I always thought of Pete Jolly [1932-2004] and Lou Levy [1928-2001] as the West Coast equivalents of Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan - out of Bud Powell but with a gift for making Bop more lyrical in terms of the melodies they improvised in their solos.
The sound of Jazz that came out of their style of playing somehow seemed lighter, prettier, and happier and helped to create a mood of satisfaction and contentment when listening to it.
It also helped to provide a nice contrast to the aggressive and energetic horn solos often associated with Bop, especially the Hard Bop form of the music.
But none of this is intended to belittle Pete’s magnificent pianism as the speed and power of his technique were virtuosic. Pete was a bona fide two-handed piano player whose ability to express himself on the instrument was seemingly unlimited.
This Shelly bio is now available as both a paperback and an eBook exclusively on Amazon. Just type my name in the search box. I am donating most of my royalties toward building a scholarship drum kit for a needy student. Hope you'll consider acquiring a copy. Thank you.
Few writers have depicted Ellington and his world as vividly as Richard 0. Boyer in "The Hot Bach," a three-part profile published in The New Yorker during the summer of 1944. [Source: Richard O Boyer, "The Hot Bach-1," The New Yorker (24 June 1944), 30-34, 37-36,40,42, 44; "The Hot Bach-2," The New Yorker (1 July 1944), 26-32. 34; "The Hot Bach-3," The New Yorker (8 July 1944), 26-31]. [The drawing of Duke is by the vocalist Tony Bennett.]
Boyer not only interviewed Ellington extensively but traveled with the orchestra, observed rehearsals and performances, spoke with musicians, and jotted down overheard conversations. (In the text Boyer refers to himself as the "Boswellian friend of Duke's" and "friend with a historical turn of mind.") The result is a richly textured, candid portrait of Ellington offstage, out of the public eye.
Boyer deftly captures the group spirit of Ellington's musicians on the road, showing their extraordinary resilience in the face of monotony, physical discomfort, and racial discrimination. He highlights the important supporting roles played by Ellington's road manager Jack Boyd, his valet Richard Bowden Jones ("Jonesy"), and especially his writing partner Billy Strayhorn. Boyer's expert touch with description and dialogue brings to life scenes rarely observed by outsiders, such as activities before and after a typical dance job, and the collective working-out of a new piece in the middle of the night,
In this "jumpy atmosphere," as Boyer calls it, Ellington forms the calm center-patiently enduring a myriad of distractions, steadily making art out of chaos.
An abridged version of the article was included in Peter Gammond's Duke Ellington: His Life and Music (1958). Following is the complete text.
Remember, as you read this that it was written from the perspective of a racial context in 1944 America and does not reflect any of today’s sensibilities on the subject of race.
“Duke Ellington, whose contours have something of the swell and sweep of a large, erect bear and whose color is that of coffee with a strong dash of cream, has been described by European music critics as one of the world's immortals, More explicitly, he is a composer of jazz music and the leader of a jazz band. For over twenty-three years, Duke, christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, has spent his days and nights on trains rattling across the continent with his band on an endless sequence of one-night stands at dances, and playing in movie theaters, where he does up to five shows a day; in the nightclubs of Broadway and Harlem and in hotels around the country; in radio stations and Hollywood movie studios; in rehearsal halls and in recording studios, where his band has made some eleven hundred records, which have sold twenty million copies; and even, in recent years, in concert halls such as Carnegie and the Boston Symphony. His music has the virtue of pleasing both the jitterbugs, whose cadenced bouncing often makes an entire building shudder, and the intellectuals, who read into it profound comments on transcendental matters.
In 1939, two consecutive engagements Ellington played were a dance in a tobacco warehouse in North Carolina, where his product was greeted with shouts of "Yeah man!," and a concert in Paris, where it was greeted as revealing "the very secret of the cosmos" and as being related to "the rhythm of the atom." On the second occasion, Jacques-Henri Levesque, a Paris critic, professed to hear all this in the golden bray of trombones and trumpets and in the steady beat of drums, bass, and piano, and Blaise Cendrars, a surrealist poet, said, "Such music is not only a new art form but a new reason for living." A French reporter asked Tricky Sam Nanton, one of Ellington's trombonists, if his boss was a genius. "He's a genius, all right," Sam said, and then he happened to remember that Ellington once ate thirty-two sandwiches during an intermission at a dance in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. "He's a genius, all right," he said, "but Jesus, how he eats!"
Ellington is a calm man of forty-five who laughs easily and hates to hurry. His movements are so deliberate that his steps are usually dogged by his road manager, Jack Boyd, a hard, brisk, red-faced little white man from Texas, whose right index finger was shortened by a planing machine twenty years ago. Boyd, who has been an Ellington employee for some years, yaps and yips at his heels in an effort, for example, to hurry him to a train which in fifteen minutes is leaving a station five miles away. Boyd also lives in fear that Ellington may fall asleep at the wrong time, and since it usually takes an hour of the most ingenious torture to put the slumbering band leader on his feet, the manager's apprehension is not unreasonable. In general, Boyd's life is not a happy one. It is his job to herd about the country a score of highly spirited, highly individual artists, whose colors range from light beige to a deep, blue black, whose tastes range from quiet study to explosive conviviality, and whose one common denominator is a complete disregard of train schedules. Often Duke finishes his breakfast in a taxi. Frequently, driven from the table in his hotel room by the jittery, henlike cluckings of Boyd, he wraps a half-finished chop in a florid handkerchief and tucks it in the pocket of his jacket, from which it protrudes, its nattiness not at all impaired by the fact that it conceals a greasy piece of meat. Not long ago this habit astonished an Icelandic music student who happened to be on a train that Duke had barely caught. The Icelander, after asking for Ellington's autograph, had said, "Mr. Ellington, aren't there marked similarities between you and Bach?" Duke moved his right hand to the handkerchief frothing out of his jacket. "Well, Bach and myself," he said, unwrapping the handkerchief and revealing the chop, "Bach and myself both" —he took a bite from the chop —"write with individual I performers in mind."
It is in this jumpy atmosphere that Ellington composes, and some of his best pieces have been written against the glass partitions of offices in recording studios, on darkened overnight buses, with illumination supplied by a companion holding an interminable chain of matches, and in sweltering, clattering day coaches. Sometimes writing a song in no more than fifteen minutes and sometimes finishing concert pieces only a few hours before their performance, he has composed around twelve hundred pieces, many of them of such worth that Stokowski, Grainger, Stravinsky, and Milhaud have called him one of the greatest modern composers. There are many musicians who have even gone as far as to argue that he is the only great living American composer. His career almost spans the life of jazz and has figured prominently in the surge which has brought jazz from the bawdy houses of New Orleans to the Metropolitan Opera House and even to Buckingham Palace. King George. who has one of the world's largest collections of Ellington records, is often found bending over a revolving disc so that he can hear more clearly the characteristically dry, dull thud of the band's bass fiddle pulsing under an Ellington theme or the intricate sinuosity of a tenor saxophone as it curls in and out of the ensemble.
