Richie Beirach, a pianist and composer who brought harmonic depth and rhythmic daring to the rangy post-1960s jazz mainstream, both as a solo artist and in a prolific partnership with the saxophonist and flutist Dave Liebman, died on Monday at Klinikum Worms, a municipal hospital in Southwest Germany. He was 78.
His former wife and musical collaborator, pianist LeeAnn Ledgerwood, confirmed his death, of complications from a long illness.
Beirach belonged to a generation of classically rooted jazz pianists that followed in the wake of McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea — all of whom he emulated at times, though his deeper allegiance was to the eloquent impressionism of Bill Evans. His integration of these various musical dialects had an influence, by turn, on pianists coming up behind him, notably the late Kenny Kirkland.
Another stylistic heir, Ethan Iverson, paid tribute in his Substack publication, Transitional Technology: “Beirach had not just the fire and a brilliant piano technique,” he wrote, “but also a dissonant harmonic approach that embraced the modernist ethos of 20th-century composers like Bela Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg.”
Beirach applied that approach in solo piano recitals and many small-group settings, with more than 60 albums under his name. His debut, an early entry in the ECM catalog, was Eon, a 1974 trio effort with Frank Tusa on bass and Jeff Williams on drums.
At the same time, Beirach was strengthening a bond with Liebman, notably in Lookout Farm, a fusionesque chamber group that made its debut on ECM in the same year, with the same rhythm team. Beirach played Fender Rhodes piano on Side A of Lookout Farm, which also featured guests including the guitarist John Abercrombie, who would become a lifelong collaborator. In its exploratory, hippie-adjacent spirit, the album captured the energy of the time.
Five years later, Beirach made an ECM album with a different trio, featuring bassist George Mraz and drummer Jack DeJohnette. It included a few original compositions that would endure as modern classics: “Pendulum,” “Snow Leopard,” and the ruminative yet propulsive title track, “Elm.”
The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing a David Liebman Quintet performance in the New York Times in 1979, praised Beirach as “the most varied and colorful of the group's three primary soloists.” Wilson added: “A small, bearded man, he is a two‐handed pianist who is as virtuosic at rumbling romps that cover the keyboard from one end to the other as he is at broad, spreading romantic splashes.”
A few years later, those qualities found a sturdy platform in Quest, which Beirach and Liebman formed initially with Mraz on bass and Al Foster on drums. A quartet that made a pugnacious virtue of eclecticism, Quest found a lasting lineup on its second album Quest II, with Ron McClure on bass and Billy Hart on drums. This personnel had success on tour and in the studio through the end of the ‘80s, and again in the 2010s.
Richard Alan Beirach was born in New York City on May 23, 1947. His interest in the piano was sparked at age five, and soon afterward he began private lessons with James Palmieri, a concert pianist from Palmero, Italy. Beirach studied with him for more than a dozen years, focusing on the fundamentals of technique and sound, before briefly enrolling at the Berklee School of Music.
After one year there, he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music, where he found a mentor in Ludmila Ulehla, who later served as Chair of the Composition Department. Beirach majored in theory and composition under her tutelage, even as he began to circulate on the New York jazz scene, living near the heart of the action in SoHo.
He found an instant friend and collaborator in Liebman, whose Chelsea loft became a practice space. The two musicians discovered they had grown up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and shared a sensibility. “In him, I found a partner who, personality-wise, was a perfect fit to me,” Liebman said in a Smithsonian Oral History in 2011. “Funny and bright as could be, a real wit, and quick.” He added: “But musically, which this is really about — he was a searcher.”
Both musicians served meaningful apprenticeships: Beirach with tenor saxophonist Stan Getz (alongside DeJohnette and bassist Dave Holland) and Liebman with drummer Elvin Jones and then Miles Davis. But the two musicians were quick to find another lane together, developing a shared vocabulary that built on the harmonic innovations of Tyner and John Coltrane.
“Something happens with me and Lieb,” Beirach told journalist Bill Milkowski in 2023, for an article in Jazziz. “Something magical happens that I can’t explain, that I’m glad I can’t explain, because it’s good to have some mystery and not have everything known.”
Speaking of his harmonic interests, he elaborated: “There’s always been chromaticism, from Bach on, but the difference is that every chromatic note that Bach wrote resolved into a chord tone up or down. Very satisfying, very beautiful. But Trane and Schoenberg and Berg, Miles, McCoy, Herbie… they created a language that had the ability for a long duration melodic chromatic note not to resolve that way. And this opens up the entire thing. That’s what the ‘60s brought.”
Beirach left New York in 2001, moving to Europe, where he found a faculty position at the Mendelssohn Hochshule in Leipzig, Germany. He taught there for 15 years, and established new creative relationships with musicians like the violinist Gregor Huebner.
But he maintained his closest connection with Liebman, performing and recording extensively, often in a telepathic duo context. In 2022, they published a book, Ruminations and Reflections – The Musical Journey of Dave Liebman & Richie Beirach on Cymbal Press. “We really don’t have an exact name for musicians like Dave and Richie,” guitarist Pat Metheny wrote in a blurb for the book. “Across decades of recordings and concerts, their aspirations obliterate the definitions of any single genre.”
Among the many testaments to Beirach’s rare chemistry with Liebman is Empathy (Five Improvised Soundscapes 2016-2020), released as a five-disc set in 2021. Reviewing it for Jazz Journal, Nic Jones writes: “The duo performances captured for posterity on the first disc display the duo’s understanding in music that’s by and large shot through with a predilection for understatement, as if both musicians know and appreciate the importance of knowing what to leave out.”
