Richie Beirach

thumb|Richie Beirach Richard Alan Beirach (May 23, 1947 – January 26, 2026) was an American jazz pianist and composer. Quotes Being curious is an absolute rule of life. If you don’t have that, I don’t know what you're doing in this music. Beirach circa late 2010s, in conversation with David Schroeder (From the Minds of Jazz Musicians: Conversations with the Creative and Inspired, 2024) Even while I was studying at [Manhattan School of Music], I was learning about melody and rhythm, and theory, and harmony, and all the great composers like Scriabin, Khatchaturian, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev...Bach and Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schoenberg, Alan Berg...Boulez, Stockhausen...We would listen, for example, to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, or a Bach Cantata or the Prelude and Fugue, and so on. And then the teacher, Ludmila Ulehla, picked the essential 20 composers in music history, from...Mozart...and so on, up through...Debussy, Scriabin...and Stockhousen...Eventually, my goal became to put all that I had absorbed from these studies into jazz, into, say, "Stella By Starlight," to integrate the harmony, the melodic ideas, and so on. I continued doing that for about twenty years afterwards. I spent hours and hours at the piano, sleeping as little [as] three hours a night. But I loved it, so it wasn't arduous work. Beirach in 2019 on his classical education in an interview with All About Jazz You must remember that it was a different time...It was before everyone was looking into their smartphones. There were computers but it wasn't such a dominant vibe in the air. People talked to each other, met in bars, and went out to hear music...In Greenwich Village...there were at least six clubs within a few walking minutes...Around that time there were at least 10 functioning clubs just in Manhattan, not even counting Brooklyn, that featured music seven nights a week...People would go out to the the clubs, not just musicians. There was a real sense of community...We were very lucky to live in this time. Beirach in 2017, in the liner notes for Inborn (2018), originally recorded in 1989 in NYC Very often the things that we consider to be new are not new. They're just new combinations or reanimations and reimaginations of things that have already been done, put together in a different way. Beirach as cited by ECM Records External links Category:1947 births Category:2026 deaths Category:Pianists from the United States Category:Composers from the United States Category:Jazz musicians Category:People from New York City