I feel a sea change happening.

The biggest musical phases of my life, in rough chronological order, began when I was seven—a Russian-Jewish immigrant growing up in the suburbs of Boston, MA:

  • Green Day
  • Nirvana
  • Metallica
  • Nobuo Uematsu (via Final Fantasy 6)
  • Paul Oakenfold
  • Pink Floyd
  • Miles Davis (senior year of high school-ish)
  • Stevie Wonder (college)
  • Michael Jackson
  • Tower of Power and Earth, Wind & Fire
  • Elliott Smith (some time after college)
  • Gustav Mahler
  • Bill Evans

The Mahler phase was perhaps the most intense and long-lasting. After that, for years, I didn’t feel a gravitational pull toward any particular artist. But when I started practicing piano again after moving back to Boston, I rediscovered Bill Evans. For years, he has been an influence in the background. I don’t always listen to his music, but I keep coming back again and again to his arrangements.

I have written written before of Leonard Bernstein’s influence on Bill Evans: Evans made Some Other Time one of his standards and was so deeply influenced by it that one of his own most famous compositions—Peace Piece—is based on it. I’ve also written about Bernstein’s connection to Mahler. In the documentary Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note, a fellow composer suggests Bernstein may have felt himself to be—paraphrasing here—the second coming of Mahler. Bernstein, in his The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard lectures, describes Mahler as a prophet—someone who, even before his death in 1911, had foreseen the century’s destructiveness.

Most recently I have come to know yet more of Bernstein’s music: I watched the intensely tragic West Side Story and have been listening to the original Broadway recordings of it. Tonight, in particular, takes my breath away. And I can learn from it. I am learning from it: studying how Bernstein modulates between tonalities, practicing his left-hand accompaniment rhythms, absorbing his harmonic language. It’s not exactly simpler than Bill Evans’, but somehow, it feels more approachable.

And so, as I continue to learn from him, it occurs to me that the great Leonard Bernstein—as I called him last week at the Drawing Board Brewing Company after performing his Somewhere (also from West Side Story)—also belongs on that list.