Pianist Randy Ingram recently released Sound Within: A Celebration of Bill Evans. It’s a piano trio album featuring Ingram alongside drummer Joe LaBarbera and bassist Rufus Reid, both of whom played with Evans. LaBarbera famously played in what was ultimately Bill Evans’ final trio, alongside bassist Marc Johnson, while Reid spent a short stint playing with Evans in the late ’70s, alongside drummer Philly Joe Jones.
For Randy, that direct historical connection was an important part of putting this project together.
“I think it has really been important to me because I think there’s something intangible,” he says. “There’s something that can’t be quantified and can’t be boiled down to technical ability… there’s something about the way that music can really communicate and move people.”
But the connection to Bill Evans is also deeply personal for Randy. He grew up in Southern California and discovered Evans just as he was learning how to listen to jazz and deciding what kind of musician he wanted to become.
“The defining moments of like, ‘Hey, I wanna play jazz. What do I like in jazz?’ So many of those early moments were directly tied into discovering Bill’s music and discovering the sort of sentiment behind Bill’s music and sort of the honesty behind it,” he remembers.
Drummer Joe LaBarbera became an early mentor. When Randy was still in college, he invited LaBarbera to play on a demo that included a number of tunes associated with Evans.
They recorded “My Foolish Heart,” a song Evans had famously played. After the first take, LaBarbera encouraged the young pianist to try it again.
“At the end of the second take, he said, ‘You know, I think that one’s better. I think you sound much more like yourself on that take.’ And I realized, like, okay, the goal is not to copy here,” he explains.
Years later, Randy’s relationship with Bill Evans took an unexpected turn when he actually became him, at least on screen. Ingram portrayed Evans in the 2013 Swedish film Waltz for Monica, a biopic about singer Monica Zetterlund.
“That remains one of the more surreal experiences of my life,” he says.
For years, Randy knew he wanted to make a record that addressed the enormous influence Evans had on him. But he also knew he had to wait.
“I had thought about doing [it] for a long time, and I had always pushed it off… I thought it was really important for me to do what I could to come up with my own thing, come up with my own sound, even with all those influences.”
So by the time Randy finally made Sound Within, he had spent years figuring out how to acknowledge Evans’ influence without being overwhelmed by it. And he had a very clear idea about what he didn’t want to do.
“I don’t wanna be a Bill Evans cover band… I think the last thing Bill would’ve wanted, the last thing that his musical ethos says to me is like, ‘Hey, play this exactly the way I played it.’”
Sound Within: A Celebration of Bill Evans is Randy Ingram’s homage to the pianist who captured his imagination as a young man, made with musicians who connect him directly to that history, but from the perspective of the pianist Randy has become.
Randy Ingram performs music from Sound Within alongside Rufus Reid and Joe LaBarbera this Wednesday, August 12 at The Pocket, one of Manhattan’s newest and most talked about jazz clubs.
You can hear my full conversation with Randy here:
