I have just seen this on Facebook on guitarist Steve Khan's page:

"It is with a very heavy heart that I have to mark the passing of pianist, composer, arranger, the great Clare Fischer. His unique style, his harmonic concepts, his beautiful melodies cast such a profound shadow over so much of what I have been trying to do - and even then, I'm only the most humble of students. Clare, his beloved wife, Donna and his dear son Brent were always so kind to me, and I have never undervalued the gift of his friendship and support."

BBC report

That's very sad. An incredible player and I have some of his solo albums which is some of the best solo piano I've heard.

Another great gone. Sad times.

I'm only familiar with the two tunes that have become standards, Pensativa and Morning, both great tunes. Just a few months ago I ordered a book of his music from his web sit and his wife Donna sent a handwritten personal thank you along with the book. I look forward to exploring more of his music.

I just wrote this over at the Keyboard Corner forum after Tim's posting there.

Very sad news but not unexpected. The big band just played a gig on 1/16 at Vitellos under his son's direction, Brent, literally less then a mile from Clare's home in Studio City. He had been in declining health for some time...

What can I say about Clare that I haven't championed here often on the forum. His tune "Pensativa" is imo one of the greatest Jazz compositions of all time-right up there with Dolphin Dance, Lush Life , Prelude to a Kiss and various tunes from Monk, Shorter, Silver, Strayhorn and Golson.

I was fortunate enough to have had the chance to study with him briefly in the '80s. Although I must admit, at that point in time I wasn't able to really grasp his harmonic concepts and and how it related to the piano. I just used to go over to his house in Studio City and basically feel like I was the biggest idiot on the face of the earth in regard to harmony and voicings ...

One time I was subbing on the legendary arranger Bill Holman's big band and on a break Clare's name came up. Bill said..I don't think there's anyone walking around on planet earth that has a greater understanding of functional harmony then Clare Fischer.

Clare could be moody and salty. I remember calling him to tell him that I had bought his friend, Phil Mattson's Steinway. Clare had recently flown out to Iowa to do a clinic and raved about the piano according to Phil. I also had called to let Clare know that I was selling my Yamaha S6 in case he might run into anyone interested. I knew Clare liked that piano since he owned the S4. Clare's first reply was.."Why are you calling me ?! I already have a piano ! " I obviously caught him on a bad day..

He was and will always continue to be a major influence in my music. Rip Clare, a one of a kind....

That is sad. He was a harmonic genius of the highest order.
I remember going to a workshop of his once and the arrangements of his that he played completely blew my mind.
RIP
It must have been incredible to study with him Dave.

Wow that's very sad. Pensativa was one of the first jazz tunes I ever learned.

Hey Dave. I had heard that some of Clare's students would call him and he could be "in a mood" so to speak, the price of artistic license/genius I guess. Not sure if he wanted to take on many private students due to his arranging and session gigs that kept him busy. He was an amazing player and arranger and a real loss for his fans, katt

My friend, bassist Jeff Berlin has a great Prince story that goes back a few years.

I can't rememer the particulars of why Jeff and members of Prince's band were hanging together (it might have been a Grammy related function or party), but they got into a discussion over Clare.

Clare had just contributed a string or horn arrangement to Prince's latest record and members of the band were saying how good they thought he was and were surprised they'd never heard of him.

Jeff's tried to explain what a legend Clare is-"think D. Ellington, M. Ravel, I. Stravinsky rolled into one". The band guys are listening, nodding along when one of the band members says, "Yeah, it sounds like he knows what he is doing, otherwise Prince would never have used him".

Jeff said-"well, uh, yeah, but you don't understand. Very few, if anyone, today in music have the knowledge about harmony much less are able to put into real world applications as an arranger and composer. Clare for almost 50 yrs. has achieved legendary status in the music world, jazz, classical, choral, pop, you name it, Clare has done it- he is truly a genius!! Prince is very good at what he does, but....."

Well, to them those were fightin' words. Jeff said, I'd gone and done it-I'd dissed the Prince!! At this point Jeff said he was not getting a very warm and fuzzy feeling. In fact he described the mood as turning somewhat hostile. He said, maybe I better move on, I don't think we'll ever agree here. He said he had the feeling they were looking at him as if he were the man who had started the AIDS virus.

On the other hand he could be a pussy cat. I remember a long time ago when I was still living in the Valley, probably around '93 or so. My wife and I were doing some Christmas shopping up at the Fashion Square mall there on Riverside in Sherman Oaks. It was early in the season and we were out late on a Monday night so it was pretty deserted.

