Insight
A series in which musicians give us insight into the background of one of their recordings
Randy Ingram
Sound Within :
A Celebration of Bill Evans
Pianist Randy Ingram was born in Anchorage, Alaska. His parents relocated to the warmer climate of Southern California when he was three, settling in Laguna Beach, California, a small town with an outsized appreciation for art and music. A piano student since the age of four, Ingram’s passion for jazz blossomed in high school, when he formed a trio with two musician friends that have gone on to earn Grammy nominations: bassist/producer Billy Mohler (Herbie Hancock/Dolly Parton), and drummer Nate Wood (Kneebody/Donny McCaslin). Randy earned scholarships to the University of Southern California, where he received his Bachelor’s degree in Jazz Performance, and The New England Conservatory (NEC), where he received his Master’s of Music.
While a project that celebrates Bill Evans’ profound influence has been a longtime goal of Randy Ingram, he was determined to wait until the right moment in his career to create a heartfelt homage that resonates in meaningful and personal ways. “The thing that’s most important to me about Bill Evans is not a style,” Ingram says. “It's not the way that he plays, or the devices that he uses. It's the sound of the piano, and that's something that comes from deep inside. So I made sure to hone in on my own sound for this album.”
Sound Within opens with the Evans classic “Turn Out the Stars,” Ingram setting the contemplative tone for the album with a short solo introduction before La Barbera and Reid enter with a tender yet vigorous rhythm in 5/4, placing the oft-reprised tune on a subtly challenging footing. It’s followed by the timeless “My Foolish Heart,” its lovely melody complicated by an unexpectedly tumultuous groove. The song, and Evans’s memorable take on it, was one of the pillars of the album in Ingram’s view. “That has been a very important song for me for a long time,” he explains. “I remember driving home from high school, when I probably should have been blasting Pearl Jam. But I had Waltz for Debby in the car stereo and would just sit there pressing repeat on the CD to hear ‘My Foolish Heart’ again because it was just so beautiful.”
“There’s an introspective thread that extends from Bill Evans through a lot of the music that I love,” Ingram says. “He was never faking anything on an emotional level; he was always able to speak who he was with total honesty. The way that I connect to Bill's music is through finding something undeniably true there. We live in an age where people seem to feel pressured to present themselves through curated external fronts, and I really appreciate someone like Bill who created something deeper, something that's real and that comes from more of an interior perspective.”
Randy has also embodied Bill Evans on screen. He portrayed the pianist in the 2013 Swedish film Waltz for Monica (aka Monica Z), a biopic of the singer and actress Monica Zetterlund that became the year’s highest grossing film in its home country and garnered several awards (trailer here). This original video (here) of Bill Evans with Monica Zetterlund and Some Other Time illustrates what Randy says about Bill Evans and "something that's real and that comes from more of an interior perspective.”
Randy Ingram’s three original compositions examine Bill Evans’s influence from a variety of different perspectives. The transportive “Aloft” is a free-floating marvel along the lines of “Very Early,” gliding on the pianist’s delicate touch. The title track, Sound Within, distills the central concept of the album into a resonant piece that follows Evans’s influence through the wide-open sounds of composers like Kenny Wheeler. “Remembrance” closes the set on an aching, elegiac note, mourning the loss of one of the music’s most towering figures.
© Sandy Brown Jazz 2026.8