This story of powerful artistic simpatico begins in a piano teacher’s study in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It’s 1968, the tropical air is heady with revolutionary creative change, and seven-year-old Eliane Elias is wondering about something unusual that’s happening during her piano lessons.
As she plays her simple pieces, her teacher’s eyes well up with tears. The teacher calls in her family to listen. “Why is the teacher crying?” Eliane later asks her mother, a classical concert pianist. “It’s because you have a way of playing that touches people,” her mother tells her. This is the beginning.
Brazil
It’s hard to convey the musical intensity of Brazil in the ’60s and ’70s. The samba, which pulsed in every Brazilian’s bloodstream, had spawned an irresistible new beat — the bossa nova — that combined the sophistication of American jazz with an unmistakbly Brazilian sensuality, and it was everywhere: on the radio, in the streets, all over the TV, and deep in the heart of Eliane. By 1972 she was in total immersion, absorbing all the music around her with the fever of youth. Then, she was introduced to Bill Evans’ Vanguard Sessions and everything changed. In Bill’s playing, she felt the powerful yet already familiar harmonies of late 19th- and early 20th-century classical writing — and the upwelling emotion of a jazz genius. Soon after, still a little girl, she committed herself totally to a lifetime at the piano.
“I had a teacher teaching me harmony,” says Eliane. “And I started to feel a strong connection when I was 11 and I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn’t like the other kids. I’d rather take my battery-powered record player to my room and work on listening and transcribing music than go to the beach. I remember a TV program called O Fino do Bossa and seeing Elis Regina and Jobim — everybody — on it! I remember sitting in front of the TV, fascinated. I was five years old. It’s the first image I have of that music. It was a wonderful time for Brazilian music. The bossa nova brought some elements of jazz, the concept of standards and harmonies.”
Not long thereafter, Eliane gave herself over to her most profound childhood pleasure: Transcribing the music of Bill Evans (among other jazz pianists). Eliane explains: “When I was a kid and I was transcribing, there was this feeling I had. It was inside my chest. It was such a feeling of accomplishment and satisfied me so much and gave me such a high that it would take my breath away. I really loved doing it and since then, I’ve thought, ‘That’s something for the young, that kind of discovery.’”
Rediscovering Bill
Fast-forward a generation. Eliane is in New York. She’s embarked on a prolific recording career that continues to match her with musical giants like Herbie Hancock, Michael and Randy Brecker, Steps Ahead, Toots Thielemans, Jack DeJohnette, and Peter Erskine, to name a few. She’s a mother, finds herself constantly on the road, and sees her daughter, Amanda, growing into her own identity as a recording artist as well. Through half a lifetime of exploring her own musical voice, she is deeply aware of the currents that flow both in her playing and in Bill Evans’. Even her husband, bassist Marc Johnson, played in Bill’s trio for the last three years of the pianist’s life. A week before his death, Bill gave Marc a handful of cassettes of music he’d been working on. After the master pianist’s passing, the bereaved bass player put the cassettes away for posterity.
One night last year, Marc pulled out one of the cassettes and handed it to Eliane. The circuit was completed. Eliane sat down at the piano and began to transcribe “Here Is Something For You,” Bill’s last, previously unreleased tune. “I got really excited because I was transcribing all the little things he did and I got goosebumps,” she says. “When I was done transcribing and played along, I got tears in my eyes and I thought, ‘Wow, I feel this again. I never thought that I’d feel this again.’ It’s something that’s so hard to explain to somebody who’s not a musician. You unlock a chord and it becomes something so big inside of you. It’s like a whole universe.”
Eliane continues: “I had no intention of writing a lyric. The arrangement was all set in my mind and on paper. It was a piano trio with a piano introduction. One day I was in the kitchen making a little something to eat and I just started singing the song, but with words: ‘Here is something for you / Where or when it finds you.’ I went to the piano. I was so moved. It was very heartfelt.” The resulting track, featured on her newest album Something For You, is a cascade of gorgeous chromatic harmony and a simple melodic figure that could easily be sung by Sinatra — or Gilberto Gil.
Something For You is a tribute to Bill in repertoire and style. “This album is something special for me and Marc,” she says. “We looked at the whole spectrum of Bill’s career, songs from the beginning to the very end. Some of these songs were standards that I didn’t know until I heard Bill play them. I’d never heard ‘But Beautiful’ until I heard Bill do it with Tony Bennett in the ’70s.”
