BILL EVANS: Suicide Was Painful

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

 

The following is included in my BILL EVANS READER which is available exclusively on Amazon as a paperback and an eBook.

As a way of understanding and appreciating his music, it's always of interest to me to enter Bill’s world from different perspectives which brings me to the piece on Peter Pettinger’s biography BILL EVANS How My Heart Sings which was published by Yale University Press in 1998. A paperback copy remains in print.

Pettinger’s book is not a full blown, critical and discerning biography, rather it’s written more along the lines of Jerome Klinkowitz’s Listen Gerry Mulligan: An Aural Narrative in Jazz [1991] in which the recorded music forms the basis for observation and discussion.

Pettinger’s principal interest is in Bill’s music, more so than the man that made it.

Because the book is over 25 years old, it’s not easy to track down full reviews of it even with the help of internet search engines.

However, I’ve managed to find a couple, as detailed below, along with a slew of short commendations which follow the lengthy assessments by Terry Teachout and Terry MacDonald.

As Doug Ramsey explains in the introduction to his review in the JazzTimes, it might be a good idea to have your Bill Evans recordings handy as you read Peter Pettinger’s BILL EVANS How My Heart Sings.

“Bill Evans, one of the greatest creative musicians of the century, lived only to the age of 51. In the last half of his life, in a triumph of will and the creative impulse, he maintained iron discipline as an artist while he let heroin and cocaine drag him to destruction. His friend Gene Lees called Evans’ death “the slowest suicide in history.” Pettinger’s book weaves together analysis of Evans’ music with facts of his life before and after he became a narcotics addict. An English concert pianist and university music teacher, Pettinger died before the book was published.

The serious listener with a complete Bill Evans collection should set aside a few weeks to read this book, making time for frequent trips to the CD player or turntable. It would require discipline almost as great as Evans’ to ignore the urge to hear the recordings that Pettinger discusses as he tracks Evans’ progress through his brilliant career. Pettinger’s strength as a listener and analyst makes this an essential book about Evans, but is not the ultimate Evans biography. Pettinger does not explore in depth the pianist’s complex personality and his relationships with family, friends and fellow musicians. Still, even his dry recitations of facts and occasional speculation about behavior motives stir anyone who admires Evans’ music and recoils from the pain of the junkie existence he chose in his mid-twenties.”

 

September 13, 1998

Terry Teachout

New York Times

BILL EVANS

How My Heart Sings.

By Peter Pettinger.

Illustrated. 346 pp. New Haven:

Yale University Press. $30.

MANY jazz musicians resemble their music. Who could have looked more worldly-wise than Duke Ellington, or wittier than Paul Desmond? But sometimes a musician embodies a contradiction, and then you can read it off his face, just as you can see a fault line snaking through a tranquil landscape. Such was the case with Bill Evans. His shining tone and cloudy pastel harmonies transformed such innocuous pop songs as ''Young and Foolish'' and ''The Boy Next Door'' into fleeting visions of infinite grace. Yet the bespectacled, cadaverous ruin who sat hunched over the keyboard like a broken gooseneck lamp seemed at first glance incapable of such Debussyan subtlety; something, one felt sure, must have gone terribly wrong for a man who played like that to have looked like that.

Appearances are seldom deceiving to the clear-eyed observer, and Peter Pettinger writes frankly in his fine new biography of what was no secret to Evans's appalled colleagues: The most influential jazz pianist of the past half-century was addicted to drugs -- first heroin, then cocaine -- for much of his adult life. He picked up the habit in 1958 as a member of Miles Davis's sextet, and despite occasional interludes of sobriety, it stayed with him, finally leading to his death in 1980. Pettinger, who died last month, was an English concert pianist who began listening to Evans as a teen-ager. He is as interested in his playing as his private life; his book is packed with so much shrewd critical commentary that it reads at times more like an annotated discography than a biography. But ''Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings'' is also the first full-length biography of Evans, and most readers will doubtless pay special attention to the grisly particulars of what the writer Gene Lees, who knew him well, tersely called ''the longest suicide in history.''

The second son of a hard-drinking New Jersey printer, Evans had a conventional and uneventful youth. One of his sidemen would later speculate that ''his involvement with drugs (early on, anyway) was to get away from the fact that he really was a very American kind of guy. I think the drugs for him made him more mysterious . . . got him out of his background.'' Compounding the problem was Evans's awkward relationship with Miles Davis, who set the gold standard for hipness throughout the 1950's and who delighted in baiting the painfully shy pianist; as the only white musician in Davis's group, he was also acutely aware that many jazz fans thought him unworthy of sharing a bandstand with celebrated sidemen like John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones.

One way for him to prove his authenticity was to do as Coltrane and Jones did (and as Davis himself had so famously done only a few years before). Though Pettinger skims over the details of Evans's plunge into the abyss of addiction, his biography contains more than enough horror stories to make the reader wonder how he managed to function at all, much less to forge a powerfully individual style that would leave its mark on virtually every jazz pianist to follow him. Perhaps most astonishingly, his playing became markedly more intense and probing in the last year of his life, not long after he switched from methadone to cocaine. It was as if he were racing himself to the grave. Late one night at a San Francisco club, Pettinger writes, Evans played Johnny Mandel's ''Theme From M*A*S*H,'' remarking that the song was also known as ''Suicide Is Painless.'' ''Debatable,'' he added dryly. Two weeks later, he was dead, leaving his friends to wonder what demons had driven him to so squalid an end.

