When I have a change of pace and need some calm in my life, I sometimes listen to Keiko Matsui. She is a very talented jazz pianist. The song below is called Water Lily. I also recommend Flight of the Angels (I couldn’t find a good video) and Steps of Maya.
Thanks for the Keiko video…..
pooritalianboy
http://www.pooritalianboy.wordpress.com
Nice, but I wish they would take away the disco beat in the background though.
Nice song, good melodies always trump pure rhythm, for the taste of the contemporary, and proof that rock/pop can still be deep check out the following
Per:
I really suggest that you listen to Flight of the Angels (the version from the Very Best of Keiko Matsui album). It is a really great song and the percussion fits in really well.
Just Learning:
That was good.
Pet peeve of mine: this music, lovely as it is, has nothing to do with Jazz. When going to music stores, or scanning radio stations for music, or any other occasion I have to look for Jazz music for some reason, I seem to encounter lots of smooth Jazz, acid Jazz, easy listening Jazz, Jazz fusion…you name it, most of which typically doesn’t even resemble Jazz in any way or form.
Besides this being a minor nuisance, I also don’t understand the phenomena. It’s not like Jazz is this hyper-popular musical genre everyone needs to be part of. Beats me…
Re: Moshe – Jazz just sounds like a cool name. But you’re right, this doesn’t resemble jazz at all except that it has a melody that’s been taken through variations, maybe has some improvisation done, and maybe uses some chords or chord progressions more popular in jazz, but all those techniques were invented hundreds of years before jazz (except maybe some of the chords/progressions but those are just variations on ones that came before). Jazz is live, improvisational, and taken to funky timings because it’s supposed to be HARD to do. It’s supposed to be the HARDEST thing to do in music. This music has a simple 4/4 beat throughout, doesn’t have any drum, bass or electric keyboard improv.
The problem is, our society is a society of labelers. We want convenient little boxes to put things into. And nowdays, pretty much every artist has their own ‘style,’ which we think of as being ‘genre’ and attempt to label as such.
She may be a talented jazz pianist, but what she’s playing sounds closer to Debussy or Shoshtakovich than jazz. But then again, everything is music cross-pollinates as some point.
And of course, there’s always things in music history studies that have the same irritating mislabeling, but what can you do? Take the Neo-Classical movement. It’s much closer to baroque music than classical, but it’s gotten the label Neo-Classical and thus it shall be known. And the impressionist movement, that was meant to be an insult by music critics to musicians they didn’t like, the musicians adopted the term and now it stuck.
I think a lot of the jazz mislabeling has to do with color – i.e. specific sounds of instruments – if they instruments sort of sound like instruments used in jazz, it’s called “something jazz” even though it’s not jazz. Like kenny g is smooth jazz because he plays an alto sax.