The Multi-Faceted Eliane
If you’ve never heard Eliane play or sing, Something For You is a great place to start. She’s a consummate jazz artist with a liquid, lyrical style and an ever-bubbling sense of joy in her playing. Here, she teams up with husband Marc on bass and the trio-friendly drummer Joey Baron; it’s as much an Evans-esque tour de force as an homage. The tight group plays the American Songbook gems linked closely with Bill: “My Foolish Heart,” “You and the Night and the Music,” and “But Not for Me.” They dip into jazz tunes that Evans emblazoned with his unique mastery, such as Miles Davis’ “Solar.” They also illuminate some of Bill’s own compositions: “Blue in Green,” “Five,” and the neo-standard “Waltz for Debby,” plus the never-before-recorded “Evanesque” and the aforementioned “Here is Something for You.” And since the album is subtitled Eliane Elias Sings and Plays Bill Evans, you get to hear her breathy, sensuous alto floating over many of the tunes.
Eliane’s vocal phrasing is so effortless and drifts so freely and intuitively across bar-lines that it’s hard to believe she doesn’t overdub, but it’s all live: “I blanket the piano. But the piano still leaks out. It would not be easy to overdub vocals because if you overdub spots, the piano would drop out. And if you overdub the whole piece, you’d lose the connection between the voice and the piano. So much of it is rubato. You have to be right there in the moment.”
This isn’t the first time such an approach has paid off for Eliane. On her debut solo recording, a collaboration with Randy Brecker, she sang most of the songs. Later, she began using her voice for color and to fill in an instrumental part. Then in 1989, something unusual happened: “I sang just one song on Eliane Elias Plays Jobim. Then I found out that the Manhattan School of Music was using that song to teach people how to sing. I went, ‘How’s that possible?’ I didn’t even think of myself as a singer. But they liked my phrasing and delivery.”
After a business transition that took her from Blue Note to Sony BMG, her new record execs said, “Let’s do a real vocal record!” Says Eliane: “So we did Dreamer with strings and the album did really well. I started taking some lessons and got a few tips on how to preserve and warm up the voice. And next, I was singing on concerts, live TV, and radio broadcasts. It just grew!” She has another all-vocal CD entitled Bossa Nova Stories coming out in October of this year; the album celebrates the 50th anniversary of the bossa nova and features Brazilian musical luminaries and lush instrumental settings.
Piano Style
The one Eliane style you won’t hear on her new Evans album is her signature Brazilian playing, which is worth seeking out in its own right. Real Brazilian piano players (as opposed to the rest of us who play Americanized versions of it) mine the rich musical lodes of Brazilian popular and classical writing. Their harmonies are distinctively chromatic and their rhythms are indelibly sourced in the samba, rather than Afro-Cuban or other Latin styles. Check out Eliane’s versions of “Waters of March” on Eliane Elias Plays Jobim or Ary Barroso’s “Brazil” on the album Paulistana. You’ll hear a captivating and irresistible groove that non-Brazilians often spend countless hours trying to recreate in their own playing.
Eliane’s playing shows great attention to line, both melodic and internal, that speaks to her classical training and gives her piano work intentionality and depth that constantly engages the ear. She explores melodies with sudden freedom: “If you heard the little recording of when I was 12 years old, you’d hear the same approach to melody that I have now. I’d make my left hand provide color. And I would look for things in classical music that would develop my pinky and let it sing. That’s my first violin there, singing away. Even something very simple can become something very emotional.”
Eliane’s harmonic sense grows organically out of her facility with lines. And her instinct for romantic, Evans-like textures emerges particularly in ballad playing. “I love minor chords,” she says. “Every chord has its own power and function and beauty. I like the tension of minor seconds. If you play [for an Fm chord] G, Ab, Eb, in the left hand, you hear all the harmonics. If you hold that and you play other things, it’s like you have your own little string section there.”
If you’re not yet hip to Eliane, now might be the right time to jump in. Already prodigious, she remains poised to continue producing world-class recordings. At only 24 years old, daughter Amanda Elias-Brecker is off to Tokyo on her first solo tour and Eliane anticipates redirecting tremendous energy from parenting back into music. Eliane has already conquered the world with her playing and now, with her singing; in Japan she has won prestigious awards for her last three recordings and continues to dazzle audiences across the globe with her performances. None of this is surprising — she creates intimacy with any crowd the moment she saunters on stage, kicks off her high heels, and digs in.
A Selected Eliane Elias Discography
Something For You (Blue Note)
Around the City (RCA Victor)
Solos and Duets (Blue Note)
Fantasia (Blue Note)
Eliane Elias Plays Jobim (Blue Note)
Illusions (Denon)