Seacoast Jazz Society

Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings

by Peter Pettinger

Biographer Peter Pettinger is a pianist himself. Not a jazz musician, but a concert pianist, one who admired Bill Evans greatly and brought to his writing a special ability to articulate the nuances of the man’s music. Some would say—and did—that the author’s considerable emphasis on the academic and technical aspects of Evans’s discography came at the expense of a deeper examination of the brilliant artist’s painful and tumultuous life. Fair enough. But for a jazz reader interested in knowing more about the music of one of the most influential jazz pianists in the history of the music, and how Bill Evans’s musical concepts were formed and developed, Pettinger presents a valuable volume.

Nor does he in any way gloss over the personal side of his subject’s life, at the center of which, of course, was his 20-year addiction to drugs.

Bill Evans was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1929. He was classically trained in piano and studied at Southeastern Louisiana University. After moving to New York in 1955, he worked with bandleader and musical theorist George Russell. He joined the Miles Davis Sextet in 1958, awkward, a little uncomfortable, the only white guy in the band, a fact that made him the object of regular heavy ribbing by his bandmates. His time with Miles was profoundly influential on Evans, both musically and personally. While the band was experimenting with modal jazz, Evans began his own experimentation—with heroin. His use of it continued, along with that of methadone and cocaine, for the rest of his consequentially abbreviated life, which ended at the age of just 51 in 1980.

After leaving Miles, Evans’s preferred musical unit was the piano trio, in which he worked almost exclusively for the rest of his life, and which garners most of the author’s attention.

Pettinger, a Brit, never met Bill Evans so lacked the opportunity to draw out of him details of his life and times that might intrigue and even titillate us. Instead, he relied on the pianist’s recorded works and personal history, the result a rewardingly illuminating portrait of the man and his music. Even jazz listeners who consider themselves fans of Evans are likely to discover aspects of him and his life that offer a greater understanding of both. And the author’s personal knowledge of music and of piano playing enable him to share with the reader a greater appreciation of Evans’s pianistic, harmonic and melodic brilliance. To Pettinger’s credit, he does this in a perfectly accessible way.

How My Heart Sings is not the whole story of Bill Evans, nor likely has one yet been written. It is, though, a good start and a good part of his story and should probably be considered required reading for admiring listeners of his music.

—Terry MacDonald

Title: Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings

Author: Peter Pettinger

Edition: Illustrated

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

ISBN: 0300071930, 9780300071931

Length: 346 pages

Bill Evans

How My Heart Sings

Peter Pettinger

Paperback

List Price: 18.95*

* Individual store prices may vary.

Description

This enthralling book is the first biography in English of Bill Evans, one of the most influential of all jazz pianists. Peter Pettinger, himself a concert pianist, describes Evans’s life (the personal tragedies and commercial successes), his music making (technique, compositional methods, and approach to group playing), and his legacy. The book also includes a full discography and dozens of photographs.

Praise For Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings…

"Pettinger understands what sets the pianist apart, and explains with a minimum of technical language and just enough musical transcriptions to get his key points across. . . This is an ideal companion for those who want to 'understand' Evans in the most important way, through listening."—Bob Blumenthal, Boston Globe

"Peter Pettinger writes frankly in his fine new biography of what was no secret to Evans's appalled colleagues: The most influential jazz pianist of the past half-century was addicted to drugs—first heroin, then cocaine—for much of his adult life."—Terry Teachout, New York Times Book Review

"[A] fine new biography . . . packed with . . . shrewd critical commentary."—Terry Teachout, New York Times Book Review

"Peter Pettinger sets out to catalog and explain Evans’ wide-ranging genius. . . . The making of every important Evans recording is discussed, and as he follows the extreme ups and downs of a career vexed by heroin addiction and other problems, Pettinger shows how the personal helped shape the artistic sensibility of this jazz innovator."—Tom Moon, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Pettinger . . . has thoroughly researched Evans’s life, reading the available literature and tracking down the pianist’s associates for commentary, and he has listened assiduously to the Evans catalog, which is no small feat given its enormousness."—Adam Bresnick, Wall Street Journal

"Pettinger provides a portrait of Evans that will serve as a foundation for further investigation of this quiet jazz giant. Recommended for jazz fans and music buffs."—Library Journal

"Pettinger is eminently qualified to assay Evan’s evolution as a pianist, and students of Evan’s music will no doubt enjoy the author’s references to Evan’s scores and academic excursions."—Publishers Weekly

"One of the most moving and informative jazz books of recent years. . . . For its sensitive sympathetic and insightful look at the artistry of Bill Evans, How My Heart Sings makes a valuable contribution."—Joel Roberts, All About Jazz

"This is the first biography of one of the most influential jazz artists ever to tickle the ivories. . . . [It] includes a full discography, dozens of photographs, and analyses of Evans’ expressive technique and compositional methods."—Paul Wilson, Bloomsbury Review

"The greatest strength of Pettinger's writing is that, analyzing Evans' recorded legacy, almost piece by piece, he tells how Evans did it—that is, what to listen for—in terms fully accessible to the lay listener. So this is not an exposé or analysis of a 'tortured' artist, but a fine music lover's reference about a nonpareil artist."—Booklist

