Emily

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! Today, I'm playing a jazz standard called "Emily," composed by Johnny Mandel. This song was written for a film in 1964, but in the end it wasn't actually included. It became popular when the pianist Bill Evans recorded it a few years later. I hope you like listening to it!

Listen to the song here
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If you look at the last few Tea with Liya songs I've posted, you'll see that I'm mentioning a lot of different musicians. On the classical side, I've brought up J. S. Bach and George Frideric Handel, and then a few weeks later I'll tell you about the days when Charlie Parker and Bill Evans were playing jazz in New York. 

Usually when we're talking about jazz musicians, there are a lot more names to be mentioned. Maybe it's because they were all part of ensembles in which each member was known for their unique role. But you wouldn't think they were connected to the classical composers that came before them, would you?

Hundreds of years separated the groups of musicians, leaving a solid wall between them through which there was no hope of passing on information... or was there?

If you're aware of the work of musicians in your past, then wouldn't you keep them in mind if you were writing songs yourself? You might invest time into listening to their famous songs and seeing what ideas they were using. If you took a special interest in one of them, you might even incorporate his ideas into your own composing.

This was actually the case with Bill Evans, a pianist who recorded today's song. He said that he was influenced by the music of Claude Debussy, a classical composer whose work extended into the 20th century. Debussy was looking at how to move away from traditional harmonies and use music to express emotion.

Bill Evans also went all the way back to the 1700s and used preludes and fugues by Bach to work on his technique.

As another example, a piano arrangement of Beethoven's 5th symphony was once made by Franz Liszt. (If you have a distinct memory of a symphony by Beethoven that everyone's heard, but you don't know the name of it, it's probably this one.) The symphony was written before Liszt was born, but he still took the time to study it. 

It might be easy to think of all these musicians as separate, unless you know that they had been in the same place at the same time. However, remember that none of them would have started playing music unless they had teachers and other influences to listen to. They spent time listening to each other, and some of them even had direct relationships.

The more diverse a composer's influences were, the more ideas he was being exposed to and could make use of. No one would have said this at the time, but all these composers were doing the same thing that you're doing right now.

They were filling up their teacups with music!

~Liya