In a flow of 881 words, Fordham's most recent column manages to encapsulate the development of jazz piano. It begins...
The iconography of jazz usually features smoky images of coolly wasted-looking individuals in natty hats blowing saxophones. But if saxes and trumpets have seemed like the quintessential jazz instruments, it's the piano that has been absolutely central to the development of the music.
...and includes this paragraph on two seminal pianists:
The tormented, fitfully visionary pianist Bud Powell participated in the inception of bebop as a teenager, and his approach refined the Earl Hines trumpet" style to a dazzling melodic display similar to bop hero Charlie Parker's sax lines. A very different founding-figure of bebop, the former gospel-pianist Thelonious Monk, came from a more eccentric angle. Monk liked erratic silences as much as sounds, struck frequently dissonant chords with a drumlike whack, and composed some of the most enduringly personal themes in the jazz repertoire.
To read the whole thing, go here. If Fordham is a bit lenient in his assessments of some UK musicians, that tolerance is more than offset by his overall perspective on the music. For a selection of his Guardian blog entries, click here.