"Reading How My Heart Sings, with Evans's eloquent, challenging music playing in the background, is a wonderful experience, there for the taking."—Larry Nai, Cadence

"Pettinger's approach is at once delightfully insightful and detailed in terms of musical analysis. . . . A much-needed addition to the growing list of respectable biographies of the greatest figures in the first century of jazz history. . . . An excellent choice for collections supporting studies of popular music at all levels."—Choice

"Peter Pettinger’s ambitious new volume is a concentrated work that aspires to fill a gap in jazz biography that has been left open too long. . . . A comprehensive endeavor and . . . a satisfying contribution. . . . Well-researched."—Michael Borshuk, Coda

"Indispensable. . . . The 40-page discography alone will be cherished as will the author's dogged research into the circumstances surrounding all important Evans recordings and trio personnel changes. . . . Through interviews with friends and colleagues, Evans own utterances and the author's insider knowledge of the piano, the book contains many insights into Evans' music."—Jeff Bradley. Denver Post

"[This book] is simply beautifully written and will probably become a model for future authors seeking to complete a classic biography."—Lee Bash, Jazz Educators Journal

"Accessible to non-musician and including a complete discography, Pettinger's book is highly recommended for Evans fans."—Jazz Insider

"Pettinger's strength as a listener and analyst makes this an essential book about Evans. . . . This fine book will be a part of the foundation for Evans scholars to come."—Doug Ramsey, Jazztimes

"[A] welcome full-scale biography."—Grover Sales, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Beautifully written and researched. . . . It should be required reading for all who dabble with the elementary jazz sounds to the serious jazz pianists of today and, as Bill Evans himself would have said, those of tomorrow."—Richard Michael, Music Teacher

"The sad, rich, influential life of jazz pianist Bill Evans as told by fellow pianist Peter Pettinger, who certainly knows the score. Evans died in 1980, a slow suicide caused by drugs, malnutrition and self-neglect. But what a body of work he left behind (among it, 164 albums, not counting reissues). Dig it."—Bill Bell, New York Daily News

"In this through and very readable biography, Evans emerges as something of a hero for sticking to his aesthetic values in the face of commercial pressures and changing fads. This may be one reason why Evans remains a figure of great interest to jazz fans and musicians nearly twenty years after his death. . . . This biography is highly recommended."—Allan Chase, Notes

"Pettinger chronicles in detail Evan's endless search for empathy and expression of emotion within his perennial context, the piano trio, and his famous successes within that context. . . . How My Heart Sings is told with a simplicity and calm momentum that are reminiscent of Evan's music itself; it shows facility supported by scholarship and research."—Jon Rodine, Rain Taxi

"A thoroughly researched, well-written biography of the soft-spoken but troubled jazz pianist."—San Francisco Examiner Magazine

"A stark—yet refreshingly lyrical—document of a jazz pianist who said more with his music than with his indulgences."—Chet Williamson, Worcester Weekly

Selected as a 1998 Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review

Winner of the 1999 ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award in the Pop Books Category

"Peter Pettinger’s book on pianist Bill Evans is one of the best jazz biographies I have ever read. It is beautifully and lovingly written, meticulously researched, and filled with deep insight into Evans’s personality and musicmaking."—Barry Kernfeld, author of What to Listen for in Jazz

"This book is likely to become a classic. There is nothing quite like it in the history of jazz. A concert pianist looks at the work of a jazz pianist whom many authorities consider one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. Pettinger hears all sorts of subtleties as only a fellow pianist can. He is also a felicitous and interesting writer. This is a brilliant piece of extended analysis."—Gene Lees

Yale University Press, 9780300097276, 366pp.

Publication Date: August 11, 2002

About The Author

Peter Pettinger was an international concert pianist for more than twenty-five years. His many recordings include the Bartók sonatas with the violinist Sándor Végh, the Elgar sonata and a jazz album with the violinist Nigel Kennedy, and Elgar’s works for solo piano.

Jazz Pianist [Bill Evans] : Life on the Upbeat - Paul Wilner

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

According to Mr. Wilner, at the time of this writing,” I was just a copy kid, but I was encouraged in my work by the late, great [NY Times critic] Robert Palmer.”

I corresponded with Paul about posting this piece to the blog and he gave his consent.

It’s always a pleasure to feature more writings about Bill Evans on this site and our thanks to Paul for allowing us to bring up his interview with him on this page. 

© Copyright ® Paul Wilner, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.

CLOSTER By Paul Wilner New York Times, Sept. 25, 1977

“ I GREW up in Plainfield,” recalled Bill Evans, the jazz pianist who has won the Grammy Award five times. He was in the den of his house in Closter, the Bergen County community to which he moved a couple of years ago after an apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx proved oppressively small for his growing family.

Now he was remembering the family he came from.

“My mother was born of a Russian immigrant coal‐mining family in Pennsylvania, and my father was of Welsh heritage. My mother was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church—they have marvelous music—and my father was into harmony.

“I started taking piano lessons when I was about 6½. We had a teacher with a very humanistic approach, and by the time I was 9 I was wailing through a lot of moderately difficult classical music and sight‐reading moderately well.”

Mr. Evans fell in love with jazz early.

