"Bill Evans - The Art of Playing" - Dan Morgenstern

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The Argument

- Modern music is not modern and is rarely music.

-  It represents an attempt to perpetuate a European musical tradition whose technical resources are exhausted, and which no longer has any cultural validity.

- That it continues to be composed, performed, and discussed represents self-deception by an element of society which refuses to believe that this is true.  

-

The hopelessness of the situation is technically demonstrable, and contemporary composers are aware of it.

- What makes their own situation hopeless is that they cannot break with the tradition without renouncing the special status they enjoy as serious composers.

- That they have this status is the result of a popular superstition that serious music is by definition superior to popular music.

-  There is good music, indifferent music and bad music, and they all exist in all types of composition.

-  There is more real creative musical talent in the music of Armstrong and Ellington, in the songs of Gershwin, Rodgers, Kern and Berlin, than in all the serious music composed since 1920.

-  New music which cannot excite the enthusiastic participation of the lay listener has no claim to his sympathy and indulgence. Contrary to popular belief, all the music which survives in the standard repertoire has met this condition in its own time. [Emphasis mine]

- The evolution of Western music continues in American popular music, which has found the way back to the basic musical elements of melody and rhythm, exploited.

- Henry Pleasants - The Agony of Modern Music

Unfortunately for Mr. Pleasants, modern Jazz was not to be the salvation he had hoped for as at the time of this Bill Evans interview in 1964, the first blushes of Free Jazz [i.e., atonality, arhythmic, etc.] were very much in vogue [think Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, et al] and The Beatles were on the horizon.

Although “The Argument” as stated above pertained primarily to Classical Music’s “agony,” one could make the case - as Bill Evans does so eloquently and diplomatically in the following interview with the esteemed Jazz author and scholar, Dan Morgenstern - that “The Argument” applied equally as well to the direction that Jazz was taking in the mid-1960’s.

“THERE CAN BE LITTLE DOUBT that Bill Evans is one of the most influential pianists — if not to say one of the most influential musicians — in jazz today. His strikingly personal conception has not only touched younger players whose styles were formed after Evans became widely known through his tenure with the Miles Davis Sextet in 1958, but it also has affected many pianists with longer roots.

At another stage in the development of jazz, there might be nothing very surprising about this, for Evans' music — lucid, lyrical, melodic, and infused with a sense of, and search for, beauty and balance — is firmly grounded in an astonishing command and organization of the musical materials in the mainstream of the jazz tradition. And his approach to his instrument reflects a firm commitment to the heritage of Western keyboard music that began with Bach and perhaps reached its final splendor in Debussy.

Such an orientation is not exactly typical of the trend in contemporary jazz, sometimes called the "new thing," sometimes "avant garde," and which seems more concerned with discarding tradition than with building on its foundations. The watchword of this school is "freedom"— a word open to many definitions.

Evans, too, is concerned with freedom in music. But he said recently, "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, which is one hell of a job. I think a lot of guys either want to circumvent that kind of labor, or else they don't realize the rewards that exist in one single area if you use enough restraint and do enough searching.

"I have allowed myself the other kind of freedom occasionally. Paul Bley and I did a two-piano improvisation on a George Russell record [Music for the Space Age] which was completely unpremeditated. It was fun to do, but there was no direction involved. To do something that hadn't been rehearsed successfully, just like that, almost shows the lack of challenge involved in that type of freedom."

Just turned 35, spiritually and physically refreshed after a troubled interlude in his life, Evans spoke softly but firmly, the even flow of his words reflecting not glibness but long and careful thought about his art and craft. The pianist recently returned from a rewarding European tour at the helm of a revitalized trio and seems poised on a new peak in his career.

"I'm extremely happy with the group," he said. "Larry Bunker is a marvelous musician. [Drummer Bunker recently gave up a lucrative studio practice in Los Angeles to go with Evans.] He plays excellent vibes as well as being an all-round percussionist, and being so musical he just does the right thing because he's listening. He really knows music, feels music — and he is a superlative drummer. ... I hope you can get to hear him at his better moments, which depend, I guess, a lot on me, because if I'm in the least falling apart, they're always so sympathetic to what I'm doing that it's hard for them to come out if I'm not. [Bassist Chuck Israels is the third member of the group.]