To Ellington devotees in Europe, which he toured in 1933 and in 1939, identifying him as a mere writer and player of jazz (his instrument is the piano) is like identifying Einstein as a nice old man. Some notion of their fervor is apparent in the words of a London critic reporting an Ellington concert at the Palladium. "His music has a truly Shakespearean universality," he wrote, "and as he sounded the gamut, girls wept and young chaps sank to their knees." The American counterparts of these European devotees prefer to emphasize the air of gaudy sin that surrounded the birth of jazz instead of likening it to the music of the spheres. They like to dwell on Madam White's Mahogany Hall in New Orleans, a resort which offered its patrons jazz music, and on Buddy Bolden's extravagant love life (Bolden was an early jazz cornettist), and they find pleasure in the belief that most jazz musicians smoke marijuana and die spectacularly in a madhouse. They try to ignore the ugly fact that several of Ellington's musicians learned how to play in Boy Scout bands. In endowing the late Bubber Miley, originator of the growl style on the trumpet and one of the early members of Ellington's band, with an almost legendary aura, although he has been dead less than ten years, they are grateful for the fact that he at least was a very heavy drinker.
Anyone who is now forty-five has lived through the entire history of jazz, but this does not prevent the followers of the art from speaking, for example, of the trumpet player King Oliver, who died in 1938, as if he were a Pilgrim Father. In the jazz world, 1910 is the Stone Age and 1923 is medieval. The men in Ellington's band, which was playing when Benny Goodman was in short trousers and when the word "swing" was unknown, have aroused such admiration individually that there are many collectors who spend their time searching for old Ellington records not because they want to listen to the band as a whole but to savor the thirty seconds in which their particular hero takes a solo. As he plays, they mew and whimper in a painful ecstasy or, as they themselves put it, they are sent.
Ellington has, like most entertainers, a stage self and a real self. On the stage, at least when he supplies the "flesh" —the trade term for personal appearances in movie houses —he presents himself as a smiling, carefree African, tingling to his fingertips with a gay, syncopated throb that he can scarcely control, As the spotlight picks him out of the gloom, the audience sees a wide, irrepressible grin, but when the light moves away, Ellington's face instantly sags into immobility. He has given a lot of thought to achieving serenity and equipoise in a life that gives him neither repose nor privacy. He craves peace. He will not argue with anyone in his band, and his road manager, on whom most of the burdens fall, repeatedly sums up his problem in the phrase "Trouble with this band is it has no boss." The arguments which Duke refuses to have, and which, to Boyd's acute distress, he concedes beforehand, usually involve overtime pay or a request for an advance on next week's salary. When Boyd tries to persuade Duke to take a militant attitude, Ellington usually says, in a tone of wheezy complaint, "I won't let these goddam musicians upset me! Why should I knock myself out in an argument about fifteen dollars when in the same time I can probably write a fifteen-hundred-dollar song?" Besides, Ellington contends that an argument may mean the difference between a musician's giving a remarkable performance and just a performance. Furthermore, doctors will tell you that there is a definite relation between anger and ulcers. "Anyway," he will add, in a final desperate defense of his pacific nature, "why should I pit my puny strength against the great Power that runs the universe?" Ellington wears a gold cross beneath his flamboyant plaids and bold checks, reads the Bible every day, along with Winchell and the comics, and has been known to say, "I'd be afraid to sit in a house with people who don't believe. Afraid the house would fall down." He broods about man's final dissolution, and in an effort to stave his own off he has a complete physical examination every three months.
Part of Duke's character goes well enough with the onstage Ellington who periodically throws back his head and emits a long-drawn-out "Ah-h-h!" as if the spirit of hot had forced wordless exultation from his lips. He likes to eat to excess and to drink in moderation. He is also fond of what he calls "the chicks," and when they follow him to the station, as they often do, he stands on the back platform of his train and, as it pulls out, throws them big, gusty, smacking kisses. (He is married, but he has been separated from his wife for fifteen years.) He has a passion for color and clothes. He has forty-five suits and more than a thousand ties, the latter collected in forty-seven states of the Union and seven European countries, and his shoes, hats, shirts, and even his toilet water are all custom-made. His usual manner is one of ambassadorial urbanity, but it is occasionally punctuated by deep despair. In explaining his moods, he says, "A Negro can be too low to speak one minute and laughing fit to kill the next, and mean both." Few people know that he is a student of Negro history. He is a member of one of the first families of Virginia, for his ancestors arrived at Jamestown in 1619, a year before the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. He has written music commemorating Negro heroes such as Crispus Attucks, the first American killed in the American Revolution; Barzillai Lew, one of the men depicted in the painting called "The Spirit of '76"; and Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and other Negro fighters for freedom. [Beyond Barzallai Lou (as Ellington spelled the name) and the historically panoramic Black, Brotvn and Beige (both 1943), it is not clear which other pieces Boyer had in mind that commemorated various "Negro fighters for freedom."]
He has also written an unproduced opera, "Boola," which tells the story of the American Negro, and a long symphonic work entitled "Black, Brown and Beige," which he says is "a tone parallel to the history of the Negro." His concern for his race is not entirely impersonal, since he and his band are constantly faced, even in the North, by the institution of Jim Crow. "You have to try not to think about it," Duke says, "or you'll knock yourself out."
Because Duke likes peace and repose, he tries to avoid the endless controversies that go on in the world of jazz. The followers of jazz cannot even agree on the fundamental point of what it is. To keep out of this dispute in particular, Duke frequently says, when people try to pin him down, "I don't write jazz. I write Negro folk music." There are those who insist that the only "righteous jazz," as they call it, is performed by bands of no more than six or seven men whose music is as spontaneous, unpremeditated, and unrehearsed as that of Shelley's skylark. Yet the very aficionados who insist that all real jazz is improvised and that all the solos must be impromptu often claim that Duke's artistry is the genuine, blown-in-the-bottle stuff, brushing aside his own statement that almost all the music his seventeen-piece band plays has been scored. Partly because of this bickering, Ellington always feels that he has found sanctuary when he boards a train. He says that then peace descends upon him and that the train's metallic rhythm soothes him. He likes to hear the whistle up ahead, particularly at night, when it screeches through the blackness as the train gathers speed. "Specially in the South," he says. "There the firemen play blues on the engine whistle —big, smeary things like a goddam woman singing in the night."
He likes, too, to sit next to the window, his chin in his hand, and, in a trancelike state, to stare for hours at the telephone poles flashing by and at the pattern of the curving wires as they alternately drop and ascend. Even at night, particularly if his train is passing through certain sections of Ohio or Indiana, he will remain at the window (shifting to the smoker if the berths are made up), for he likes the flames of the steel furnaces. "I think of music sometimes in terms of color," he says, "and I like to see the flames licking yellow in the dark and then pulsing down to a kind of red glow." Duke has a theory that such sights stimulate composition. "The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician," he says. "Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the backyard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique."