“I started playing with a high‐school dance band when I was about 12,” he recounted, “and I started ‘jobbing’ around with older guys. They were good musicians, and I learned a good deal.

“We worked anywhere from Elizabeth to New Brunswick three or four nights a week all through high school. Then I worked all summer at different resorts.”

After serving a stint in an Army band near Chicago during the Korean War, Mr. Evans “came back to Plainfield for a year to get my self together to go to New York,” which was then, as now, a mecca for aspiring jazz musicians.

He hit the metropolis in 1955, signed a standard contract with Riverside Records at scale wages almost at once and worked at different clubs.

In 1958, he got his break: A surprise phone call from Miles Davis inviting the young pianist to join Mr. Davis's quintet for an engagement in Philadelphia.

“The first night there, he asked me if I wanted to come with the band,” recalled Mr. Evans, who jumped at the chance.

Was it tough to be the only white musician in the group?

“It was more of an issue with the fans,” he said. “The guys in the band defended me staunchly. We were playing black clubs, and guys would come up and say, ‘What's that white guy doing there?’ They said, ‘Miles wants him there—he's supposed to be there!’

“This is an age‐old disproven theory—that white men cannot play jazz. What black people who are talking that way might be saying is they want their race to get credit for developing the music as a tradition.

“Even then, however, many strains are in it. Most of the tunes in jazz are taken out of Broadway musicals. Miles would have been considered as militant as anyone, and yet he called me.

“Jazz is the most honest music I've come across. The really good jazz musicians only respect musicians they feel are worth respecting. There—there are no racial barriers.”

After a year with the Miles Davis group, which also included greats such as Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones, Mr. Evans formed the first of his famous trios with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums.

His home is decorated with photographs of different groups taken by jazz photographers, who are also fans of his.

Riverside releases of his early group are now collectors' items. “Japan is the only place I know where they have those records freshly pressed and printed,” Mr. Evans said wryly.

Although he has just left the Fantasy label for Warner Brothers, in hopes that his records will be better promoted, Mr. Evans has not gone in for the currently popular jazz‐rock mélange of styles.

The electronic console he received as a signing gift from Warner's sits forlornly in his music room, next to the more‐played standard piano.

Reticent on the subject of the mass success that groups such as Weather Report and Return To Forever are enjoying, Mr. Evans did say:

“I wonder, when people make a turn like this, how much of it is genuine musical desire and how much is ambition for larger commercial success. Everybody lives with their own destiny, you know. If somebody chooses to play a certain way, they've got to live with it.

“I came out of jobbing music, paying my dues, and that's where I learned to feel a certain form and work with it. I respect musicianship and honest creativity.”

The pianist, who has been accused of aesthetic conservatism, added:

“I'm not scared by the avant-garde. Charles Ives and Schoenberg were out there in 1910, so the sounds don't bother me. It's just what you're doing with them, you know.”

Primarily a family man in Closter, Mr. Evans played for his daughter's music class one day to “try to give them a little insight into what jazz is and the difference between written music and a more spontaneous form.”

Although he is fairly apolitical, confining negative comments about his new neighborhood to the single observation of “I'd like to see a little more integration,” music in the schools is something that Mr. Evans feels strongly about.

“Whenever budget problems come up, the first thing they cut is the arts,” he said. “The music department in many schools has been almost phased out.

“Physical education has been phased out, too. When I was a kid in Plainfield, we were out of school an hour a day playing and being physical. Here, the kids get out of school very seldom.

“Plato said that gymnastics and music are the two polarities which, at balance, create a broad and balanced personality. Those are the two things that are getting de‐emphasized in the schools.”

Mr. Evans doesn't socialize with fellow musicians in Jersey very much.

“I don't know too many guys out here,” he said. “I just come out here to be just a family person.”

And he doesn't seem to miss the bustle of the city at all.

“Most people think of New Jersey as the exit from the Lincoln Tunnel,” Mr. Evans observed. “They think of Secaucus as a dump. But I've been around a long time and, believe me, this is ideal. To live in this style this close to the city is just terrific.”

The pianist next turned his attention to the television set, and played briefly with his infant son, Evan Evans. Then he said:

“I look on myself as a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective, and I try to do things that will speak to me on the level that I respond.

“As I get older, I really feel that my perspective and aims get more simple.”

Mr. Evans has about 90 records released on which he has performed, along with perhaps 40 albums of his own groups and solo performances.

“I'm not so concerned with breaking barriers because I find that style and time aren't important,” he said. “Things that are good are good and things that aren't just aren't.” ■

Bill on Tony - "I just hear music."

 "He's a late “arriver" - somebody who digs away and develops and develops and develops and then they bust through.

Tony Bennett is somebody I appreciate that way. I couldn't understand his thing, really, when I was young. I thought his vibrato was bad, his voice was thin, and yet Tony is the kind of person who loves and respects music on a very deep spiritual level. He just has gotten more inside himself, and more inside his art all the time, until finally he has the ability to transport the listener that's unmatched. I think it's a great art, in that type of singing, to take a straight song and sing it relatively straight and somehow put more meaning into it and be able to grab the listener and transport them. When I listen to Tony I don't hear words, I don't hear a vocalist - I just hear music. That's why I really love his singing. I find it is a much harder journey for the later “arrivers" but what they have at the end of it is something much richer."