"We probably make a stronger emotional projection than at almost any time in the past. Maybe one criticism of the group that could have been valid is that we didn't reach out to the people who weren't interested enough to come in, and I would like to get out to people and grab them a little. That's something that has to happen or not happen, but I think it's happening more and more."

EVANS' DESIRE to reach out to his audience may come as a surprise to those who have overemphasized the introspective qualities of his work. His music also has been characterized as intellectual, and critic Whitney Balliett once wrote that "no musician relies less on intuition than Bill Evans." The pianist said he was aware of Balliett's statement.

"I was very surprised at that," Evans said. "I don't consider that I rely any less or more on something like intuition than any other jazz player, because the plain process of playing jazz is as universal among the people who play jazz correctly — that is, those who approach the art with certain restrictions and certain freedoms — as, for instance, the thought processes involved in ordinary, everyday conversation.

"Everybody has to learn certain things, but when you play, the intellectual process no longer has anything to do with it. It shouldn't, anyhow. You have your craft behind you then, and you try to think within the area that you have mastered to a certain extent. In that way, I am relying entirely on intuition then. I have no idea of what's coming next, and if I did, I would be a nervous wreck. Who could keep up with it?

"Naturally, there are certain things that we play, like opening choruses, that become expected. But even there, changes occur all the time, and after that, when you're just playing, everything is up for grabs. We never know what's coming next. Nobody could think that fast... not even a computer. What Balliett hears, I think, is the result of a lot of work, which means that it is pretty clear. I know this: everything that I play I know about, in a theoretical way, according to my own organization of certain musical facts. And it's a very elementary, basic-type thing. I don't profess to be advanced in theory, but within this area, I do try to work very clearly, because that is the only way I can work.

"When I started out, I worked very simply, but I always knew what I was doing, as related to my own theory. Therefore, what Balliett hears is probably the long-term result of the intellectual process of developing my own vocabulary — or the vocabulary that I use — and he may relate that to being intellectual, or not relying on intuition. But that's not true."

Another critic, Andre Hodeir, has stated that the musical materials used by most jazz players, such as the popular song and the blues, have been exhausted and that the greatest need for jazz is to develop new materials for improvisation.

Evans said he is well acquainted with these views but does not share them.

"The need is not so much for a new form or new material but rather that we allow the song form as such to expand itself," he explained. "And this can happen. I have experienced many times, in playing alone, that perhaps a phrase will extend itself for a couple of moments so that all of a sudden, after a bridge or something, there will be a little interlude.  But it has to be a natural thing. I never attempt to do this in an intellectual way.

"In this way, I think the forms can change and can still basically come from the song form and be a true form — and offer everything that the song form offers. Possibly, this will not satisfy the intellectual needs of somebody like Hodeir, but as far as the materials involved in a song are concerned, I don't think they are restricting at all, if you really get into them. Just learning how to manipulate a line, the science of building a line, if you can call it a science, is enough to occupy somebody for 12 lifetimes. I don't find any lack of challenge there."

Along with this regard for the song form goes a commitment to tonality, Evans pointed out. It is not an abstract idea, he said, or one to which he is unyieldingly bound, but it is the result of playing experience and a concern for coherence.

"If you are a composer or are trying to improvise, and you make a form that is atonal, or some plan which has atonality as a base, you present a lot of problems of coherence," he said. "Most people who listen to music listen tonally, and the things that give certain elements meaning are their relationships to a tonality—either of the phrase, or of the phrase to the larger period, or of that to the whole chorus or form, or perhaps even of that to the entire statement. So if you don't have that kind of reference for a listener, you have to have some other kind of plan or syntax for coherent musical thinking.

"It's a problem, and one that I have in a way solved for myself theoretically by studying melody and the construction of melody through all musics. I found that there is a limited amount of things that can happen to an idea, but in developing it, there are many, many ways that you can handle it. And if you master these, then you can begin to think just emotionally and let something grow. A musical idea could grow outside the realm of tonality. Now, if I could master that, then maybe I could make something coherent happen in an atonal area.

"But the problem of group performance is another thing. When I'm playing with a group, I can't do a lot of things that I can do when playing by myself because I can't expect the other person to know just when I'm going to all of a sudden maybe change the key or the tempo or do this or that. So there has to be some kind of common reference so that we can make a coherent thing." Evans became emphatic.