We came upon Clare and his wife walking along and I said -hey Clare remember me, Dave Ferris ? I took a few lessons with you about 6 years ago (thinking Clare's wondering-who ? ) .
He said, "of course I remember you. How are you doing ? In fact I heard KLON (the jazz station at that time) play a song from your CD.
It was wonderful. I liked the melody" ! Well that about made my life right there.. Clare Fischer, the man who wrote Pensativa, telling me he "liked" the melody on one of my songs.

I said thanks of course and proceeded to tell him how humbled and inadequate I'd felt coming over for those few lessons. He said -I'm so sorry, I hope I didn't offend you any way, that was not my purpose. I said..no no, it was all me. I just wasn't able to really understand your approach and how to go about working on it.

Anyway he was very gracious and showed a side that often wasn't evident of him.

Dave, thanks for sharing your story. I really wished I had chance to take a lesson with him when I was in LA, I've learned his arrangement of "alone together" from his CD by ear, and his solo piano playing is something that I aspire to.

I am not sure if this is true, but a friend of mine told me that Clare was mugged/attacked while he was on the road and that may have contributed to him being the way he is.

Btw I don't know Jeff Berlin personally, but I know whole bunch of people here who went to his player shcool of music to study music

I just received an email with the info for the public memorial for Clare this Sat.

https://www.swiftpage3.com/speasapage.aspx?X=2V0JXDMQI4FJ47AS00Z5WE

Thanks Dave for this info. I didn't know Clare worked with Donald Byrd. I sang Donald Byrd's very beautiful solo on Lush Life, it's hard to believe he improvised it so early in his career.

In the 1980s I was a freelance classical music journalist in Los Angeles, and writing lots of program notes. I was assigned to interview Clare Fischer by phone and help him edit a program note for a commissioned chamber work that was being premiered.

He was a delight to speak to, and very humble about his composing skills: he said he had long before drifted into pop/jazz arranging, had neglected most of what he had learned about classical music, and figured he was now sort of an impostor. He was proud of his new piece - called Pantone, a single movement work commissioned by the LA Piano Quartet - but nervous about it at the same time, since it would be played alongside classical repertoire.

He was also very gracious about my helping him shape his thoughts into a workable program note. I remember him as an interesting and kind fellow, one of the many superb behind-the-scenes musicians working in the City of Angels.

I don't want to go too much in to off topic, but could anyone suggest a few albums of him, especially solo?

His "Alone together IMO is up there with the best solo jazz piano CD's of all time. I mentioned this several times in the past but he is one of the few piano players that really seems to treat piano as a polyphonic instruments. You don't hear him playing one chord after another, but rather 4-5 independent voices moving to produce a chord, like he was improvising 3-4 independent lines, and he has control over how loud every single note is(it seems). I hear people like Keith Jarret, Fred Hersch and Bill Evans do that too. It's really subtle but IMO very profound aspect of jazz piano playing that doesn't get noticed too often. His "just me" is great too.

Thanks, etcetra.

Bill Dobbins did a transcription book on those albums...

It's called--"alone together, just me".

Might be out of print but it's published by Advance Music (order # 09003)

Thanks, Dave.

For anyone interested, here is a leadsheet with the original changes from Pensativa. I played the real book version for Clare at my first lesson in 1986 and he started yelling at me. "Those are WRONG !! That's not what I wrote. One guy (Freddie Hubbard) records it that way, it gets in some book (real book) that has wrong changes to more songs, and everyone takes it as Gospel."

As always, Clare never minced words.

The second and third pages of the pdf are Clare's original handwriting for the chart.
http://www.divshare.com/download/16856963-eae

Thanks for that Dave, I have been meaning to learn Pensativa for ages and now I can do so with the proper changes.

Thanks Dave! Appreciate it.

This is great. Of course the Art Blakey version (written by Freddie Hubbard) is a legitimate version, too, but it's great to see what the original composer intended.

Thanks for sharing.

From what I've been told..Cedar Walton came up with those changes.

Very interesting. Hubbard probably wrote the intro, but it makes sense Walton would come up with the changes. Free for All is one of my all time favorite albums.

Clare Fischer and Terry Trotter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75d2FRpFwxc

Terry gave me that CD when it first came out (jeez its been almost 20 years now ) and wanted to know what I thought about the strings on Pensativa. I'm not normally a fan of strings and "Jazz trio" but I thought it was a great arrangement . It was a nice touch when Clare took the first half on EP in the cut 2 feeling.

Some nice playing by Terry on the rest of the CD too. I was a student of Terry for almost 5 years. He was huge in my development not only as jazz player but a pianist.