- Bill Evans as told to Ted O'Reilly, July, 1980

A Profile of Bill Evans by Neil Tesser

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

Jazz fans who remembered the music from its halcyon days during the quarter century following the end of World War II in 1945, were thrilled with the advent of audio CDs in the 1980s and 1990s.

Not only was the compact disc more convenient than the more cumbersome LP, there was room for more music on a single disc which also allowed for individual and multi-disc sets to make available a huge sampling of a particular Jazz artist’s recorded output.

The agreeable miniaturization that followed was a boon to record companies which got to make a “second profit” from the release of music they already owned in this new, digital format. This dynamic of smaller format yet enlarged capacity could also include the release of tracks that were recorded but not placed on LPs due to a lack of space and also recording rarities from the vaults that had not seen the light-of-day for decades.

The record producers also spent some of the money back in the form of sleeve inserts and booklets that featured artwork, photographs, the original liner notes and, most especially, new commentaries about the music by many distinguished Jazz authors and critics.

However, in some cases, the art direction and design folks got carried away and placed these precious narratives in formats using miniscule fonts, printed in pale colors on even lighter backgrounds to the point where they became unreadable without a magnifying glass. 

In other instances, the text was bastardized by spreading it over special pages, sometimes in a vertical format which caused the readers to crane their necks and strain their eyes trying to make sense of it all.

So, the good news was that it was all there in a conveniently collected series of compact discs; the bad news was that all this brilliant elucidation was virtually lost to the naked eye.

A case in point are the following booklet notes by the esteemed Jazz critic Neil Tesser which were part of the booklet that accompanied the 1997 release of The Complete Evans on Verve. [Don’t get me started on the atrocious metal box that houses the set.]

I wrote to Neil and asked his permission to transcribe the notes and present them as a READABLE blog feature and he graciously replied as follows: “Absolutely, Steve. I always thought that was a good piece of work, but I also felt that it wasn't read by many: between the production delays behind the box (separate story), the cost of the thing, and the brilliant decision to use a flyspeck font and print it in muted shades of gray and green — including, on page 51, mute green type ON muted green background — I wonder if a dozen people ever took the time decipher it. Which is to say, I'd be happy and thankful to see it reused in a readable form.”

This piece contains three footnotes. I’ve retained the numbers in the body of the text and you can locate the footnote annotations at the conclusion of Neil’s essay. There's also a sidebar reference following the footnotes which I have left "as is."

© Copyright ® Neil Tesser, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the permission of the author.

“Ultimately, for Bill Evans, it all came down to sound.

Every musician pays attention to the sound his instrument produces, from its intonation (correctness in pitch), to the mechanics of its production, to the qualities — tender, clipped, bluff,  translucent — that can color it.  Jazz pianists, however, quickly learn to concentrate on other musical issues — such as the athleticism of pure technique, or the infinite puzzle of alternate harmonies — because of the instrument they play: unable to carry their own pianos with them, they often find themselves shackled to keyboard clattertraps in the clubs where they perform, making the fine points of sound a luxury indeed. 

But Bill Evans didn’t just “pay attention” to sound; it became an overriding preoccupation, and that alone might have been enough to set him apart from most of his piano-playing contemporaries.  In fact, his concerns with sonority would have proved remarkable no matter what instrument he played.

Consider his approach to melody.  In his exquisite improvisations, Evans focused not just on their elegant contours and breathtaking leaps; in the gradations of his touch, and in the subtle, constant ebb and flow of dynamics, he clearly considered the actual sound that each note gained from and imparted to its neighbors.  Rhythm: for Evans, the octave-placement and internal chording — in other words, the sound — of his distinctive rhythms held an importance separate from (and nearly equal to) the propulsive kick of those rhythms themselves.  But the most obvious evidence lies in the voicings of his innovative and influential harmonies.  Even when others happened upon the same chords, their music didn’t resemble Evans’s — not unless they also happened to copy the heretical way in which he structured those chords.  Evans almost always omitted the root note of his harmonies, something they teach you not to do in music school. By so doing, he opened up the possible directions in which any one chord might lead.  At the same time, though, this technique gave his harmonies an unmistakable signature—light, airy, yet surprisingly textured — which Evans made into an unmistakable trademark.

Enrico Pieranunzi, the respected Italian pianist who reveals so much of Evans’s influence in his own work, offered this description: “If you play the root before [the chord] and not at the same time, this sets up vibrations that give life to the chord.  This is just a question of ears.  No one before Bill Evans was able to conceive of this.” 

It may seem a little odd to focus on such an elusive concept as the “sound” of Bill Evans’s music.  Those who know the science behind his art will readily understand why.  By dint of both training and inclination, Evans was a master theoretician, fascinated by the intricate clockwork of chords and the precise micromanagement of subtle rhythms; and a musician who masters such matters might easily look down on the less “scientific” subject of individual sonority.  Lennie Tristano, whose school of cerebral improvisation left its strong influence on Evans, provides an appropriate example: in his own piano playing, he sought a balanced and nearly monotonous attack, downplaying such elements as dynamics and voicing in order to highlight the relentless, eventually seductive logic of his melodies.  

