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My brother told me once felt like ‘Dad was waiting for him to show up’ in the States before he could passd on. and he finally did. I can’t know this for sure, nobody can really but it feels right.

Last year’s Jimmy Raney Birthday article, Bebop Is Harder Than You Think, centered around Jimmy’s unparalleled mastery of uptempo bebop playing — playing cogently while the tempo threatens to leave you in the dust. This year, we’re going in the opposite direction with his ballad playing, where the challenge isn’t how you play when you have no time to think — it’s what you play when you have all the time in the world; the onus is to play something meaningful that touches people, or leave your soul hanging out to dry.

Sometimes I get a little annoyed at how some musicians seem to view bebop’s requirements. They learn a few licks and exclaim, “Ok, and that’s how you master bebop!” To be sure, you can pick up some bebop clichés and incorporate them. But there is really more to bebop than just learning some arpeggios, enclosures…

In jazz improvisation discussions, it’s easy to get caught up in the small stuff. It seems particularly prevalent in piano and guitar instruction: what scale, what chord change, what scale over what chord change, what jazz lick here, what jazz lick there… Here a lick, there a lick, everywhere a jazz lick, E-A-D-G-B —E! To…

If you’re an English stickler over the use of the word evolve in its typical context – over a long period of time – then perhaps not. However, if you’re a musician of Jimmy Raney’s caliber, that weaves profound musical stories within just a few choruses with such precise yet inexorable logic, then Yes, it’s…