Perhaps Duke will still be awake at three in the morning, when his train stops for fifteen minutes at a junction. If there is an all-night lunchroom, he will get off the train, straddle a stool, his Burberry topcoat sagging like a surplice, a pearl-gray fedora on the back of his head, and direct the waitress in the creation of an Ellington dessert. The composition of an Ellington dessert depends upon the materials available. If, as is often the case, there is a stale mess of sliced oranges and grapefruit floating in juice at the bottom of a pan, he will accept it as a base. To this he will have the girl add some applesauce, a whole package of Fig Newtons, a dab of ice cream, and a cup of custard. When Duke is back on the train, Boyd, who has stayed up for the purpose, will beg him to go to bed, if they are on a sleeper, or to take a nap, if the band is traveling by day coach, as is often necessary in wartime. Ellington not infrequently takes out a pad of music-manuscript paper, fishes in his pockets for the stub of a lead pencil, and begins composing, and Boyd departs, complaining to the world that "Ellington is a hard man to get to bed and a harder man to get out of it." Frowning, his hat on the back of his head, swaying from side to side with the motion of the car, occasionally sucking his pencil and trying to write firmly despite the bouncing of the train, humming experimentally, America's latter-day Bach will work the night through.
It was on a day coach, rolling through the Ohio and Pennsylvania night, that Ellington wrote most of "New World A-Coming," a symphonic work which had its premiere at Carnegie Hall last December. A Boswellian friend of Duke's who was traveling with him at the time took notes on the scene. Across the aisle from Duke as he worked, four men in the band were playing tonk, a form of gin rummy, at a dollar a hand. In front of him a harassed mother was trying to soothe a crying baby and behind him two little boys, in the great day-coach tradition, were eating oranges.
Nearby, Lawrence Brown, an Ellington trombonist, a husky, dignified man who looks like a doctor and says he would like to be one, was reading the Atlantic Monthly, while Junior Raglin, a chunky youth who plays the bass fiddle, was scowling over a comic magazine. Sonny Greer, Ellington's jaunty, jouncy drummer, looked up from the card game and said to Duke, "What you doing, Dumpy?" Duke grunted, then said, "Oh, just fooling around on a new piece." The other card players looked over and in succession asked, "How's it going, Pops?," "Getting anywhere, Sandhead?," and "You sending 'em, Fatso?" The band members, who sometimes speak of Duke as The Duke, also address him as Phony, which is short for the Phony Duke, and Ze Grand, a contraction of Ze Grand Duke. Duke didn't reply to any of the questions; he just kept on working, swearing whenever the rocking of the train made him blur his notations. Not far away, a group of soldiers were swarming around Estrelita, whom publicity men know as the Sepia Gypsy Rose Lee or the South American Bombshell and whom the band calls Skookums. She is a part of a vaudeville act that occasionally tours with Ellington. Down the aisle a way, Albert Hibbler, a blind singer in the band, was balancing himself on the arm of a seat occupied by Berry Roche, Ellington's blues singer, whose customary white dress highlights the deep black of her skin, and at one end of the car Wallace Jones, Harold Baker, and Rex Stewart, trumpets, and Juan Tizol, trombone (a musician, of course, takes the name of his instrument), were discussing the occupational hazards of their trade.
"When we don't sleep," said Tizol, who is a Puerto Rican and the only white man in the band, "seems like our lips get even stronger. Get a lot of sleep and damn if they don't crumple."
"I got a salve I like," Jones said. "Prevents muscles of the lip going dead. But the muscles of my lip just wouldn't vibrate last night, just wouldn't vibrate. That damn hall was too cold."
Baker began talking about the difficulty he had had in learning the trumpet. "I breathed all wrong," he said, "and it strained the whole side of my face. It used to hurt so. I blew from too low and I couldn't learn to keep my stomach tight. I used to blow with my jaw as hard as a wall and my teacher would walk up and bang the trumpet right out of my mouth. I pressed so hard against my teeth that they were sore all the time. To cure myself, I hang my trumpet on a string from the ceiling. Just walk up to it and blow it without touching it with my hands.
"Music is bad for the nerves," he went on. "My nerves are bad now. You gotta do so many things at once. You gotta think about how to fill your horn, about harmony. You gotta look pretty and keep the guy next to you satisfied. You sneak each other that ole go-to-hell look, then flash the public that ole full-of-joy look. I dunno. It's just rush and then rush some more. Never no sleep. Feel like I want to quit sometime." No one spoke for a moment and there was no sound except the rattling of the train. Then Baker said musingly, "Always wanted to play like Joe Smith, but seemed like my notes would crack on me. Joe's notes were so clear and clean." Rex Stewart, a ball of a man with a mustache and a slow, pleasant smile, said comfortingly, "Well, Harold, I'm always missing something, too. Never get exactly the right thing out, Never sounds exactly like I imagine before I play."
The train rounded a long curve and Duke stopped writing. He began again and then evidently decided he wanted to try the music out on someone. "Swee-pea? Sweepea!" he called. Sweepea is William Strayhorn, the staff arranger and a talented composer in his own right. Strayhorn, who, incidentally, does not play in the band, is a small, scholarly, tweedy young man with gold-rimmed spectacles. He got his nickname from a character in a comic strip, Strayhorn, who had been trying to sleep, staggered uncertainly down the aisle in answer to his boss's summons.
"I got a wonderful part here," Duke said to him. "Listen to this." In a functional, squeaky voice that tried for exposition and not for beauty, Duke chanted, "Dah dee dah dah dah, deedle dee deedle dee boom, bah bah bah, boom, boom!" He laughed, frankly pleased by what he had produced, and said, "Boy, that son of a bitch has got a million twists."
Strayhorn, still swaying sleepily in the aisle, pulled himself together in an attempt to offer an intelligent observation. Finally he said drowsily, "It's so simple, that's why."
Duke laughed again and said, "I really sent myself on that. Would you like to see the first eight bars?"
"Ah yes! Ah yes!" Strayhorn said resignedly, and took the manuscript. He looked at it blankly. Duke misinterpreted Sweepea's expression as one of severity.
"Don't look at it that way, Sweepea," he said. "It's not like that."
"Why don't you reverse this figure?" asked Strayhorn sleepily. "Like this." He sang shakily, "Dah dee dah dah dah, dah dee dah dah dah, boomty boomty boomty, boom!"
"Why not dah dee dah dah dah, deedle dee deedle dee dee, boom bah bah bah, boom?" Duke said.
"Dah dee dah dah dah!" sang Strayhorn stubbornly.
"Deedle dee deedle dee dee!" Duke answered.
"Dah dee dah dah dah!" Strayhorn insisted.
Duke did not reply; he just leaned eagerly forward and, pointing to a spot on the manuscript with his pencil, said, "Here's where the long piano part comes in. Here's where I pick up the first theme and restate it and then begin the major theme. Dah dee dah, deedle dee deedle dee, boom!"
