Bill Evan handwritten lead sheets where he just wrote the notes, rather than a chord symbol. For example the first chord would be "E, Bb, F#,A, C". Not sure about this. But I'm sure that sometimes a chord symbol is a meaningless abstraction. Helpful in general but sometimes meaningless in particular context.
wadecottingham that's pretty cool!
wadecottingham maybe because aimee listened to the song and worked out what the bass was playing beforehand lol.
not gonna lie when i hear that Gb/G i automatically hear A13(b9)...and it was just the tritone in the end lol so ill take that :)
thank you!!!