But Evans had also absorbed the easy-riding, emotionally gratifying funk of Horace Silver.  (Listen to some of his early recordings and you simply can’t miss it.)  Armed with that model, and with his control of attack, dynamics, balance, and voicing, Evans could send his most theoretical concepts into the world on a cool, inviting breeze.  Logic and sound worked hand-in-hand to produce music that challenged the mind and satisfied the soul.

Others heard this; in fact, remarks about this facet of Evans’s style constitute something of a leitmotif within the substantial commentary about his work (which at the time of this writing includes several postgraduate dissertations).  In an interview given shortly after hiring him to play in his remarkable late-50s sextet, Miles Davis placed Evans among the handful of pianists who, “when they play a chord, play a sound more than a chord.”  Chuck Israels, who took over the bass chair in Evans’s first important trio, feels that “few pianists in the entire world of music have developed the range and nuance that was an integral part of his playing,” and finds a single shortcoming in the work of another notable pianist and good friend: “He has listened to Bill Evans and not heard the sound of the piano.”  And pianist Richie Beirach—who produced one of the first posthumous recorded tributes to Evans—explained Evans’s trademark piano posture like this:

“. . . to be aware of the sound—that’s why he hunches down, just to get this shit straight.  He doesn’t hunch down ‘cause he’s tired or he’s high.  When your head is like this, you hear the stuff; your ear is lower.”    

Evans’s approach to the piano—in which neither right-hand melodies nor left-hand rhythms predominated, but rather engaged in a musical conversation with each other—extended beyond the keyboard. It became the template for his philosophy of the piano trio, and that philosophy remains, along with his extraordinary lyricism, one of the two most enduring aspects of his music.

Until this time, piano trios existed primarily to support the pianist, forming a rhythmic framework for the keyboard solos and pointing attention almost entirely to the ivories.  Evans, however, wanted a trio in which no one element dominated completely, and in which each man could push the music in the direction of his choice at any given time—a musical unit that could “grow in the direction of simultaneous improvisation, rather than just one guy blowing followed by another guy blowing.  If the bass player hears an idea that he wants to answer, why should he just keep playing a 4/4 background?” he asked.  He wanted a group that matched his own demand of himself: to be able to “change directions at any moment” in the creation of music.  But he also wanted a trio that would express his lyricism: “Especially, I want my work—and the trio’s if possible—to sing.”

Given his own subtle iconoclasm, Bill Evans could hardly have missed hearing it in other artists, no matter how different a form it might take.  In the early 60s, he wrote the brief liner note for an album by Thelonious Monk, the long misunderstood genius who had carved a keyboard style at least as striking as Evans’s own:   

“This man knows exactly what he is doing in a theoretical way—organized, more than likely, in a personal terminology, but strongly organized nevertheless.  We can be further grateful to him for combining aptitude, insight, drive, compassion, fantasy, and whatever else makes the `total’ artist, and we should also be grateful for such direct speech in an age of insurmountable conformist pressures.”  Evans also used Monk as an example of how “any man can be great if he works true to his talents, neither over- nor under-estimating them and, most important, functions within his limitations.”

It doesn’t take any great leap of analysis to imagine Evans’s words applying to Evans himself.

*****

William John Evans, of Welsh and Russian stock, came into the world on August 16, 1929 in Plainfield, New Jersey.  He began playing the piano at the age of 6, tackling the violin at 7; as a teenager, he played piano in the semi-professional dance band led by his older brother Harry, who also played piano.  But he spent his truly formative years in Louisiana: Harry had settled in Baton Rouge, where he eventually became the city’s Supervisor of Music, and Bill followed by attending Southeastern Louisiana University.  He attended on scholarship, which may come as no surprise; the scholarship, however, was for flute, which he had begun studying at 13 and which he played in the university’s marching band.

(Once you get the image of a marching flutist to jibe with your impressions of Evans and his music, then try this one: as quarterback, he led his intramural football team to the league championship.)

Evans played first-chair flute in the concert band, but he majored in piano, graduating with high honors in 1950.  He hated to practice, and an incident from his senior performance exam illustrates his ability, even then, to dig beneath mere technique in search of the underlying musical essence.  Each of the three professors serving as his jurors found fault with Evans’s technique on etudes and exercises; yet each of them praised his work on the actual pieces he performed, which supposedly required mastery of said exercises.  

After college, Evans was drafted into the army, which sent him to play in the Fifth Army Band at Fort Sheridan—an hour or so north of Chicago, where throughout his military hitch he spent his nights gigging. With his discharge papers in hand, he went to New York in 1955, where he performed in a quartet led by the clarinetist Tony Scott and did post-graduate studies in composition at Mannes College.  There he encountered George Russell, one of the pioneering theorists of “third stream,” the movement that hoped to synthesize a new direction from the fusion of jazz and modern classical composition.  When Russell secured a recording date for a commissioned work called All About Rosie in 1957, he made sure to include Evans; and the pianist’s startling, fully-formed solo pricked up the ears of critics throughout the country, as did his contributions to a subsequent Russell project, New York, N.Y.

By that time, Evans had already released one album under his own name.  Recommended to the young Riverside label by the guitarist Mundell Lowe, Evans in 1956 had recorded his first trio date, New Jazz Conceptions, which featured the debut of his most famous composition, “Waltz For Debby.” It took more than two years for his second album to arrive, but by then, the jazz world was hungry for it—because Evans had just come off an eight-month stint with the most important band of the period, the Miles Davis Sextet.  