"This doesn't lessen the freedom," he continued. "It increases it. That's the thing that everybody seems to miss. By giving ourselves a solid base on which to work, and by saying that this is accepted but our craft is such that we can manipulate this framework — which is only like, say, the steel girders in a building — then we can make any shapes we want, any lines we want. We can make any rhythms we want, that we can feel against this natural thing. And if we have the skill, we can just about do anything. Then we are really free.

"But if we were not to have any framework at all, we would be much more limited because we would be accommodating ourselves so much to the nothingness of each other's reference that we would not have room to breathe and to make music and to feel. So that's the problem.

Maybe, as a solo pianist, I could make atonal things or whatever. But group improvisation is another type of challenge, and until there is a development of a craft which covers that area, so that a group can say: 'Okay, now we improvise, now we are going to take this mode for so long, and then we take that mode with a different feeling for so long, and then we go over here'. . . and if I were to construct this plan so that it had no real tonal reference, only then could it be said that we were improvising atonally.

"What many people mean when they say 'atonal,' I think, is more a weird kind of dissonance or strange intervals and things like that. I don't know ... I don't feel it. That isn't me. I can listen to master musicians like Bartok and Berg when they do things that people would consider atonal — although often they're not — and love and enjoy it, but here's someone just making an approximation of this music. It really shows just how little they appreciate the craft involved, because there's just so much to it. You can't just go and play by what I call 'the inch system.' You know, I could go up eight inches on the keyboard and then play a sound down six inches, and then go up a foot-and-a-half and play a cluster and go down nine-and-a-half and play something else. And that's atonality, the way some guys think of it. I don't know why people need it. If I could find something that satisfied me more there, I'd certainly be there, and I guess that's why there are people there. They must find something in it."

It was suggested to Evans that this was a charitable view, that, in fact, much of this kind of music reflects only frustration, and that the occasional moment of value was no adequate reward for the concentration and patience required to wade through all the noodling.

"Yes, it's more of an aid to a composer than a total musical product," he answered. "If you could take one of these gems and say, 'Ah, now I can sit down and make a piece. . . .' But it's the emotional content that is all one way. Naturally, frustration has a place in music at times, especially in dramatic music, but I think that other feelings are more important and that there is an obligation—or at least a responsibility—to present mostly the feelings which are my best feelings, which are not everyday feelings. Just to say that something is true because it is everyday and that, therefore, it is valid seems, to me, a poor basis for an artist to work on. I have no desire to listen to the bathroom noises of the artist. I want to hear something better, something that he has dedicated his life to preserve and to present to me. And if I hear somebody who can really move me, so that I can say 'ah, there's a real song'—I don't care if it's an atonal song or a dissonant song or whatever kind of song—that's still the basis of music to me.. . ."

What did Evans mean by song? Was it melody? "Essentially, what you might consider melody or a lyric feeling," he replied. "But more, an utterance in music of the human spirit, which has to do with the finer feelings of the person and which is a necessary utterance and something that must find its voice because there is a need for it and because it is worthwhile. It doesn't matter about the idiom or the style or anything else; as long as the feeling is behind it, it's going to move people."

But style can get in the way of hearing, it was pointed out.

"I remember discussing Brahms with Miles Davis once," the pianist commented. "He said that he couldn't enjoy it. And I said, 'If you can just get past the stylistic thing that puts you off, you'd find such a great treasure there.' I don't know if it had any effect or not; we never talked about it again. But I think it's the same problem in jazz; if you can get past the style, the rhythm, the thing that puts you off — then it's all pretty much the same. Things don't change that much.

"That's why I feel that I don't really have to be avant garde or anything like that. It has no appeal for me, other than the fact that I always want to do something that is better than what I've been doing. If it leads in that direction, fine. And if it doesn't, it won't make a bit of difference to me, because quality has much more to do with it, as far as I'm concerned. If it stays right where it is at, and that's the best I can find, that's where it's going to have to be."

Evans paused and then added wistfully: "I hope it doesn't, though... I'd like it to change. I never forced it in the least, and so far I do think there have been some changes. Still, essentially, the thing is the same. It has followed a definite thread from the beginning: learning how to feel a form, a harmonic flow, and learning how to handle it and making certain refinements on the form and mastering more and more the ability to get inside the material and to handle it with more and more freedom. That's the way it has been going with me, and there's no end to that... no end to it.

