From the first moments, when I was just discovering improvisation, Bill Evans

seemed to me an essential pianist of jazz modernity. His music, imbued with a rhythmic and harmonic vocabulary so colorful, polyphonic and resolutely new for his time, launched me into the orbit of music and led the way to musical rigor and refinement. 

 

Keith Jarrett captivated me from the start, as much in his perilous solo exercises as in the jazz trio he reinvented alongside his longtime partners, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. He resurrected the memory of my initiatory encounter with the work of Bill Evans, which had occurred a few years earlier. In his piano music, I hear a spiritual heritage, which resonates with thousand and one nuances and pays tribute to the creativity of the human spirit.