Bill Evans by Larry Kart

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

“In 1983 I began by referring to Bill Evans as a minor artist. What I would say now is that Evans was an artist whose conflicts threatened to overwhelm his gifts, and that it was his fate to spend much of the latter part of his career making a music in which those conflicts were in effect disguised, even denied.”

- Larry Kart

As you will no doubt observe from checking the number under Bill Evans’ name if you scroll down the blog sidebar to LABELS, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has made a concerted effort over the years to post a variety of articles about the late pianist Bill Evans [1929-1980].

Most of these, in recognition both of his uniqueness as a piano stylist and because of his influence on many other Jazz pianists, tend to be laudatory in nature.

Occasionally, we find one that is not so complimentary and offers well-reasoned [and well-written] arguments for a critical view in the censorious sense of the word.

Such is the case with the following essay on Bill which can be found in Larry Kart’s Jazz in Search of Itself [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004]. 

We asked Larry for his consent to bring it up on the blog and he very kindly said “Yes.”

© -  Larry Kart: copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“This piece about pianist Bill Evans … touch[es] upon what might be called the pastoral reaction or, if one were in an unkind mood, the pastoral evasion in jazz. 

[Pastoral in this context means portraying an idealized version of something. “Pastoral” lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music that depicts life in an idyllic, bucolic, rustic manner, typically for urban audiences.] 

What was being reacted to were several interrelated late 1950s phenomena: the state of the Broadway show tune tradition, which had provided jazz with so much of its basic material but which had come to be threatened from within and without; the rise of rock 'n' roll, a music that not only was at odds with Broadway-style romance and sophistication but also made it unlikely that jazz ever again would be the broadly popular "youth" music it once had been; and the advent of a full-fledged jazz avant-garde, a music that implicitly disrupted jazz's norms of craft professionalism and seemed likely to alienate a significant portion of the jazz audience. Matters of the marketplace are involved here, of course, but matters of the spirit underlie and perhaps override them. For instance, Evans's desire to defend "song form," referred to below, was based not only on his longstanding genuine affection for the forms and moods of the Broadway show tune but also on his sense that this musical-emotional world, with all its attractive, familiar, and useful habits, was now on the wane or even under attack. Thus the possibility of the pastoral almost inevitably arose, as part of the actual or imagined artistic past came to be regarded as a place of potential refuge, a realm from which a defense of the threatened "beautiful" could perhaps be mounted.

[1983]

“TODAY, three years after his death at age fifty-one, pianist Bill Evans arguably remains the most influential jazz musician of our time. A list of pianists who have been shaped by Evans would run for many pages, and his influence was not confined to that instrument. Much of the technical and emotional vocabulary of contemporary jazz stems from Evans—so much so that today's dominant styles seem inconceivable without him. For one thing, he and his onetime bassist the late Scott LaFaro virtually invented the elastic, floating sense of swing that is the norm for so many contemporary rhythm sections, and his oblique, subtle harmonic patterns also are in common use. Indeed, both the breadth and likely length of Evans's influence on jazz can be compared only to the shadows cast by Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane: a veritable jazz pantheon.

But Armstrong, Parker, et al. were major creative figures, while Evans was an essentially minor artist — a charming player, at best, but one whose music was confined to a rather narrow emotional realm whose possibilities he had largely exhausted by the early 1960s. Of course, many musicians and fans would dispute that estimate. But if Evans was the minor artistic figure I believe him to be, the question of how and why he became so influential still remains. And if a limited and, in Evans's later years, quite formulaic music has shaped the approach of so many other artists, what does that tell us about the state of contemporary jazz?