"Whatever I move to, I want to be more firmly based in and better in than what I leave. What I want to do most is to be fresh and to find new things, and I'd like to discard everything that I use, if I could find something to replace it. But until I do, I can't. I'm really planning now how to set up my life so that I can have about half of it in privacy and seclusion and find new areas that are really valid. After the Au Go Go [the Greenwich Village club where Evans is currently playing] and maybe a week somewhere else, I hope to take off about a month. It will be the first time in two or three years that I will have devoted time to that."

IN THIS QUEST, Evans will be aided by what he describes as "one of the most thrilling things that have happened in my  career"—a very  special gift.  At the  Golden Circle in Stockholm, Evans performed on a piano built on new structural principles: a 10-foot concert grand designed and built by George Bolin, master cabinetmaker to the Royal Swedish Court.

"It was the first public performance on the new piano," Evans said. "One night, Mr. Bolin came in to hear me and expressed respect for my work, and before I knew it, my wife had negotiated with his representatives for me to be able to use the only such piano in the United was on exhibit at the Swedish Embassy — for my engagement at the Au Go Go. It is one of only three, I think, in existence in the world right now. And after the engagement, the piano will be mine as a gift. Mr. Bolin dedicated it to me.

"It came at a perfect time, because I didn't have a piano of my own just then. It is a marvelous instrument — probably the first basic advance in piano building in some 150 years. The metal frame and strings are suspended and attached to the wooden frame by inverted screws, and the sound gets a kind of airy, free feeling that I haven't found in any other piano. Before this, Bolin was famous as a guitar maker—he made instruments for Segovia and people like that. To build an instrument like this, a man has to be as much of a genius as a great musician."

Such gifts are not given lightly and are an indication of the stature of the recipient as well as of the giver. Whatever music Bill Evans will make on his new piano, one can be certain that it will do honor to the highest standards of the art and craft of music.”

Source:

October 22, 1964

Downbeat Magazine                                  

Bill Evans “in” Paris “with” Gene Lees

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

 “It is difficult for me to write about Bill. His life, Helen's [Keane, Bill’s producer], and my own were too closely involved for too long a time. For the last two years I have been trying without success to find a way to write an extended portrait of Bill.”

- Gene Lees

"Everything he plays seems to be the distillation of the music. In How Deep Is the Ocean, he never states the original melody. Yet his performance is the quin­tessence of it. On My Foolish Heart, he plays nothing but the mel­ody, but you still receive that essence of the thing.

‘Pianistically,’ he's beautiful. He never seems to be hung up in doing anything he wants to do, either technically or harmonically. When he's confronted with a choice in improvisation, he doesn't have to wonder which voicing of a chord is best. He knows. A given voicing will have different effects in different registers, especially when you use semitones as much as he does. So he constantly shifts voicings, depending on the register. And he is technically capable of executing his thought immediately. It's as if the line between his brain and his fingers were absolutely direct."

- pianist, Warren Bernhardt

“There have been times when, hearing Bill Evans, I have thought: this music, so emotionally unprotected, so completely exposed in its feeling—take it into the real world and that world will crush it and crush the man who made it. Perhaps, after all, that is what happened.

But what a heritage he left us.

- Martin Williams

Before his death in April 2010, I shared some correspondence with Gene Lees, who reigned for many years as one of Jazz’s most erudite observers and writers.

I initiated it by writing to him and requesting his permission to include his essay, I Hear the Shadows Dancing: Gerry Mulligan, in my blog feature on Jeru. Gene wrote back granting me the sought after copyright permission.

Not too long after our initial exchange of messages, Gene contacted me about my reference to him in the lead-in to my multi-part feature on the late pianist and vibraphonist, Victor Feldman in which I state:

Mentioning my name in the same context as that of Gene Lees, the esteemed Jazz writer, might be the height of presumption on my part, but in doing so in this instance, I mean it only as the basis for a speculative empathy that he and I might have in common.

Because of his close and enduring friendship with Bill Evans, the legendary Jazz pianist, many of us in the Jazz World have been patiently waiting for what could only be termed the definitive work on Bill and his music as provided by Gene Lees, the cardinal writer on the subject of Jazz in the second half of the 20^th century.