The train lurched suddenly. Sweepea collapsed into a seat and closed his eyes. "Ah yes!" he said weakly. "Ah yes!"
Duke retrieved his manuscript from him and went back to work. The blackness outside was changing to gray, and presently the music slipped from his hand and his head dropped forward as if his neck was broken. Some time later Boyd bustled through the coach, shouting to the band that the train would be in New York in half an hour. He was brought to a halt by the sight of Ellington's sleeping form. He began to shake Duke. "Damn if I don't let him stay here!" Boyd said to Duke's friend after a moment. "Damn if I don't do what I did in Tacoma! Let him stay there that time until the train was switched to a siding five miles away. He had to walk back. Damn if you wouldn't think that'd cure him!" He loosened his clutch on Duke's collar and the big man sagged forward. Boyd glared at him. "Once in San Francisco," he said, "Ellington slept that way and when he got off the train he was so sleepy he got in a line of men that were being herded into a van. They were prisoners for San Quentin. When Ellington tried to get out, the guard wouldn't let him. Damn if I should of rescued him! Should of let him go to prison. It would of taught him."
Boyd tries to arrange things so that the band will arrive at its destination at about six or seven in the evening, making it possible for Duke to sleep an hour or two before the night's engagement. If the town is in the North, Ellington can occasionally get into a hotel, since his name is well and favorably known, but the other members of the band have to scurry around the Negro section of the town, if there is one, and make their own arrangements for lodgings. Usually they can get rooms in the households of amiable colored citizens, and if they can't do that they often pass the time in some public place like a railway station or a city hall. Most dances begin at nine and run until two in the morning. On dance nights, Boyd has an assignment that almost tears him in two. He is supposed to "stand on the door" and check the number of admissions to the dance, but he is also supposed to have Duke awake and at the dance hall. At about eight-thirty, after a half hour's futile effort to rouse his boss, he is in a frenzy. Then, with the strength of desperation — Boyd is a small man and Duke is six feet tall and weighs two hundred and ten pounds - he props the unconscious band leader in a sitting position on the edge of his bed and, grabbing his arms, pulls him out of bed and onto his feet and walks him across the floor. This usually restores a degree of consciousness, which slowly spreads through the rest of Ellington's system. At this point, Boyd tears off to the dance hall, leaving some hanger-on behind to see that Ellington does not go to sleep again.
Duke thereupon pads sleepily about the room, groping for his red bathrobe and red slippers. His bare shanks show from beneath what appears to be a short, old-fashioned nightshirt, but if anyone calls it a nightshirt Duke is insulted. He says sulkily, "It's an Oriental sleeping coat. Not a nightshirt. Have 'em specially made for me." When he gathers himself together, he reaches for a phone and orders what for him is breakfast — fruit, cornflakes, and black tea with cream. While he is on the phone, he may pick up a pencil and scribble a few bars of music on the pad before him. After humming a bit of what he has just written down, he may say, "Always like to use the voice instead of the piano when writing. Piano holds you too much to what falls naturally under the fingers." With an almost imperceptible increase in tempo, he will eat his breakfast, and then, at a faster pace, he will shave and take a shower. He usually trots out of the bathroom, flings himself on his bed, and douses himself with talcum powder. He also sprays himself with toilet water, Then he may say, "Tell you about me and toilet water. It must have two properties. It must have a nice, clean fragrance, and it must be pleasant to the taste. Have mine blended for me. Call it Warm Valley. After one of my pieces." When he has dressed, he grabs a hat, flings it away, takes another one, and says, "Tell you what goes with me and hats. I pay twenty-five or thirty dollars for a specially tailored hat and then throw it away and buy one of these dollar-ninety-five corduroy porkies. I love these little porkies."
Duke usually arrives at a dance a trifle late, a common practice among band leaders and one they justify by arguing that they can make a more dramatic entrance after the band has been playing awhile. Most of the dances Ellington plays for are held in auditoriums, dance halls, or armories that accommodate anything from two to ten thousand people. When Duke arrives, someone tells the men in the band, and after a minute or two they call a halt and explode into the band's dressing room. They are very intense.
As Sonny Greer explains, "To give anything, you gotta give everything." Their intensity is expressed by a weird cacophony in which some of the musicians shriek like steam whistles, some of them imitate the pantings of locomotives, some sing like saxophones or trombones, and some make sounds so complicated and unearthly that it seems impossible that they come from a human throat. There is a good deal of horsing around and pushing, and occasionally a bottle is passed. While all this is going on, Albert Hibbler may still be dressing and complaining, "I can't see my uniform." Somebody may say with rough affection, "Shut up, you squarehead. You don't need no uniform," and hunt it up for him. If someone tells Duke that there is a big crowd on the floor, he starts to yell, "Hurry up! Hurry up! I want to make my entrance!" No one pays much attention to him. Lawrence Brown, who is one of the best trombones in the profession, usually stands apart from the rumpus, as if he disapproved. "I don't care anything about the band business," he says. "I sometimes think I may still study medicine." Brown, who is thirty-six, a college graduate, and the son of a minister, used to play trombone for Aimee Semple McPherson in the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, a fact which disturbs some of his admirers, who, with the reverse morality of jazz fanciers, would prefer that he had begun his career in a sporting house. While his mates riot in the dressing room, Brown may say with quiet pride, "I do not curse, drink, or smoke." Not long ago he said that if he couldn't become a doctor, he would be a dentist or an undertaker.
In general, or so its members like to think, the more exhausted the Ellington band is, the better it plays. Ordinarily, the tempo at the beginning of a dance is rather slow; both players and dancers have to warm up to their interdependent climax. By midnight both are in their stride. Then the trumpets screech upward in waves, sometimes providing a background for a solo, soft and sensuous, by tough little Johnny Hodges, alto saxophonist, who advances toward the front of the stage threateningly and who holds his instrument as if it were a machine gun with which he was about to spray the crowd. Johnny is fond of addressing his fans as "Bub" or "Bubber" when they come up to talk to him at a dance. Junior Raglin's bass fiddle beats dully, like a giant pulse. Junior's eyes are closed and his face is screwed up as if he were in pain. Duke's face is dominated by an absorbed, sensual scowl as he plays his piano. Sonny Greer, a cigarette waggling before an impassive face, jounces up and down on his stool so hard that he seems to be on a galloping horse, and Rex Stewart, as the night advances, becomes progressively more cocky and springy as he takes his solos. Sometimes the excitement among the dancers reaches a pitch that threatens literally to bring down the house. Two years ago, a dance in a hall in Arkansas was stopped when the floor began to collapse under the feet of the jitterbugs, and five years ago, in Bluefield, West Virginia, so many people crowded about Duke on the stage that it caved in, fortunately without casualties.
