All 24 new Herbie Nichols compositions from our Herbie Nichols Centennial Project are now available. We're finally able to bring you all of the music (lead sheets and artist performance audio) for all 24 previously unrecorded Herbie Nichols compositions that became our Herbie Nichols Centennial Project. We've introduced his new songs to you in four groupings (six compositions in each group.) and also accompanied the release of each six with a teaser video which shows the great piano artists we invited to make the first recording of these songs on the 7-foot Steinway "B" piano at the Van Gelder Recording Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Herbie recorded his own Blue Note sessions (1955, 1956) on this same piano when it was in Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack studio.
In all, we had 23 different pianists involved, each playing one of Herbie's unrecorded songs, except for pianist Frank Kimbrough, who got to play two of the new songs. In all, we had 23 different pianists involved, each playing one of Herbie's unrecorded songs, except for pianist Frank Kimbrough, who got to play two of the new songs. For more history about our project, check out our Herbie Nichols Centennial Project page and our Herbie Nichols Piano Summit page.
These "Fourth Six" tracks feature established master pianists, several of whom are jazzleadsheets.com composers including living legend Bertha Hope.
As with our previous releases in this project, a teaser video is available with excerpts of these six songs from our recording sessions. Here are more:
Here are all 24 titles, in four groups:
"The First 6"
"The Second Six"
"The Third Six"
"The Fourth Six"