And yet, while there is an exquisite chapter by Gene about Bill entitled “The Poet” in his compilation, Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s, Mr. Lees has not ventured forth with the long-awaited, full-length treatment on Evans.

The reasons why Gene’s book on Bill Evans has not materialized can only be surmised, but perhaps, and this is mere conjecture on my part, Gene is too close to his subject.

Also, he may be overwhelmed by the immensity of dealing with the size of the footprint that Bill left on Jazz.  Or, it may be, again a supposition on my part, that the loss of his friend is still something that weighs heavily upon him making the task of writing objectively about Evans a difficult one.

“Not so,” Gene wrote: “See the February, 1984 edition of the Jazzletter.”

Gene had been writing this monthly newsletter since 1981, but, as I replied, I had only been a subscriber since 1991 and did not have that edition.

A few days later, a copy of Volume 3, No. 7 of the February, 1984 Jazzletter arrived in the mail.

It contained what can only be described as a dedicatory essay to his late friend, pianist Bill Evans, somewhat disguised, if you will, as Gene’s review of Bill’s two volume Paris Concerts.

This music on these CDs had been issued posthumously on Elektra Musician a few years after Bill’s death in September, 1980.

Gene included a note in which he generously offered me his permission to “use all or part of it on your blog.”

Although, he would be quite effusive in his praise of Peter Pettinger’s Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings when it came out in 1998 New Haven: Yale University Press,] and even publish the essay that preceded it  - Bill Evans Observed (British Classical Pianist Peter Pettinger Considers Evans’ Work) in the Vol. 11, No. 11 edition of the Jazzletter, the much hoped-for book length treatment on Evans by Gene Lees, his close-friend and confidant, never materialized.

Perhaps, some of the reasons that I surmised in the introduction to my Victor Feldman blog feature held sway after all, but I never got around to discussing these points any further with Gene due to his passing.

© -Gene Lees, used with the author’s permission. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“RE: PERSON I KNEW

When Modigliani died, the prices of his paintings shot up overnight, and now are astronomical. In a delicious example of funereal opportunism, his home town of Livorno, Italy, which ignored him when he was alive, is dredging its canal in search of sculptures he deep-sixed there one night in 1914 in disgust with this aspect of his own work. If any are found, someone will make a lot of money.

That an artist's work rises in "value" with his death is inevitable, but the record industry is outstanding in the exploitation of necrophilia, as witness the cases of Janis Joplin, John Lennon, and Elvis Presley. Nor has jazz been free of this kind of avarice.

If it is true that an artist has a right to be judged by his best work, it is only just that in most instances the recordings a jazz musician has rejected be left in obscurity. He clearly did not want to be represented by them. To issue flawed or interrupted takes to milk a few more dollars out of the departed is questionable practice.

No such unfortunate story attaches to the two albums producer Helen Keane has derived from tapes of two concerts played in Paris November 26, 1979, by the Bill Evans Trio. They are not only not inferior Evans. They are, in my opinion, the best and highest examples of his extraordinary talent to be found on record.

It is difficult for me to write about Bill. His life, Helen's, and my own were too closely involved for too long a time. For the last two years I have been trying without success to find a way to write an extended portrait of Bill.

I had not listened to Bill very much in his last years. And what these albums, recorded less than ten months before his death, prove beyond question is that he had begun to evolve and grow again, which is unusual in artists in any field. Artists tend to find their methods early and remain faithful to them, which sometimes leads in actors to the kind of mannered and self-satirizing performance so sadly typified by John Barrymore at the end. It is rare to see sudden growth in older jazz musicians, as we have in the case of Dizzy Gillespie since he changed his embouchure two or three years ago. Bill, on the clear evidence of these albums, was in his most fertile period when we lost him.

Jazz is not the ceaseless fount of pure invention that some of its annotators believe it or would like it to be. "They think," Ray Brown said dryly, "we just roll out of bed and play a D-major scale." Every good jazz musician develops his own methods — approaches to scales, chord voicings, ways of playing arpeggios, rhythmic figures. If a critic likes a certain musician, he will graciously refer to these recurring patterns, if at all, as the man's licks. If he doesn't like the playing, he will draw attention to them as clichés.