Almost always a group of serious thinkers who attend these affairs just for the music and not for the dancing gather before the bandstand in front of Duke and make profound comments. "The guy is really deep here," one will say, over the howling of the jitterbugs. Another will murmur, "Terrific mood, terrific content, terrific musicianship." Prim little colored girls sitting along the wall with their mammas — many of Duke's dances in the North are attended by both Negroes and white people — will get up and really throw it around when they are asked to dance, and then will return demurely to their mammas. The serious thinkers disapprove of the jitterbug and his activities, but Duke says, "If they'd been told it was a Balkan folk dance, they'd think it was wonderful." Every now and then there is a wail from Tricky Sam Nanton's trombone, a sad wa-wa melody which sometimes sounds like an infant crying, sometimes like the bubbly, inane laugh of an idiot, and sometimes like someone calling for help. Sam says, "It's a sad tale with a little mirth. When I play it, I think of a man in a dungeon calling out a cell window."
Usually a dance ends peacefully, but more than once, in the Southwest, cowboys have brought the festivities to an abrupt ending by firing their guns at the ceiling. On such occasions, the band gets off the stage in a hurry, which is probably a good idea. Once in a while, in the South, a gentleman draws a gun and insists that the band play only his favorite tunes. Unpleasantness, however, is not confined to regions below the Mason-Dixon line. During prohibition, a group of gangsters tried to shake Duke down when he was in Chicago. They presented their demand to Sam Fleischnick, who was then Duke's road manager. Fleischnick refused. "All our boys carry guns," he told the gangsters. "If you want to shoot it out, we'll shoot it out." Ellington considered getting out of town when he heard of Fleischnick's declaration of war against the gang, but he finally solved the problem in a more sensible fashion. He telephoned the influential owner of a New York night club where Duke and his band once had played and the owner arranged for Ellington to have the freedom of Chicago without cost.
When a dance is over, Boyd and his Negro assistant, Richard Jones, or Jonesy, who doubles as Duke's valet, begin packing the instruments, uniforms, scores, stands, and the like so that they can be transported to the next town the band is playing. "If the band gets four hours' sleep," Boyd often says, "me and Jonesy don't get any. When the band walks out, they're through, but me and Jonesy have to get the baggage on the train and often we don't get to bed at all." After work, Ellington and Strayhorn are likely to go to some Negro all-night spot, if they are in Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, or some other big town which affords such a luxury. Duke, who is always worrying about keeping his weight down, may announce that he intends to have nothing but Shredded Wheat and black tea. When his order arrives, he looks at it glumly, then bows his head and says grace. After he has finished his snack, his expression of virtuous determination slowly dissolves into wistfulness as he watches Strayhorn eat a steak. Duke's resolution about not overeating frequently collapses at this point. When it does, he orders a steak, and after finishing it he engages in another moral struggle for about five minutes. Then he really begins to eat. He has another steak, smothered in onions, a double portion of fried potatoes, a salad, a bowl of sliced tomatoes, a giant lobster and melted butter, coffee, and an Ellington dessert —perhaps a combination of pie, cake, ice cream, custard, pastry, jello, fruit, and cheese. His appetite really whetted, he may order ham and eggs, a half-dozen pancakes, waffles and syrup, and some hot biscuits. Then, determined to get back on his diet, he will finish, as he began, with Shredded Wheat and black tea.
Long before this, he is usually surrounded by an admiring crowd, which watches him with friendly awe. He chats with the chicks in the group and may turn from his steak or lobster to say pleasantly to one of them, "You make that dress look so beautiful." He is not a bit embarrassed by the fact that he said the same thing the night before to another chick in another town. Sometimes he will pause before eating a dessert awash in rich yellow cream and say to a girl, "I never knew an angel could be so luscious." At the end of his supper, he may lean back, satisfied at last, and sing out to Strayhorn, "Dah dah dee dee dee, tah tahdle tah boom, deedle dee, deedle dee, boom!"
''Why not deedle dee deedle dee dee, deedle dee deedle dee dee, dumtah dumtah dumtah, boom?" Billy asked recently on such an occasion.
"I don't think that's right for a trio," Duke said. "This is a trio."
"I don't think your strain is melodic enough," Billy said.
"I think it's a nice strain. Then it goes backward." Duke said, and sang,
"Boom, dee deedle, dee deedle, boom tah tahdle tah, dee dee dee dan dah!"
"I still think it has too many notes for a trio," Billy said. "I'm looking for something small that goes up a half tone."
Sometimes Duke and Strayhorn have adjoining rooms at a hotel. It will be bright daylight when they climb into their beds, Duke first having said his prayers. Ellington may stare up at the ceiling a moment before he falls asleep and then call ro Billy, in the next room, "Sweepea! How about dah dee dah dah, dah dee dah dah dah as an opening fanfare?"
"Why not deedle dee deedle dee deedle dee, deedle dee dee?" sings Sweepea sleepily.
Bill Evans, one of the foremost jazz pianists of the postbop era, profoundly influenced three generations of keyboard players. Among contemporary jazz's most popular and accessible artists, he had at least fifty albums as a leader and five Grammy Awards to his credit.
When playing, Evans would sit hunched over the keyboard, head parallel to his large hands, glasses dangling precariously off the bridge of his I nose. Combined with the subtly lyric and impressionistic side of his music, his introspective image led to the early criticism that his sense of swing and time were too studied to involve his audiences.
Looking back, it is clear how inaccurate that criticism was. Many of Evans' early recordings as a sideman and a leader exhibit a powerful rhythmic authority, and even his most hushed ballad work rode on a steady inner propulsion. The last half decade of Evans' life saw his music enriched by an even more exuberant drive. This was due in part to changes in his personal life and a deeper confidence in his music but also to the dynamic musical partnerships he formed during that period, particularly with Jack Dejohnette on drums, Eddie Gomez on bass, and the members of his last trio, bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe LaBarbera.
Evans' distinctive touch and gorgeous voicings were unmistakable on acoustic or electric piano, inspiring great respect among his contemporaries. Miles Davis reportedly once said, "Bill Evans plays the piano the way it's supposed to be played." Evans drew deeply from the heritage of Western keyboard music, and his expansion of the song form in jazz, wedded to a harmonically rich romanticism, touched pianists as diverse as Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, George Winston, Herbie Hancock, Marian McPartland, and Paul Bley.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1929, Evans began his musical studies at the age of six. After graduating from Southeastern Louisiana College, he worked with a succession of bands, including those fronted by clarinetist Tony Scott, bassist Charles Mingus, and composer George Russell, who first exposed Evans to modal-based jazz.
Evans' debut recording as a leader was New Jazz Conceptions, released by Riverside Records in 1958. However, it was not until his association with Miles Davis—he played with the sextet in 1958 and was then rehired
in 1959 for the historic Kind of Blue recording sessions—that Evans gained international prominence.
In 1959 Evans also established his initial, and many contend his most satisfying, working unit with the late Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums. From its inception, this group displayed an uncanny improvisational rapport and forged the prototype for the "pure" trio in modern jazz. A live recording made at the Village Vanguard in 1961 documents this trio and, in the opinion of some, is Evans' peak accomplishment. Tragically, the glory days of this Evans band were cut short by LaFaro's death in a 1961 car accident. Suffering a profound personal and professional loss, Evans did not record for a year.
