Bill Evans - Romantic Agony - Whitney Baillett

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Written as a 1985 New Yorker review upon the issuance of a boxed set of Bill Evans’ Riverside recordings and newly discovered recordings of a Paris concert by his last trio, Whitney’s essay also offers a concise distillation of many of the qualities that made the late pianist Bill Evans’ music unique and as such we wanted to include it on these pages as part of the editorial staff at JazzProfiles efforts to represents as much as possible about Bill in the Jazz literature.

Boxed sets and newly discovered or never-before released recordings have become quite commonplace in the 30+ years since this essay was published but both were a “big deal” in 1985 [especially before the onslaught of CD ressiuses that began in the late 1980s]. 

Equally important is Whitney’s refusal to contribute to the Bill Evans hagiography that has grown up around the Bill Evans Legend since his death in 1980. Objectively and subjectively, Balliett does his usual job of pointing out the singular features that made Evans’ contributions to Jazz unique, as well as, those that were perhaps more mundane.

This brief essay is elegantly written and offers more of what the Boston Globe once described as Whitney’s “pictorial descriptions [which makes him a gifted writer of profiles].”

“Balliett comes as close as any writer on Jazz -perhaps on any musical style - to George Bernard Shaw’s intention to write so that a deaf person could understand and appreciate his comments.” - Choice Magazine

Romantic Agony

“Bill Evans, who died in 1980, at the age of fifty-one, became the most admired and influential pianist since Bud Powell. He continues to be celebrated. Elektra Musician has issued—in a two-L.P. set called "Bill Evans: The Paris Concerts"—selections from a pair of concerts Evans gave in one evening in Paris in November, 1979. And Fantasy has brought out "Bill Evans: The Complete Riverside Recordings,” a blunderbuss album made up of a hundred and forty-six numbers (on eighteen L.P.s) set down between 1956 and 1963, when Evans moved from Riverside to another label. (The album is misnamed; Evans made a good many other Riverside records, as is made clear in the exhaustive album booklet.)

When he played, Evans sat back a couple of feet from the instrument, his back bent completely, his forehead almost touching the keyboard. He kept his hands flat, and during the last decade of his career they rarely strayed from the two middle registers, as if they were invisibly hobbled to middle C. This abject, prayer like posture suggested several things: that Evans was paying homage to his instrument, to his music; that he was so enfeebled by drugs that he couldn't sit up straight (his addiction, reportedly conquered during much of the seventies, was an open secret); that he was overpowered by shyness. The last was probably true, and it had a strange effect on his playing, which was always, as I wrote in these pages when Evans first appeared, "a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private music and an equally intense wish to express his joy at having found such a music within himself." His music seemed to be withdrawing, to be bowing out, slipping away. His diffidence was such that he had to be persuaded to make his first solo recording, and he then waited two years before making another. 

By his own admission, Evans was a slow learner with medium gifts who had to work very hard for everything he achieved. He was pleased by the facility of young players, but he most admired those who made their way inch by inch. He gave as an example Miles Davis's slow but spectacular progress from imitative bumbler in the mid-forties to lyrical innovator in the late fifties, when Evans briefly worked for (and influenced) him. 

Evans' constant inner struggle made him difficult to listen to, whether on records or in the flesh. His playing demanded concentration of a sort not usually found among jazz audiences, who like to take easy emotional gifts away with them. His music was lucid and orderly, but it had a contemplative, rarefied, almost abstract quality, which kept its emotional content at various removes from the listener. This was particularly true during the last ten or so years of his career, when his playing became so pallid and secretive that it seemed to have lost its emotional center. All of which makes his famous, sparkling "All About Rosie" solo that much more startling. Delivered in the midst of a George Russell piece at a 1957 Brandeis University concert, it seized you immediately, and remains one of the classic recorded jazz piano solos.

Evans' style was a distillation of Bud Powell and Lennie Tristano. He had been trained as a classical pianist, and his style also reflected his admiration for Chopin and Grieg, for Debussy and Ravel and Scriabin. His right-hand single-note melodic lines were short and rhythmic and beautifully shaped. They had a smooth, logical flow that needed no decorative devices. The first note in each phrase, generally struck a fraction ahead of the beat, pulled the notes that came afterward, and by themselves the lead notes formed one melody while the secondary notes formed another. Evans would often conclude a solo with a chordal passage, which suggested the "locked hands" parallel chords of Milt Buckner or the harmonic piles of Art Tatum. 

These chordal layings-on occupied Evans increasingly in his last years, and he would sink into them, his ad-lib flags unfurled, his loud pedal engaged. He worked hard at a Nat Cole kind of touch, but he was never a pianistic player. He rarely used either end of the keyboard, and one sometimes wondered if he wouldn't have been a brilliant guitarist. (Red Norvo once pointed out that many musicians end up on the wrong instrument.) He was a romantic who kept his edges firm, who attracted apologists, as Martin Williams' notes to the Fantasy album attest. He had none of Bud Powell's tough, bitter edge and none of Lennie Tristano's mathematical directness. His slow solos bloomed, and his fast ones wheeled like terns.

The "Riverside Recordings" album chronicles in massive detail Evans' progress from flashy bebop pianist to his studied lyrical self. Twenty-five of the numbers are with three different small groups, which include Jim Hall, Zoot Sims, the young Freddy Hubbard, and Cannonball Adderley, and not a great deal happens. Seventeen selections are solo piano, thirteen of them previously unissued. These are often ad lib or done in implied rhythms, like "All the Things You Are," which is almost abstract, and "I Loves You, Porgy," which Evans played again and again. They are Evans at his most private. 

The remaining hundred or so numbers in the album were done by six different trios. Three were put together solely for recording, and three were working groups. The most famous trio had Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums, and it existed from late 1959 until the summer of 1961, when LaFaro was killed in an automobile accident. LaFaro, in his mid-twenties, was an admirer of Charles Mingus and a brilliant bassist, whose methods are best heard in the work of Michael Moore. Dancing, crowded, passionate melodic lines poured out of him, and he quickly and probably unwittingly became the dominant voice, forcing Evans in on himself and making the group his own. Evans, of course, wanted the trio to be three equal voices, not a piano with bass-and-drums accompaniment, but LaFaro's imaginativeness wrecked this idealistic notion. Evans, reportedly bereft when LaFaro was killed, apparently didn't fully realize LaFaro's strength. Or did he? Listen to the solo numbers Evans made not long after LaFaro's death and to the new trio, with Chuck Israels on bass. Evans holds forth, he sparkles, he swings ("Show-type Tune," "Ev'rything I Love," "Stairway to the Stars"), and much the same is true of the last quartet in the album. (Larry Bunker, a less assertive drummer than Motian, had come in.)

It has been said that the "Paris Concert" L.P.s mark a return to Evans' outgoing brilliance of the late fifties, that they are the beginning of a new period in his playing. (His final trio had Marc Johnson on bass and Joe LaBarbera on drums.) To be sure, he moves around more on the keyboard, and he is adventurous harmonically ("Gary's Theme," "Laurie"), but what seems new is a long-windedness ("Nardis"), an absorption with sound (Noelle's Theme"), a kind of pianistic pomposity. Perhaps the struggle within him was at last over, and the extrovert had come forth.”