Chuck Israels on Bill Evans from Randy Smith's "Talking Jazz"

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

EXPOSING THE ISSUES:

CHUCK ISRAELS INTERVIEW

"He [Bill Evans] thought he was gonna be a

middle class junkie."

- Chuck Israels

“I met bassist/composer/educator Charles "Chuck" Israels in 1986 when he came to Bellingham to assume directorship of the jazz studies department at Western Washington University. Born August 10, 1936 in New York City, he began playing professionally while still in college. Probably best known for joining the Bill Evans Trio after the death of Scotty LaFaro, he had also been active in the recording studios with the likes of John Coltrane, JJ. Johnson, Herbie Hancock and Stan Getz. In addition, he initiated the jazz repertory movement with his National Jazz Ensemble long before the advent of Wynton Marsalis. During a long interview in August 2008 at his home in Bellingham, Chuck spoke of these experiences and others. The original interview ran to nearly 14,000 words and appeared in Cadence in two parts, in the Jan.-Feb.-March and April-May-June 2010 issues. Here are excerpts from the opinionated and articulate Israels, currently living in Portland, Oregon.”

The following excerpts are from Randy Smith’s recently published Talking Jazz: Profiles, Interviews and Musings from Tacoma to Kansai. It is one of the most refreshing new books on the subject of Jazz to come along in a while and you can find information about this highly recommended work by logging on to Amazon.com and searching by author and title.

You’ll find the context for Randy’s original and much longer interview with Chuck in the italicized quotation that opens this feature. His talk with Chuck covers a wide variety of topics germane to Israels’ career, but this piece focuses on the bassist’s time with Bill Evans and the pianist’s trio.

Chuck had the unenviable task of following the late bassist Scotty LaFaro [1936-1961] and I’m almost certain that he found it irritating, to say the least, to constantly be asked “What was it like to replace Scotty in Bill’s Trio?”

It seems to me that Chuck always deflected this [never-ending] question but some of the irritation seems to come through whenever the subject is raised including, I think, in the following interview with Randy.

© Copyright ® Randy L. Smith; copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“How did you get the job with Bill Evans?

Basically it happened because Scott LaFaro died and Bill knew me from Brandeis University [Bill was part of a group of musicians who played concerts at the university in 1957 when pianist Steve Kuhn, drummer Arnie Wise and Chuck - all students at the time - performed as a trio during the concerts.], and Bill probably thought that I was the logical successor and somebody who could do it. I was in Europe at the time this happened, with this ballet company, and I got the news that I was gonna come home and there'd be a telephone call, and in fact, there was, and I took the job. And people used to say, "Well, how does it feel to replace Scotty?" and I thought it was the stupidest question. I never replaced Scotty. I was playing the music I loved to play, and I was as good at that in my way as Scotty was in his way.

Can you describe Evans' state of mind at the time you came into the band? Was he still reeling from LaFaro's death?

Oh, yeah. Yes, he was. I don't know what his state of mind was. Uh, it's funny that you can work with someone for six years and in a way not get to know him. Some people you get to know, and some people you don't. I think Bill thought I was a guy you couldn't know, but I don't see it that way. I see it as my shyness about his lifestyle, and my reluctance to expose myself to intimacy with a guy who was behaving the way he was behaving. We didn't talk; we played music together.

In layman's terms can you describe why Bill's music was so attractive to you?

Because it has all the elements in balance that interest me. It has all the elements of European classical music and form—well, not all of it—but enough of it, and probably the most inventive rhythm of any musician I ever worked with or heard. I don't know, there may be some others, but to me Bill Evans' level of rhythmic invention was just extraordinary, something that was not normally discussed about his playing, but to me it was really advanced rhythm. And the quality of having a touch of the blues in it, the blues character, that I find is a flavor that I want to have in my music.

Can you pick one recording you are particularly fond of?

Well, I think the Town Hall concert [Verve, 1966] is particularly good; I think that recording with Monica Zetterlund [Waltz for Debby, Phillips, 1964] is very good. It's hard to pick one — each of them has something. My playing got better as I worked with Bill. My playing improved; whether his did or not I'm not so sure. His playing was in some ways not growing, and it was because music became a survival mechanism for him, at least partly, and he allowed himself to be put into musical circumstances that he didn't choose because Helen Keane had an idea that this would be good, and Bill became involved and dependent on her maneuvering of his career in order for him to make enough money to sustain his habit and lifestyle. And it was a little strange to me to see this guy who had bought a house in Oradell, New Jersey, had a wife and kid, and thought he was gonna live this suburban, normal, bourgeois existence and continue to shoot heroin, and then later cocaine, enormous amounts of cocaine. He thought he was gonna be a middle-class junkie.

What was the dynamic with that group? Did you rehearse?

No. Bill's music was organized, and you just jumped on that train. All of it was unspoken. We never talked. Actually, it's highly arranged music— something that eludes most people because they don't hear the arrangement, they think it's all just happening. Bill's conception of how the piece goes is pretty strong, and he comes in with that conception, and you fit your part into it. And the fitting in of the part to me was blatantly obvious, what to do. He plays this, this is what goes with it. Now, that doesn't mean someone else wouldn't make a different decision, but my decision was very clear to me.

And Bill expected you to find your part?

Yes, 97% of the time, every once in a while, this little thing fits here. I don't think he ever said it; he just played it enough that, "Okay, I should play that." That didn't mean the arrangements didn't change; sometimes I changed it. And when J did change it, it was because the circumstance asked for that. We'd be sitting there in a club, Bill would have played something and there'd be this sort of silence—he never announced anything—and I would know what to play next because I knew the repertoire.

But you didn't discuss the music with Bill that much.

Not only not that much, not. He would write out little chord sheets for me, so I had a little roadmap to go on—that was all I ever got from him. And my impression was he was not dissatisfied with what was going on musically. I don't think he had any reason to be. At the beginning Paul Motion was dissatisfied because I wasn't as good as Scotty, and he was right. I wasn't at the beginning, although I had something else to offer that I don't think he recognized.

What was that?

What did I have to offer? A way of playing with Bill's music, a way of not competing for attention in the music at times I don't think that was useful. Some people liked it. I mean, it was what got Scotty the attention it got him. I heard it differently. I didn't make any decisions—I didn't decide anything, I went in and played the music.

Was it with the Evans trios that a different conception of the rhythm section was really born in modern jazz?

I think so. But it wasn't only Bill's trio—it was also Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden. Usually those don't happen in one place all alone. That's normal in life—it's really unusual if there is one guy. Leonardos [Da Vinci], there are not so many of those.

During this time you were pretty busy in the studios.

Yes, and at the moment that Bill fired me, he hired Gary Peacock for a minute in 1964. Gary was on the gig, and I wasn't, I don't remember feeling terribly upset. I had work, playing with Stan Getz and with different people, with J.J, And then next thing I knew, Gary wasn't there and I was back. Stan was upset that I did that, went back to Bill. "Why'd you do that, don't you like my playing?" "Yeah, I like your playing, but Bill Evans Trio is Bill Evans Trio, that's where I belong."”

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles previously posted a very dense analysis of the aspects of the late pianist Bill Evans' approach to Jazz piano that made his style so unique.

All things considered, it is an amazing distillation of information by a distinguished musician and music educator who served as the bassist in Bill's trio from approximately 1962-1966.

I've read and researched widely in the published literature on Bill and I've never come across anything that equals the quality of Chuck's exposition.

Here’s a link to Chuck’s piece about Bill which previously featured on these pages.