In 1962 he returned to the studio with Motian and bassist Chuck Israels, who was a sympathetic improviser in the mold of LaFaro. Evans varied his musical formats to some extent over the next two decades of his life from the occasional large ensemble to a series of duet and solo piano recordings. But until his death in 1980, Evans favored his trios, a setting that enabled him to transcend typical rhythm-section roles and cultivate new levels of interplay among piano, bass, and drums.
Bill Evans' dominance as a pianist has tended to eclipse his achievements as a composer. He left a modest but memorable legacy of jazz tunes, including "Peace Piece," "34 Skidoo," "Show-Type Tune," and perhaps his most inspired melody, the lyrical "Waltz for Debby."
Coming the year before his death in 1980, the following interview is perhaps one of the most candid and comprehensive in terms of his pianism that Bill ever gave in his all-too-brief career and this is probably attributable to the well-prepared, insightful questions put to him by Wayne and Paul.
WE: Bill, if music can be classified as a language, how does your trio approach this musical language to ensure that your message is reaching an audience?
BE: The language of music is sort of a motivic language. It's a developmental language in a sense, and there are just so many subtle ways that it's used in relationship to the form or the phrase or the period or whatever. I would say that I have worked hardest on my music to develop that kind of language. And I want it to come out of a genuine jazz tradition and to be absolutely a musical language as well, and it is something that I've dealt with personally on a very deep basis as much as I can with the music that we play. And to understand it one would have to listen to it correctly.
Now some people might listen to our music as just a series of abstract ideas which are related to nothing except themselves. This isn't really enough. In order to really understand our music and the language that we use, one would have to be aware of always where the music is in relation to the form that is being used in that particular performance or a particular piece. So that might take a little bit of conditioning. However, we do work with popular forms — forms that are felt by people that grow up in this culture — and I don't think it would take too much effort or concentration brought to bear before a person would be able to understand how to listen to our music. And one must really pay attention to it. It can be listened to as music in the background, and one could get an impression that that might be all it is, but really, as I say, in order to appreciate the language, what we're trying to say and the meaning of it, one would have to really know where we are in relationship to the particular thing we're doing.
I mean, I've certainly studied more or less all kinds of approaches to music and opened my mind to them and so on, but I've made the choice for various philosophical and personal reasons to go with the kind of idiomatic and form content that I use. And it can be, as I say, rather abstract if one doesn't tune in to where it's at. But I think the melodic content and harmonic content and even the form content of it all come out of popular music. And the traditional popular forms—not only out of the culture, but I mean really, you know, if we examine classical forms they basically come out of various song forms. Even the symphonic forms are extensions of smaller forms.
So, it's nothing new, but [in] the same way that a person would miss a great deal listening to a symphony if they don't understand the form, they would miss perhaps even more if they don't understand the form with us. But I'm not trying to be hard to understand; that certainly is not my goal as a musician. But of course, having gotten deeper into the music and trying to say more, we have gotten perhaps a little sophisticated. However, we like to feel that if people will make the effort to learn how to listen correctly that they would be rewarded, hopefully.
WE: Could you elaborate on what is meant by the term song form?
BE: Well, of course, there are many different kinds of song forms. The most well known would be an a a b a form in which there are three identical sections: one repeated at the beginning and then repeated again at the end—a a—and then the b as a transitional or opposite or different content that occurs. Strictly speaking, they would be like eight measures each; that makes what we call the thirty-two-bar song form. Now there also are, you might say, a-1 form, which would be sixteen, and sixteen with a slight alteration in the second half; and then there are many different varieties that grow out of this.
Now, most things that I write I find more or less determine their own form out of a conditioning. I have to feel a song form and work some natural changes in it, and I'll be using some extensions and so forth. In fact, I am not even aware of the metric content unless I reexamine what I do. I just really feel the development of it.
So there are many varieties of song form, but when one learns to feel the form, and in listening, to feel the form, as long as it's not a concocted thing, you know, and screwed together somehow, it should be easy to feel. And I just happen to respect forms that come out of history and come out of culture and tradition as something which is substantial and real and which, if one learns to live with them and [they] become part of you, that you can then extend and use these things as organic means to make music.
I respect the American popular song very much and some of the masters that have composed in that form. And it became a means for jazz players to improvise by using a lot of these forms in songs to play off of. And I studied this very hard, analytically and diligently as I was growing, and got deeply enough into it so that I feel it's worthwhile to continue working with it, 'cause there's still explorations that I haven't begun to make yet into handling these things.
PR: As I understand you, you want to make enduring music of classical proportions. But some jazz musicians today seem less bent on classical values than on pursuing sounds and forms that reflect our everyday lives. Are there many current musicians who share your aesthetic?
BE: I think there are quite a few. But I know that there are people that, as you say, work with the everyday. The way I feel about all those things is everybody has to live with themselves, and I think everybody knows inside the reasons for doing what they're doing. "To each his own" is all I can say. I'm just doing a thing that gives me the greatest pleasure. I made my choice for my own reasons, and I'm willing to live with them, and I live with them pretty happily.
But I think that all that controversy about all those things, I don't know whether it really matters that much or not. Certainly I want something better than the everyday. When I go to any kind of art I look for something very special. I don't look for the person's bathroom noises or anything else. I don't want something everyday. I want something that they've had to really dedicate their lives to protecting, and nurturing, and cultivating, and searching for and bring me something special, you know, 'cause I could hear the everyday or see the everyday just by going out into the world, and I don't consider that to be art.
PR: As you were growing up, what was your exposure to the heritage of Western culture?
BE: Well, I think one of the primary influences that comes to my mind is the conditioning as children to have a great reverence for art. This is something which happens in certain families today. It doesn't seem to happen as much in the schools as it did then. Like, we were presented even in third and fourth grades and fifth and seventh grades, we would have a listening hour where we'd listen to great music. And whether or nor nine out of ten of the kids really tuned in, all of them probably realized that here was something which was being presented with great respect so it must be important even if they didn't tune in. And the ones that did tune in developed that kind of respect.
Also from my family I got it. I think this is basic, in that you respect something which is far out of your sphere; it's not immediately attainable, and placing those artists in the realm of spiritual leaders, great people in history. The trend today is to glorify the mediocre. We'd like to think, it seems like, today that "Gee, if I bought enough electronic equipment and devoted six months of work, I too could be a great musician." But this kind of perspective of really great reverence and respect for something that's considered to be exceptional, then you just naturally devote yourself in a serious way to it. You take it seriously, you won't be satisfied with just superficial things, and I think that has a lot to do with it at bottom, the conditioning that you have towards your goals.
WE: During your formative years, was there a particular person or event that inspired you to become a musician?