To answer those questions, one has to look at the shape of Evans's career. In 1956, when he made his first recording under his own name, New Jazz Conceptions, Evans had yet to find a personal style, although his blend of Lennie Tristano, Bud Powell, and Horace Silver was quite promising. And much of that promise was fulfilled, particularly on the albums Evans made under the leadership of composer George Russell: Jazz Workshop (some of which was recorded before New Jazz Conceptions) and Jazz in the Space Age. Faced with the challenge of Russell's harmonically dense, rhythmically adventurous, complexly structured compositions, Evans produced solos that so thoroughly realized the implications of such pieces as "Jack's Blues," "Dimensions," and "All About Rosie" that he and Russell seemed to be co-composers. Yet the bristling linear logic of those and other performances from what one might call Evans's first period proved to be something of a false trail, for his music was about to undergo a profound change.

Joining Miles Davis's sextet in April 1958, Evans went on to play a major role in Davis's Kind of Blue album, bringing to the music a wealth of pastel-like harmonic coloration. Perhaps it was Evans who affected Davis at this point; perhaps it was mutual. But there can be little doubt that the album's most wistfully ethereal piece, "Blue in Green," was essentially Evans's creation. And when the pianist formed his own trio in December 1959 (Evans had left Davis in October 1958; Kind of Blue, recorded in March and April 1959, was a one-shot return to the fold), he left behind the urgent linear drive of his earlier work and continued to work in the Kind of Blue manner, favoring "sprung" rhythms, delicately shaded textures, and a melodic approach in which, so it seemed, as much as possible was implied and little was directly stated. Here he found an ideal partner in LaFaro, whose remarkable technical facility and great lyrical gifts led to the creation of a new kind of piano trio — one in which the orthodox piano-soloist-with-rhythm concept was virtually abandoned, and any member of the trio could take the lead at any time.

"I'm hoping the trio will grow in the direction of spontaneous improvisation rather than just one guy blowing followed by another guy blowing," was the way Evans described his goal. Bui a somewhat different story is told by the four albums that Evans, LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian made for the Riverside label between 1959 and 1961 — Portrait in Jazz, Explorations, Waltz for Debby, and Sunday at the Village Vanguard (the latter two both recorded at that club during a June 1961 engagement). Listening to those recordings in chronological order, one hears an exquisitely tender romanticism subduing all other moods— so much so that the more aggressive 1959 performances ("What Is This Thing Called Love?" and "Autumn Leaves" from Portrait in Jazz) would have sounded unthinkably bold by Evans's 1961 standards. If "spontaneous improvisation" was the stated goal, with each new recording Evans also moved several steps further into LaFaro and Motian's lush, fluid textures — diminishing the volume level of his playing and softening its rhythmic profile until the pianist had become an almost ghostly presence, hovering near the pulse to add subtle touches of harmonic and melodic color.

The core of Evans's legacy, his 1959-61 performances were, and still are, intoxicating. But in the midst of the delicate, whirling patterns of the Evans-LaFaro-Motian trio, one could detect some potential weak points. From his first recordings, it was clear that Evans had a taste for sentimental pop tunes. (Indeed, the sugar quotient of his own most famous composition, "Waltz for Debby," is quite high.) Now, Evans's fondness for such ditties as "Someday My Prince Will Come," "Alice in Wonderland," and (in later days) "People," "Make Someone Happy," and "The Love Theme from Spartacus" is not a sign of weakness in itself. After all, Thelonious Monk and especially Sonny Rollins have chosen to deal with material that was no less sweet and sentimental. But in emotional terms, Evans often seemed to be as much at the mercy of those songs' hyper-romantic moods as any follower of the Hit Parade—either that or perhaps he believed that he could purify and exalt such music through sufficient applications of subtlety and good taste.

Rollins, on the other hand, could take a campfire ballad like "In a Chapel in the Moonlight" or a mock cowboy song like "Wagon Wheels" and transform its corniness into strength by building into the performance an ironically humorous view of the song's sentimentality, not to mention his own (and the entire culture's) taste for such sentiment. In jazz it's not just the material but the artist's attitude toward it that counts. When Rollins got his hands on extremely sentimental tunes, he not only knew just what they were but also was able to express and play with that awareness — thus providing his listeners with a seriocomic venture into emotional realism (for all of us have a residue of sappiness in our souls that must be dealt with from time to time). But when Evans handled "Make Someone Happy" or "What Kind of Fool Am I?" as though they were not sugary kitsch but songs that deserved all the tastefulness he could lavish upon them, he was as close to being emotionally fraudulent as the most cynical, manipulative cocktail lounge virtuoso.

