Cornelia Street Café Opens Season with BILL EVANS TRIBUTE 9/15

CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ is located at 29 Cornelia Street, NYC, New York 212-989-9319 between West 4th and Bleecker Sts, Greenwich Village

1 Subway to Sheridan Square; A, C, E, B, D, V, F to West 4th St.
Contact: Jim Eigo, Jazz Promo Services, 845-986-1677, jazzpromo@earthlink.net

Tonight At The Cornelia Street Café.

6:00PM Bill Evans TRIBUTE
(Bill Zavatsky; Laurie Verchomin)
Serial Underground "the subversive nightclub series" (Time Out NY)

We open our 2010/11 Serial Underground season with a unique evening to celebrate the great composer/pianist/jazz icon Bill Evans on the thirtieth anniversary of his death on September 15, 1980. Bill was an early mentor of mine. Although it took me a long to appreciate his influential lyrical side, the hard-swinging extroversion that characterized how he played in his last years grabbed me. I suspect our casual friendship arose from common musical interests; for instance, our mutual appreciation of great classical pianists. Bill set me up with a job fixing up and editing his transcribed solos for a book. and we painstakingly cross-checked details over the phone (this was before fax machines and computers, remember). I¹d plunk out a chord on my piano, and he¹d say yes or no or change this or keep that, and so forth.

Tonight¹s guest writers certainly bring us closer to the man behind the music. Bill Zavatsky¹s poems stay with you long after you read or hear them. Laurie Verchomin¹s upcoming memoir about her life with Bill Evans in the last year and a half of his life runs the full emotional gamut. Once I started reading it, I couldn¹t stop. Laurie and I decided to frame her words with piano music, and although I¹m using Bill¹s compositions or, in some cases, songs associated with him, strangely enough, I¹m not playing like him. Maybe a chord or two, or a favorite lick, but I just can¹t do my once letter-perfect Bill Evans imitation anymore. Perhaps that¹s a good thing. When I told Bill how much I had stolen from him, he said "Go right ahead. That's what I did when I was young. It only took me forty years to evolve my own style!"

$7 admission includes a drink|Jed Distler, host.|Cover $10

NY Jazz Guitarist Tom Chang has performed and or recorded with Greg Osby, Joey Calderazzo, Rich Perry, as well as pop icons The Supremes, Luther Vandross and Southern Indian Percussion Master Subash Chandra.

His newly formed unit will perform original contemporary jazz compositions influenced by Southern Indian Karnatic concepts as well as contemporary classical music and contemporary jazz.

Cover $10|http://www.myspace.com/tomchangmusic