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.