Now, Bill Evans was not in fact such a cynic, if one can judge a man's state of mind from his music. Instead, he seemed to believe that the genuine prettiness of, say, "When I Fall in Love" was just one step away from the beautiful. And it is this wistful faith, implicit in so much of Evans's music, that the difference between the "pretty" and the "beautiful" is only a matter of degree that probably accounts for Evans's vast influence — above and beyond the attractiveness and usefulness of his specific musical techniques.

The period of the initial Evans Trio (1959-61) also saw the advent of Ornette Coleman, whose music, with its spontaneously varied harmonic patterns and its near-total rejection of anything that might be thought of as pretty, seemed to threaten the very existence of what Evans once referred to as "the song form." One could argue that Coleman's music (and that of Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, et al.) was not intended to threaten anything but was merely the music these men wanted and needed to make. But the threat was present nonetheless, especially to those younger artists who had grasped some of the implications of the so-called new music while still feeling unable or unwilling to sever their ties with the song form's reassuring pleasures.

That is not to suggest that a strict progressivism should apply in jazz or in any art. But radical developments arise only when there are pre existing tensions — the sense, for instance, that the usefulness of previously prevailing techniques is at or near an end. And while that may not turn out to be the case, once a Coleman or a Coltrane comes along, the decision to continue working within a preexisting musical mode almost unavoidably becomes a conservative act — a decision to do something and a decision not to do something. So, through no fault of his own, Bill Evans's music has become one of the means by which almost two generations of jazz musicians have skirted the artistic problems that Coleman and others uncovered, not to mention the solutions they proposed. Reassured by Evans's music that the song form can live and flourish, his disciples occupy themselves with finding ever more subtle harmonic byways and increasingly more oblique means to float above the pulse. More power to them, one might think, except that the romanticism of Evans's style cannot be separated from his purely musical techniques. And as his disciples have massaged that romanticism several times over, its inherent weaknesses have become more evident.

Consider the album Bill Evans: A Tribute, on which fourteen prominent pianists — including George Shearing, Teddy Wilson, John Lewis, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Richie Bierach, and Joanne Brackeen — are heard in solo performance. The members of the pre-Evans generations fare best, with Lewis's chaste, tender version of "I'll Remember April" a particular gem. And there is some strong playing from the first generation of post-Evans figures, particularly Hancock and Corea. But when one gets to the second- and third-generation pianists, especially Brackeen and Andy LaVerne, an odd, curdled hysteria enters the music. Seemingly aware that Evans's techniques demand a romantic statement of some sort, but unable to find such an impulse within themselves, in its place Brackeen and La-Verne supply a thick, inflated rhetoric — the musical equivalent of a bad pastoral poem in which nymphs and satyrs frolic about, even though both the poet and the culture have ceased to believe in the dream that those mythical beings represent.

Judging by his recordings, it would seem that Evans himself occasionally found that dream equally difficult to inhabit. Consider the performance of Jule Styne's "People" that appears on his 1975 solo album Alone (Again). A virtually static, mechanically sentimental song, which was found wanting on those counts by no less a judge of popular music than Frank Sinatra, "People" still might have been the basis for an interesting performance if Evans had done something to reshape its structure or to question its abject pathos. But instead he just plays the tune over and over again for more than thirteen minutes — always keeping the nagging melody in the foreground. Now there can be little doubt that Evans was fully in control of this performance; throughout Alone (Again) he is alert and technically secure. So why, then, does he keep hammering away at "People" until the listener wants to scream?

Perhaps Evans was aware for once that he could not purify the mechanical kitsch of such songs, no matter how subtly he embroidered them, and he therefore decided to let "People" stand on its own and even to emphasize its essential banality. So Evans's "People" is an awful thing to listen to, a grinding musical torment. But in terms of his entire career it can be read as a momentary, and oddly moving, union of self-awareness and self-disgust — Bill Evans's pained farewell to a world of sweetness and light that part of him always must have sensed was false.