BE: I'm sure that happened. The encounters which aren't so glamorous that were important were, for instance, having a wonderful woman as a teacher, rny first teacher, who brought me into music and got me to read music, and therefore [I] developed a great ability to explore music through a superior sight-reading ability, without bringing the whip down as far as a type of approach to music like the scales and arpeggios and heavy technical work which would have, with my temperament at that age, turned me against music.
Other than that, there were, of course, many experiences or perhaps a good teacher here and there. Things that I came across, listening experiences, you know. I can remember, for instance, the 78 album of Petruschka which I got early on in high school as a Christmas present — a requested Christmas present. And just about wearing it out, learning it. That was the kind of music that at that time I hadn't been exposed to, and it just was a tremendous experience to get into that piece. But there were things like that all along the line.
I remember first hearing some of [Darius] Milhaud's polytonality and actually a piece that he may not think too much of — it was an early piece called Suite Provencale — which opened me up to certain things. But there were countless events like that which are all revelations in their own right and inspirational. I don't know, it's such an accumulative thing, you know, the ability to manipulate music in some kind of a comprehensive way. And I've really just kind of dealt with it piece by piece over a long period of time, and it seems that at this point in my idiom I enjoy a certain amount of freedom.
I mean, I've come to the point where I have a great deal of enjoyment playing, whereas for many years it was bringing a great deal of concentration to bear — conscious concentration of technical things, you know, of having to think a great deal — at the same time trying to leave one part of my mind free to just be the expressive part. Now it's more that I can enjoy almost the total expressive part, and I'm thinking only at less-conscious levels about technical things. So I have arrived at that point, which is very enjoyable, but it's taken a tremendous amount of preparatory years and efforts.
PR: Let's turn for a moment to the first trio you fronted that included bassist Scott LaFaro. How would you estimate LaFaro's contribution to modern bass playing, and what role did he play in the development of that first trio?
BE: In my mind Scott LaFaro was responsible in a lot of ways for the expansion of the bass. I think he is acknowledged, at least within musical circles, as being more or less the father or the wellspring of modern bass players. And when we got together I realized that Scott had the conceptual potential, he had the virtuosity, and he had the experience and the musical responsibility, and so forth, to handle the problem of approaching the bass function in jazz, especially with a trio, which is a very pure kind of setup with more freedom.
I thought I could depend on him to approach this, and we just really accepted a conceptual goal which was more conversational, more a thing where, including the drums, where everybody could contribute. They didn't have to play the roles that were more or less assigned by jazz tradition — that you could only walk at this time, that you could only do this at this time, and you could only do this at this time — but rather leave our minds wide open but with responsibility, so that we weren't just going off into space, that we were using that tradition but allowing ourselves to be a little bit more open within it. And of course, with that trio in a space of about two years we tried to work toward that goal with responsibility .. .
The last night that that trio played together [in July, 1961] before the tragedy of Scott being killed in an automobile accident, I think we had worked toward those goals pretty well. We had reached at least a point of some development in it that meant something. Even on the very first record you could hear that we were already working towards that, but I think it got a much more refined and complete thing by the time we had done the last records.
Musicians, you know, in various countries told us that those particular records seem to have had an impact in that they represented this kind of — wasn't like a kind of a break, an iconoclastic thing, you know, where we just rebelled against everything. That wasn't the kind of break it was; it was more like an extension of what had been happening and perhaps more of a completion or something like that.
But anyhow, that was the beginning of it, and that sort of conceptualized the trios that I had after that. I mean, they were more or less modeled on the development that we had made with that trio. And of course, we developed in other ways within those conceptual goals that we had accomplished.
But I might add that — maybe it's a personal thing, you know — I'm also coming into, I think, a new period in the last couple of years or so. But the particular trio I have now with Marc Johnson on bass and Joe LaBarbera on drums is giving me a great deal of pleasure. It has me excited, and [I'm] enjoying myself in a way that — really I can't remember feeling this way since that original trio. So it is kind of really a good feeling, and it's also a marvelous thing to feel that a bassist twenty-five years old, Marc Johnson, can come into my trio with all the abilities and aesthetic and love the music and fit right in emotionally and aesthetically, and Joe LaBarbera who is just a little over thirty, because I'm of another generation, and it's encouraging to me that, you know, that they're interested enough in the music in every way to become a real part of it.
PR: Could you elaborate on the musical function of each member in your trio?
BE: This is a rather pure group, in that there's just one person really for each function, and then we cross over the other functions. I mean, the drummer is really controlling timbre and various colors and contributions in the rhythm and, you know, the propulsion and other things, maybe just coloring, or whatever. And then you have the bass function primarily in the bass, and then he becomes a solo voice also, and an accompanying voice. And then, of course, I have most of the time the primary voice in the harmonic content. And of course, we all share all these roles in various degrees as we move around. But I don't really define the roles so much, because at this level it's like we all just approach the music, and I expect them to be responsible to the music and not everybody to be just indulging themselves. And we try to dedicate ourselves to the total musical statement, whatever it might be, and try to shape it according to musical ends and not ego ends.
PR: How do you feel about extended choruses?
BE: I think things get a little lopsided sometimes, when everybody takes seventy choruses. It seems to be justified in certain ways, but to me, it's not just fine in terms of the content or the thing that they're doing — it just stretches it out beyond all dimensions, beyond any kind of emotional shape that's desirable.
If you'll notice, if we play a concert we may do seven, eight, or nine things in the first half. Now, what I try to think of in a set like that is I choose each thing to follow each thing in a way so there's a total pacing to the set. I'm really quite sensitive to that, in that in clubs I won't even predetermine sets, but I have an ability now to pace, let's say, an almost infinite number of combinations of what we do in a way that will generally work out to be a very well-paced set and a very well-shaped set. So that what we're thinking of in terms of individual pieces in effect become almost movements — you might say there will be eight or nine movements in a total work. A set would be like a total work. I'm thinking in terms of the keys and the moods and tempos and all kinds of things, you know— who might be playing a lot on one thing and not much on another. And trying to really shape this thing so that it's an emotional and musical feeling of inevitability in a sense, you know, that one thing moves to another with a sense of purpose.
So I like to feel that we don't work one thing too hard, you know, that before you get feeling like "Gee, they've been on that too long," we move into a change, some sort of a change of mood that is somehow emotionally the next thing that should or could happen that will be satisfying.
WE: Many active pianists have commented on the impact of your conception on their playing. Are you aware of the influence you have had on other players?
BE: No, it's really difficult for me to see or feel those things. I believe it's true, because it's been said so much, you know, and for so long that I suppose there's some truth in it. I don't look for it, and I don't recognize it as much as — once in a while I seem to catch an inkling of it, but of course, I'm not looking for it.
First of all, I never strived for identity. That's something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually. I suppose I could see where I could be an influence, because I think what I've done is I've put something together which is not eccentric; it's a nice kind of eclectic amalgamation of what has gone down maybe before me or something like that. And I think it's something that a student of music who is talented that's coming up can focus on and draw from. Now somebody like Monk or even Erroll Garner who are great in a sense so stylized, and in the case of Monk even eccentric, that it's sort of very difficult to get into their bag at all or to utilize much of what they've done. You can learn from their spirit more than anything.