With the Sextet, Evans had done more than back the soloists; he had played an intricate role in developing the modal harmonies, open-ended structures, and coolly measured approach to improvisation unveiled by the Davis Sextet on the groundbreaking album Kind Of Blue.  At the time, Davis was seeking a way out of the harmonic prison drawn by the hard-bop movement of the 1950s; Evans’s still-developing mastery of chord voicing suggested new escape routes, some of which paralleled Davis’s own.  Evans and Davis collaborated on all but one of the album’s compositions, and although both their names appear beneath the title of the indelible ballad “Blue In Green,” most historians and music analysts peg it as the work of Evans alone.  The pianist was even enlisted to write the still-famous liner notes to the album, in which he compared jazz improvisation to the meditational state and flowing strokes of Japanese sumi-e painting.

By 1959, his star had risen; nonetheless, when his second album arrived bearing the title Everybody Digs Bill Evans, some found reason to argue with that assessment.  He lacked the jaw-dropping, shout-inducing technical fireworks of the beboppers and their direct descendants; and, as some musicians and many more critics were quick to point out, he didn’t swing in the obvious, even bombastic manner used by most of his predecessors.  But Evans, exemplifying his own later comments about Monk, operated from a different paradigm; he had located these so-called flaws at the heart of a new sense of jazz swing.  His understated beat had become a deceptively light but irresistible forward drive; his supposedly “limited” technique became the basis of a lyrical profile rarely before heard in jazz.  And his decentralized concept of the piano trio engendered a format of unexpected strength and compelling influence.

 

* * * * *

Evans had left Miles Davis’s group in a state of fatigue and depression, brought on by the demands of the road and his own lofty self-expectations.  “At the time I thought I was inadequate,” he would recall years later.  “I felt exhausted in every way—physically, mentally, and spiritually.”  In addition, he wanted to spend some time with his father, who was ill at the time.  After resting up at his parents’ home in Florida, the pianist spent some time visiting his brother.  He later recalled that “somehow I had reached a new inner level of expression in my playing.  It had come almost automatically, and I was very anxious about it, afraid I might lose it. . . . But when I got back to New York and the piano in my own apartment, it was consistently there.”  As a result, he eagerly set about forming the first of the trios that would ensure his place in music history. Bill Evans did not choose his bandmates lightly.  He believed that the kind of music he wished to make could grow only out of long relationships with the right associates, and in 1959, he established just such a balance with two young and similarly dedicated musicians.  The drummer, Paul Motian, had worked with Evans in Tony Scott’s quartet and had remained in that band in the intervening years; the bassist, Scott LaFaro, had joined Tony Scott’s group after Evans’s tenure, but the pianist had played with him briefly in 1956.  Each brought a large measure of independence to his role in the new kind of trio that Evans wanted to lead.  In his timekeeping duties, Motian had learned to swing in a manner quite different from the heated rhythms and sharp angles of hard-bop.  Motian pushed the music along as much by inference as by direct statement—as much with percussive color as with downbeats.  LaFaro also offered something different: with his prodigious technique, he could take his music anywhere that his agile mind suggested, seemingly unrestricted by the instrument’s physical boundaries.  This made him the perfect candidate for the trialogue that Evans wished to create. 

As Paul Motian would later describe it, “we became a three-person voice — one voice, and that was the groundbreaking point.”

But this “first trio,” as it has come to be known, lasted only until the summer of 1961, when Scott LaFaro died in a fiery auto crash in upstate New York.  The loss of LaFaro devastated Evans; he did not play again in public for almost a year, and apparently played little in private for the first six months after the crash.3   When he returned to recording, Chuck Israels had come on board.  Israels lacked LaFaro’s mercurial technique and played a much more conservative style of jazz bass, and in the minds of many observers, the Bill Evans Trio suffered a setback during Israels’ tenure.  Certainly, one can’t dispute that the trio lost some of its tripartite sparkle while turning more of the spotlight over to Evans himself.  

But a careful listening to this version of the trio paradoxically reveals the durability of Evans’s concept.  Israels quite obviously understood the democratic ideal at the heart of Evans’s trio: you can hear the evidence in his asymmetrical lines, his melodic counterpoint, and his ability to walk away from the traditional four-stroke bass accompaniment.  His playing proved that even though a virtuoso had created the role, one didn’t have to be a virtuoso to play that role — and, by extension, that Evans had charted a direction for the jazz trio that would outlive his own bands.  Nonetheless, all of Israels’ successors — Gary Peacock in 1962, Eddie Gomez in 1966, and Marc Johnson in 1978 — employed a technically complex and contrapuntally challenging style, squarely in the mold of Scott LaFaro.

