Chris Anderson

Pianist

Born: February 26, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois

Died: February 4, 2008

Chicago pianist influenced Herbie Hancock

Copyright © 2008 

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Chris Anderson was born in Chicago on February 26, 1926. He passed away just before his 82nd birthday two years after suffering a stroke. His lifelong fascination with harmony, sparked by movie scores, began well before the age of 10. He was already teaching himself to play on the family piano, so well indeed that he never took lessons -- a clue to the startling originality of his harmonic ideas. Before Chris finished high school, he was playing blues gigs in South Side bars. An after-high school job in a record store exposed him to Nat King Cole, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington; from then on, jazz was his music.

After those first three great mentors, Chris rarely listened to pianists. As he put it, "I'd be more interested in listening to an arranger than to a pianist. Gil Evans for example, or Nelson Riddle -- they fascinated me. The things Riddle did for Sinatra knocked me out." Consistent with his interest for harmony and arrangement, his classical listening favored the great impressionist orchestrators, Debussy and Ravel.

By the time he was 18, he was playing piano for Leo Blevins, an influential Chicago guitarist who knew almost all the Jazz stars. That year, due to Leo, Chris started playing with Sonny Stitt. Within two years, he was playing the famous Pershing Ballroom concerts with Charlie Parker and Howard McGhee; two of these have been preserved on record. He was 20, and due to steadily worsening cataracts, became completely blind.

For the next 15 years as house pianist for several of Chicago's best jazz clubs, Chris played with a steady stream of the greats: Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Gene Ammons, Max Roach, Stan Getz, Johnny Griffin, Roland Kirk.

At the same time he was playing with and influencing a whole generation of young Chicago musicians, many of them destined for greatness. Among them were Wilbur Ware, Clifford Jordan, Von Freeman, Billy Wallace, George Coleman, Wilbur Campbell and Harold Maburn. Chris, with characteristic modesty, speaks of them not as followers, but as close musical brothers. "Heck, they influenced me as much as I influenced them."

In 1960, Herbie Hancock heard Chris Anderson play. "Chris' music has affected the core of my music very deeply. After hearing him play just once, I begged him to let me study with him. Chris Anderson is a master of harmony and sensitivity. I shall be forever indebted to him and his very special gift."

In 1961, Dinah Washington, having run through several piano players in the previous year, asked Chris to tour with her. Despite Chris' brilliance as a singer's accompanist, the musicians in Chicago were betting that he wouldn't last two months with the evil-tempered Dinah. Sure enough, in New York six weeks later, she fired him. Chris decided to stay on and play in New York. His crippling bone condition limited his ability to work, though he appeared regularly as a soloist in Barry Harris's annual concerts and made the most of the gigs he had at Bradley's, the Village Vanguard, the Jazz Gallery, and Smalls. Through these infrequent appearances his playing was able to influence a handful of younger musicians who were lucky enough to have seen or played with the master, including Ronnie Ben-Hur, Ari Roland and Jason Lindner.

He left a small but significant number of recordings. Plans are in the works to make an extensive collection of his music available for posterity.