Evan Lurie

Biography

Lurie was a part of a group of young New York musicians, including his brother, John Lurie (saxophone) plus Arto Lindsay and Henry Kaiser (guitars), and Anton Fier (drums). They were unwilling to recognize the boundaries between different forms of popular and not-so-popular music and so happily mixed avant garde techniques with pop music and jazz. Lurie became the keyboard player with the Lounge Lizards, a band led by his brother John, which was one of the first New York bands to play jazz with a pop sensibility and present it in that adaptation of 50s style which became fashionable in the 80s. The black-and-white cover on the band’s first album showed them in a picture reminiscent of the 50s and this was typical of the approach. Lurie is a technically able pianist who is able to adapt his playing to the very varied repertoire encompassed by the band, everything from ‘Harlem Nocturne’ to Thelonious Monk pieces like ‘Epistrophy’. Lurie also...

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