Eddie Heywood

[BassmanPicker]

Is there any musician in the world today that can play even closely to the man who was the best jazz piano player of all time. Somehow Jazz devolved into just being able to play riffs and come back into the same key. Heywood's "riffs" re-wrote entire melody lines or outlined them in red. I haven't seen or heard of anyone even closely able to handle music as Heywood did. And he wrote so many of his own melodies that became the theme music of so many movies that they have ingrained themselves into the older American psyche.

Will there ever be real musicians again or is music doomed to become nothing more than a man pulling a cat by the tail?

[jazzboCR]

Is there any musician in the world today that can play even closely to the man who was the best jazz piano player of all time. Somehow Jazz devolved into just being able to play riffs and come back into the same key. Heywood's "riffs" re-wrote entire melody lines or outlined them in red. I haven't seen or heard of anyone even closely able to handle music as Heywood did. And he wrote so many of his own melodies that became the theme music of so many movies that they have ingrained themselves into the older American psyche.

A reasonable template is talking about an artist then presenting some tunes to further make your case--serving them up on a platter as it were. No nagging; just a suggestion.

Some tunes ...and yes I'll start with "Canadian Sunset": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3l3GSyeD08 << trio version so you can hear the piano and the basic song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e93moa3ydb4 << This comes as a shock to those only knowing him from his over-blown doings with Hugo Winterhalter (he happily cashed those checks though).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f7MU7Jqgvg << Lovely medley

[BassmanPicker]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL1OHjtKdTQ is the sort of thing I was talking about. Where Heywood builds the music instead of cutting it into pieces. It's hard to tell with Canadian Sunset since that was written by Eddie.

From his broken career I suspect that he kept getting addicted to dope since he would be years out of the business only to return even better than before. This seems to be becoming the norm for all musicians and actors these days.

Even better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f7MU7Jqgvg

[jazzboCR]

From his broken career I suspect that he kept getting addicted to dope since he would be years out of the business only to return even better than before. This seems to be becoming the norm for all musicians and actors these days.

Not to be contentious but if you'll change "...these days." to "...those days.", I'll wholly agree. There are a couple of actors that follow this pattern these days but most of the heavy dope was from the '40's to the '80s. These days the glamour has been stripped from dope and alcohol, there is too heavy a media and fan focus on their lives and with so many good actors and musicians around, what manager/promoter/producer would take a chance on a doper or boozehound? Production insurance costs would skyrocket 'cuz insurance companies know all this too. Sure, there are outliers like Robert Downey, Jr. but that's just it--they are outliers, and in his case, a cleaned-up outlier. Oh and you are only addicted once...and it's forever--re-addiction is really only relapse, no matter how long the clean period was. A civil discussion here, right?--no direct challenge meant or implied.
Thanks again for bringing Mr. Heywood to our attention.