* * * * *

Evans began his association with Verve Records in 1962 while still recording for Riverside.  At Verve, throughout the 60s, he continued to make the trio his main laboratory.  But this did not preclude other projects, such as his duo recordings with guitarist Jim Hall—in which the two artists set high-water marks for an intimate, almost telepathic communication—or the overdubbed solo project that earned Evans the first of his six Grammy Awards.  He performed in orchestral settings supplied by the arranger Claus Ogerman, and he resumed his association with George Russell on a 1972 album called Living Time, a somewhat experimental work that employed composed sections of undetermined length, as opposed to a finite number of measures.  Nonetheless, the intricate creative possibilities of piano/bass/drums remained both the prime vehicle for his musical development and the beneficiary of his inspiration.  The various drummers — and their styles were indeed varied, from the mainstream fireworks of Philly Joe Jones to the off-kilter fulminations of Jack DeJohnette to the diffident cushion laid down by Marty Morell — all had a distinctive impact on the music’s thrust.  Finally, when drummer Joe LaBarbera joined Evans and Marc Johnson in 1978, Evans had assembled his last great trio — and, to the ear of many observers, his best trio since the very first one.

But Evans had already entered the precipitous decline that would result in his death on September 15, 1980.  (That date is preserved as the title of a Pat Metheny song, one of the several tribute compositions that began to appear shortly after Evans’s passing.)  Without doubt, the unexpected death of his older brother Harry acted as a catalyst: it seemed to shatter the support that music had provided for his life.  The trio performed a spectacular concert in November of 1979, in Paris, but its opalescence may well have been that of a supernova: in Joe LaBarbara’s estimation, “he was coming to a point in his life when he was peaking, musically, and he probably also realized that he was dying.”  And when the trio played in San Francisco, eight days before Evans’s death, “The guy was toward the end,” recalls Marc Johnson.  “I remember him telling me he was performing on sheer professionalism.  The sound he was making was harder.”   

That should have provided the only clue that anyone needed.  

Before then, though, Evans had created a piano style and a musical cosmos that continue to work their magic, 15 years after his death, through the most famous of his legatees: Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Gary Burton, and Pat Metheny.  Evans filled his playing with spontaneous (but rarely impulsive) asides and illustrations, yet his music didn’t insist that you follow any one of them.  These elements opened themselves up to those listeners who sought them.  Evans once stated that “I don’t want to rob anybody of the joy of discovery,” and his music—in the best tradition of the greatest art—fulfilled that creed.

NEIL TESSER

1995-96

This essay owes much to the research conducted and presented by the indefatigable Win Hinkle in LETTER FROM EVANS, published on a bimonthly or quarterly basis from 1990-1994 and now available on the Internet’s World Wide Web.

FOOTNOTES

1. He was certainly aware of perhaps his greatest limitation, his problems with chemical dependency.  Like many of his contemporaries, he found himself caught up in heroin, a habit that almost certainly contributed to the chronic liver problems of his later life; this condition would cause his hands to swell, sometimes to the point of affecting his ability to perform.  And years after ditching heroin, he took up with cocaine, which several of his friends and observers blame for his death.  

2. Of some interest: Bill Evans was not the only Bill Evans to play with Miles Davis.  In 1980, Davis hired a then 22-year-old saxist named Bill Evans from the Chicago suburbs to play in his fusion band.  And for that matter Bill Evans (the pianist) was not the first Bill Evans to establish himself in jazz.  A Detroit saxophonist born nine years earlier holds that distinction, although by the time he began recording, he had changed his name to Yusef Lateef.

3. To bring things full circle, compare Evans’s reaction to that of Marc Johnson, the bassist in the Bill Evans trio at the time of the pianist’s death.  “Right after he died, I spent a couple of months just immersed in his music.  And then, suddenly I found that I couldn’t listen to it; it was just too devastating to me.  For a number of years there, I didn’t put a Bill Evans record on the turntable.  I didn’t want to hear anything that I did with him.  It made me sad.  Then suddenly this year [1990 — a decade after Evans’s death] it’s like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I feel I can listen to this music again, with enjoyment, as I used to.”” 

SIDEBAR

(This will be set off in a separate box in the program-book layout.)

Evans was a naturally shy and even self-deprecating man: announcements of just completed songs, let alone banter with the audience, did not fall from his lips, and for much of his adult life, he wore a full and often shaggy beard, which further shielded him from his public.  So did his addictions, first with heroin and then with cocaine.  Whether he used drugs to gain acceptance as the only white man in Miles Davis’s band, or to relieve the pressure of the musician’s life, or simply because it allowed him to shed his inherent discomfort in public settings, the fact remains that he used drugs, and that this shaped his life in ways similar to most addicts’ experience. Orrin Keepnews, Evans’s first producer (at Riverside Records), recalls at least one recording session that he authorized, at least in part, to justify the cash advances Evans had extracted from the label to supply his habit.  Evans contrasted his personal demons with not only his sunny, inviting music, but also with a quick, dry, and often dark sense of humor.  (For instance, when he learned of the financial disorder left behind by a recently deceased record-company executive, he opined that the man “must have died in self-defense.” )

Evans may have succumbed to addiction — as did so many of his peers — but it didn’t reflect allegiance to the fashion of the day.  Unlike many, he never made his addiction a motivating factor for his music, and he never engaged in hand-wringing or self-pity over this aspect of his lifestyle.  Evans simply didn’t follow the crowd.  He didn’t splurge on the latest clothes, as did his former colleague, Miles Davis.  He wouldn’t pepper his conversation with hip constructions, and once told Downbeat Magazine that such commentary represented an excuse for not thinking.  And he refused to simply settle into the niche his fame had carved.  Instead, he worked restlessly to peel back layer after layer of his music; in his music, Evans had no fear of revealing the man behind the beard.