So maybe that's one reason why I might have been an influence, and it's something that somebody can pass through also. They can become influenced by it, and they could also just then move through it, because it's not eccentric and it's not so highly stylized, I think. At least that's the way I see it, that it might be attractive for that reason.
PR: We're surprised to hear that you never strived for identity. Within four bars your sound is unmistakable!
BE: Well, if there is a striving for identity, it's something that's so much a part of my individuality or personality that it's just automatic. I never said, like, "I want to have an identity," in so many words. What I said was "I want to approach musical problems as an individual. I want to build my music from the bottom up, piece by piece, and kind of put it together according to my own way of organizing things. Yet I want it to fit in, but I'm not going to take it in toto from any one place," which is what I did, really. I just have a reason that I arrived at myself for every note I play. Now, I think just as a result of that you probably have an identity — just because you are an individual and you see the problem, and so forth, in your own way. But as far as saying, like, "I'm going to project my personality” or "I'm going to project an image onto music” — a kind of a personality image onto music, which is kind of the way most people think of identity — that was no part of it whatsoever. And I don't think that can be effective.
I think having one's own sound in a sense is the most fundamental kind of identity in music. But it's a very touchy thing how one arrives at that. It has to be something that comes from inside, and it's a long-term process. It's a product of a total personality. Why one person is going to have it and another person isn't, I don't know why exactly. I think sometimes the people I seem to like most as musical artists are people who have had to — they're like late arrivers. Many of them are late arrivers. They've had to work a lot harder in a sense to get facility, to get fluency, and like that. Whereas you see a lot of young talents that have a great deal of fluidity and fluency and facility, and they never really carry it anyplace. Because in a way they're not aware enough of what they're doing.
There are certain artists — Miles Davis is a late arriver in a sense. I mean, he arrived early, but you couldn't just hear his development until he finally really arrived later. And Tony Bennett is another one that's just always worked and dug and tried to improve, and finally, what he does as a straight singer has a kind of a dimension in it and is able to transport the listener way beyond other singers in his category. Or Thad Jones is another one that I can enjoy listening to play. I enjoy listening to players that think for themselves, especially. I mean, you could line up a hundred players that all more or less sound alike, and they're all good players, and I can even enjoy listening to them. But if just one of them thinks for himself, he stands out like a neon sign. And it's so refreshing to hear someone who thinks for himself.
Now at the same time, the danger of a person grabbing a concept like this is that they think thinking for themselves is being eccentric or being rebellious or being — especially of being "different" — and that's not it.
The idea is to try to be real and right in the core, right in the middle, but still be an individual enough to handle the material in your own way.
PR: So is it fair to say that you consider yourself a late arriver?
BE: See, I said I was coming into the new period, and it has something to do with this, in that I'm opening up the expressive feeling more. I'm allowing it a little more room, and I think the dimensions are growing, you know, so that the feelings can become a little larger, a little more grand, perhaps, which I don't know makes that much difference. Perhaps those feelings were there all the while, and maybe I'm just going to display them a little bit differently or something.
But yeah, as I say, the early arrivers are always a little suspect to me, although they many times show great facility, and I can enjoy them, but I have generally found that very few of them carry things forward or take things into a new area. Those types of talents generally are very assimilative. They have that ability — some sort of a conglomerate of intuition which just takes and sops up and just sort of comes out, you know, it organizes itself and comes out, but they don't know generally, completely enough, all the constituent things that go into what they do, and therefore, they're not able to really discard and add to in any conscious way, and they're kinda trapped, in a sense, by that facility.
WE: Let's turn to some of our favorite Bill Evans recordings. "My Funny Valentine" from Undercurrent with guitarist Jim Hall is a knockout. Could you give us some insight into that session?
BE: Sure. Alan Douglas was the producer of that album for United Artists. Monty Kay was managing me at the time, and he said, "I've talked to Jim Hall, and if you guys would like to do an album together, it would be nice. Just pick the rhythm section that you want." And it just occurred to me, knowing Jim's ability, the broad ability that he had, that this might be something we could do without [a] rhythm section, that we might do just together, so we proceeded with that conception. And we did it in one night.
However, Alan Douglas asked, as the producer, that we do all low-key, more ballad-type things, totally. So really what happened was that by the time we had done the rest of the record, aside from "Funny Valentine," we were beginning to feel a little frustrated that we hadn't moved into another mood. And we said, "Look, we just gotta do, you know, something that moves a little more." And we selected "My Funny Valentine," which we played at a very bright tempo, as you know. And I think one of the reasons that it kind of comes to life is that it was the only thing that we did in that mood,
PR: Another favorite is Interplay, with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. We don't often hear you in the company of horns. Why is that?
BE: I don't know exactly. Of course, I was concentrating a great deal on the trio and its development. But I like that album myself. I love all the musicians on it, and it was just one of those things we did, I think, in one afternoon. The frameworks were rather loose, just enough to give us something to play off of, and these wonderful players, you know, just made a really good-feeling album out of it. And I still enjoy listening to that album.
But I have done some albums more recently with horns. There are two quintet albums that came out recently. One called Quintessence, with Ray Brown, Philly Joe Jones, and Harold Land on tenor, and Kenny Burrell on guitar. And then there's another quintet album most recently, called Cross-Currents, with Lee Konitz on alto and Warne Marsh on tenor and my trio. And the latest release on Warner Brothers is called Affinity, with Toots Thielemans on harmonica featured most prominently, and Larry Schneider plays tenor and soprano on a few tracks. So it does happen — I do try to vary the output —l ike it'll either be a solo album or perhaps an album with a large orchestra, you know, or a quintet album or trio album. The trio, however, is the fundamental performing group, so that occurs most frequently. But I think there was a stretch where I didn't play with horns for quite a while on record, and I expect I'll make up for that maybe in the future, because I enjoy playing with horns.
WE: Our last question, Bill. A lot of musicians today disavow the term jazz. Do you?
BE: No, I don't, because it's just most naturally the term that is associated with our kind of music. Unfortunately, for instance, in the Book of Lists, I don't know if you're aware of that book - it just has lists of various things from the five most humorous letters to "Dear Abby" to the seven tallest mountains in the world or whatever—but [of] the seven words in the English language that elicits the most negative response, one of them is jazz.
It was very discouraging to find this in the Book of Lists. And I think one of the reasons that some people just adopt a more or less pop-oriented name which is not like the Bill Evans Trio, but you know, we might call ourselves the Light Switch or something and then never use the word jazz in association with the music. Surprisingly enough, if you do that you'll probably enjoy a much-greater public acceptance, and it just has a lot to do with the fact that jazz is a categorization that a lot of people do not react positively to. But I don't disavow the word.”