Second thoughts are called for here, for several reasons. First, Peter Pettinger's biography of Evans, Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, published in 1998, has brought to light a great deal of information about Evans's life. Second, some of that information has to do with Evans's varying patterns of drug use and their possible effects on the music he was making during any given period of his career. Finally, it was not until 1984 that the first two albums by Evans's final trio (with bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe LaBarbera) were released — a freshet that would be followed by a veritable geyser. Beginning in 1989 with the release in Japan of the eight-CD set Consecration, and followed in 1996 by the six-CD set Turn Out the Stars and in 2000 by the eight-CD set The Last Waltz, some twenty-two hours of music recorded in live performance by Evans in the final year of his life have been made available. And it is the feeling of many of Evans's admirers that these recordings, particularly the Turn Out the Stars set, constitute a major—perhaps a climactic— development for him.

I don't agree by and large, but there is no question that the music of Evans's final trio was an advance over, say, the music Evans was making in the early 1970s, a period during which even the sympathetic Pettinger acknowledges that "Evans... settled for long stretches of meager invention, stringing together stock phrases and motives," And Pettinger adds that "the methadone which he was taking, with its sedative effect, may have been a contributing factor." (Methadone is an opium-based substitute for heroin, the drug to which Evans had been addicted since the late 1950s.) It seems fair then to speculate that the driven, harried, feverish quality that crops up on the recordings from Evans's final year, and that to my mind disturbingly marks the Turn Out the Stars set in particular, was linked to Evans's late-1970s turn to the stimulant cocaine as his drug of choice.

There are any number of great jazz performances that could be described as driven, harried, and feverish—Bud Powell's "Un Poco Loco" is one obvious example. But if Powell's "Un Poco Loco" is driven, harried, etc., it is expressively so — the anguish, if you will, pervades every strand of the musical fabric and is mastered there, or at least exhilaratingly confronted, in the terms of Powell's art. But the latter-day Evans often sounds like a man on the run (and not only because of his longstanding tendency to rush), strewing forth pianistic "gems" in an attempt to distract or evade pursuers.

This is, again to my mind, especially true of the four lengthy and much-vaunted performances of Miles Davis's "Nardis" on Turn Out the Stars. While the harmonic virtuosity of Evans's playing on the five-minute-or-so solo passages that begin each of those performances is undeniable in one sense, it finally seems more fidgety than reflective (a series of paths that either lead nowhere in particular or back to the place where Evans started). Questions also arise — as I think they do in most of Evans's music after the death of Scott LaFaro in 1961 — about how genuinely lyrical this supposedly quintessential jazz lyricist actually was.

"One extremely striking aspect of the Evans approach ... is his strong melodic sense," wrote Orrin Keepnews in the liner notes to Evans's 1958 album Everybody Digs BILL Evans. "Bill is fundamentally a lyrical pianist, a 'pretty' player in the best meaning of that word. . . . This strong melodic sense is also very much in evidence on 'up' numbers." The performances on Everybody Digs support that view, especially "Tenderly," which seems to have been conceived as a single melodic strand and which concludes with a thrilling passage in which the pianist rushes upwards toward what we sense must be his ultimate melodic goal and is thrown back no less than five times, only to ascend triumphantly on his sixth and final attempt. One suspects that this performance involved a good deal of pre-planning, but even if it did not, the adventure of Evans's melodic impulse literally enacts a confrontation between ecstasy and restraint, as he gives us a line that "desires" a release, is repeatedly blocked, and then magically overleaps the barrier.

Increasingly, however, Evans was constructing what Pettinger rightly describes as an "essentially harmonic world." On "I Wish I Knew," from the 1961 album Explorations, Pettinger notes "the large-scale substitution ... of new harmonies for the songbook changes. The . . . songsheet made do with half a dozen or so basic chords. Evans's reconstruction . . . employed nearly three times as many, changing mostly by the half bar. In this way a simple song could be enriched, strengthened, and transformed."

