Papa Bill

As I often do when I need to clean a lot of shit out of my ears, I listened to Kind of Blue last night.  In listening to Blue in Green, I decided that Bill Evans is basically the father of contemporary harmony.  It's largely the concept of taking the individual chords and milking them for all they're worth extension- and upper strucure-wise(same thing, really).  Furthermore, I feel like Evans presented the future musicians with two great lessons.  1) How to exploit all the colorful harmonic possibilities of a chord.  2) How to do so in an extremely melodic way, showing that the true reason for harmony is to elevate the meaning of melody.  Every note he plays on Blue in Green is just the melody those chords are singing at the time.  I think that it is the second lesson which finds itself to often lost on the more recent generations, eclipsed by lesson number one.  This is part of what is so drab about Branford's playing; he gets so excited about the chords he's blowing over that he forgets to really play anything exciting.
Cannonball makes me cry.