I enjoy secret garden as gentle , non intrusive and non-elevator music.

http://www.secretgarden.no/lowband/fs_sight_sounds.html

..dB

Oh and how did I not know about this place until Yesterday?

Because we are trying to keep it low key and small. Last thing we want is the stupid arguments or nonsensical posts often seen on ...

Understood what you guys are about and not complaining that nobody told me.  Just seems so many people are here who I enjoy reading and conversing with that I'm surprised I didn't get linked in an indexed google search until yesterday.

Same here.

I found out about this forum because LFF (I think) linked this site's Koda plots over at HF.  I had a laugh, and then I joined.

Gotta admit, I kinda felt like the nerd at the party who wanders into the discussion and chuckles along outside the circle.

Just seriously extended my music library. This is a great topic and I am really happy I found Bill Evans, he is right up my alley. I need a good DAP soon so that I can stop swapping music for my 16gb nano.

Thanks for reminding me of Debussy's prelude. It is one of those albums I chose not to fit onto my iPod previously. Any other good recommendations for similar styled impressionists? Also, which Bill Evans are the mellow, drug induced ones? I just have Exploration and Sunday Night.

If you like Debussy, it is a good bet you'd like other impressionists, such as Ravel, Satie, and Scriabin.  Debussy himself has works that are much more accessible than his preludes (if you play piano his children's corner and suite bergamasque are two relatively easy sets of songs to learn.)

A little Evans History:

Evans was ravaged by two drugs.  Miles Davis introduced him to heroin, which was the "it" drug during the hard bop era.  Miles kicked the habit after about five years but it plagued Evans until I believe the late 60's.  I've seen it speculated that the abuse got worse after Lafaro's death and the collapse of his best trio.   The time period that you'll notice this affect his work is roughly from Trio 64 through his Montreux Jazz Festival album which was a comeback of sorts.  His next album, Alone, was one of the best solo jazz piano albums of all time. 

He then plunged headfirst into cocaine (the "it' drug of the 70's-80's) and there was a steep drop-off in the quality of his work until a few live sets (some recorded without his knowledge) in the last year of his life: Turn out the Stars, The Paris Concert, and a fitting bookend to his life and career The Last Waltz.

Evans took a very logical, structured view of building chord structure, harmonics and tempos in his songs.  The drug years largely sapped him of his prodigious mental acuity, not to mention his coordination.  So the "mellower" music was from a lack of dynamism and creativity (relatively) compared to his formative years.  Not as good a study for jazz piano students but very pleasant for background music.

Hope that wasn't too long-winded.  I just started playing again this week after a series of injuries and am very excited.

Nothing's a sure bet.  There's quite a few things that appeal to people about Evans' style.  He has a couple key similarities to the Classical impressionist composers.  One is the impressionist harmonies, in which full bodied chords (by which I mean more varied than say tonic-third-fifth) help make the actual melody instead of being in the background telling the listener what key/scale the melody inhabits.  Impressionism also contains some modal elements (which Evans was in the forefront of pioneering in the Jazz world with albums such as Kind of Blue) as well as what some call "escaped chords" which occupy a key that has no real relation to anything around it and is left unresolved.  It's an eerie, haunting (sometimes mildly jarring) sound when you hear it. 

That is all besides for the basic tone and texture of the style.   There aren't many buildups to earth-shattering crescendos- its more about the colors than strokes. The word I would use to describe both impressionism and Evan's Jazz style (which I classify as "introspective") is shimmering.  The rhythms are exact (relatively) but they are supposed to feel free and fluid. 

While Evans' style more closely resembles the impressionists than any other "classical" style, nothing's a sure thing.  Most of the actual "melodies" in Impressionism are much more complex and less "intuitive" to the modern ear than the jazz standards (and MASH theme songs) that Evans would play.  If you're interested in getting into impressionism, you can start with Debussy's Suite Bergamasque which features probably his most famous work, Claire De Lune.  Try listening a few times and see if it does anything for you.

Composers like Scriabin are more impenetrable.  Part of his process was a synesthesia-like association between key and color - what seem like jumbles of random notes and fragmented scraps of melodies were his idea of swirling colors on an easel.  It was a very pretentious (though fruitful) time.