Transformed, yes — enriched and strengthened, perhaps not. A more or less simple popular song that also is a good one has a certain organic unity—a working balance between its harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic components. Alter that balance by a "large-scale substitution of new harmonies," and do the components of the song remain in balance? And if not, what can be done about this? As it happens, on "I Wish I Knew," Evans has a good answer: he adds to the mix, as Pettinger says, "the infinite shades of his tone production," thus nudging the song's melodic and rhythmic components into the same realm of luxuriant ambiguity that his substitute harmonies already occupied. And it is this balance (as I wrote in 1983) that worked so well for him up through the death of LaFaro, as Evans "moved several steps further into LaFaro and [Paul] Motian's lush, fluid textures — diminishing the volume level of his playing and softening its rhythmic profile."

What was increasingly at stake in Evans's music of this period was the pianist's acute sensitivity — musical and otherwise. One thinks of the emotional buffeting he reportedly received from some audiences and fellow band members because he was the only non-African-American member of the Miles Davis Sextet and of his resulting "determination," says Pettinger, "not to isolate himself from the [band's] drug-grounded fellowship. In fact, not content with being a mere addict, he was determined to be the worst junkie in the band." Evans's companion of the time, Peri Cousins, adds: "I have a theory about his addiction. When ... he kicked it, which he did on numerous occasions, the world was .. . too beautiful [for him]. It's almost as if he had to blur the world for himself by being strung out."

Quite articulate about his music, in a 1964 interview Evans said this: "The only way I can work is to have some kind of restraint involved, the challenge of a certain craft or form and then to find the freedom in that.... I think a lot of guys. . . want to circumvent that kind of labor." Then there is this Evans statement: "I believe that all music is romantic, but if it gets schmaltzy, romanticism is disturbing. On the other hand, romanticism handled with discipline is the most beautiful kind of beauty."

Plausible words, perhaps, but the value that Evans seemingly places on restraint in itself leads one to ask, what is being restrained and why? Evans's "challenge of [working within] a certain craft or form" is not merely an account of his own necessary practice; it lends to that practice an aura of moral virtue ("I think a lot of guys ... want to circumvent that kind of labor"). In other words, for Evans certain sorts of musical labor are not only valid but they also validate. And should an aesthetically valid outcome be reached in a seemingly non laborious manner, that can be disturbing. Thus in 1964, after acknowledging that the brilliant, lucid, and "completely unpremeditated" two-piano improvisation that he and Paul Bley played on George Russell's 1960 album Jazz in the Space Age "was fun to do," Evans says: "[But to] do something that hadn't been rehearsed successfully, just like that, almost shows the lack of challenge involved in that kind of freedom."

Drawing a comparison between Bach and César Franck in his Man and His Music: Romanticism and the Twentieth Century, Wilfrid Mellers refers to the "tension [in Bach's music] between linear independence and the dramatic logic of harmony." In early Evans, as in Bach, that tension was alive, rich, and fruitful; in much later Evans, as in much Franck, logical and increasingly elaborate harmonic labor seemingly exists to curtail, if not defeat, linear melodic independence. (Pettinger says of Evans's 1966 composition "Unless It's You" — and the same could be said of many latter-day Evans improvisations — "The interest was mostly harmonic ..., the significance of almost every note [of the top line] dependent on its attached harmony.")

One thinks again of Evans's recording of "Tenderly," with its dramatized joust between restraint and the desire to break away from it, of Evans's acute sensitivities, and of his apparent attempt to damp them down after the death of his uncannily empathetic musical partner Scott LaFaro. In 1983 I began by referring to Bill Evans as a minor artist. What I would say now is that Evans was an artist whose conflicts threatened to overwhelm his gifts, and that it was his fate to spend much of the latter part of his career making a music in which those conflicts were in effect disguised, even denied.”