Bill too had his clichés. But they were very much his. Many pianists have copped them, and still more have tried. He was far and away the most influential jazz pianist after Bud Powell. And he used his various configurations in interesting combinations. There were, however, times when he seemed stuck in them. Had I not known of what he was capable, I would doubtless have found these performances marvelous. But his work at such times bored me, a fact I always tried to conceal from him, although he probably knew. Perhaps he too was bored by it.

I first heard him on the album Everybody Digs Bill Evans, which remains a landmark. Oscar Peterson raised the level of playing the piano in jazz to the proficiency long the norm in classical music. It was Lalo Schifrin who made this remarkably apt observation: "It was said in their own time that Liszt conquered the piano, Chopin seduced it. Oscar is our Liszt and Bill is our Chopin." The poetry of Bill's playing compels the comparison to Chopin, whose music, incidentally, Bill played exquisitely. Oscar brought jazz piano to the bravura level of the great Romantic pianists. Bill, who said he was strongly influenced by Oscar, brought to bear coloristic devices and voicings and shadings from composers usually considered post-Romantic, including Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and Scriabin, and maybe Alban Berg. After listening to a test pressing of Conversations with Myself that I had sent him, Glenn Gould phoned to say of Bill, "He's the Scriabin of jazz." I had no idea whether Bill was even that familiar with Scriabin, but sure enough, he turned out to be a Scriabin buff, and gave me a soft and enormously enlightening dissertation on that Russian, whose mysticism seemingly appealed to a like element in Bill's own half-Russian half-Welsh soul. (One of my pleasant memories is of introducing Bill to Glenn. They so admired each other.)

Everybody Digs Bill Evans was a hauntingly lyrical album. It managed to blend sophisticated methods with a trusting youthful emotionality, almost like the music of Grieg. I was discussing Grieg with Bill once, specifically the lovely Holberg Suite. "I went through a phase of pretending I didn't like Grieg," I said. "So did I," Bill said. And, anticipating his answer, I said, "I know what happened to me, but what happened to you?" "The intellectuals got to me," he said. Bill and I shared a distrust of intellectualism.

The mood of Everybody Digs, that springtime lilac poignancy, is muted in his later albums. There are moments when it comes forth, as in the astonishing Love Theme from "Spartacus" track in Conversations. But generally Bill's development was in the direction of intelligence (which is not the same thing as intellectualism). Bill knew, and even acknowledged once in an interview, that there was something special in Everybody Digs that had been lost. And he seemed to want to combine both qualities.

Bill was one of those wonderfully coordinated people. His posture and his bespectacled mien made him seem almost fragile, but stripped, he was, at least in his thirties, strong and lean, with well-delineated musculature. He had played football in college, he was a superb driver with fine reflexes (who, like Glenn Gould, had a taste for snappy cars), he was a golfer of professional stature, and he was, by all testimony, a demon pool shark.

When he was young, he looked like some sort of sequestered and impractical scholastic. There is a heartbreaking photo of him on the cover of the famous Village Vanguard recordings, made for Riverside in 1961 and reissued on Milestone in 1973. Whether that photo was taken before or after the grim death of Scott LaFaro in an automobile accident ten days after the sessions, I do not know.

But there is something terribly vulnerable and sad in Bill's young, gentle, ingenuous face. I knew Scott LaFaro only slightly, through Bill, and I didn't like him. He seemed to me smug and self-congratulatory. But he was a brilliant bass player, as influential on his instrument as Bill was on his, and Bill always said Scott was not at all like that when you got past the surface, which I of course never did. The shock of Scott's death stayed with Bill for years, and he felt vaguely guilty about it. This is not speculation. He told me so. He felt that he had made insufficient use of the time he and Scott had had together. He was like a man with a lost love, always looking to find its replacement. He had a deep rapport with Eddie Gomez, but perhaps he came as close to replacing Scott in his life as he ever would in the young Marc Johnson, at the end.

In any event, to look into that face, with its square short small-­town-America 1950s haircut, is terribly revealing, particularly when you contrast it with Bill's later photos. He looked like the young WASP in those days, which he never was — he was a Celtic Slav — but in the later years, when he had grown a beard and left his hair long in some sort of final symbolic departure from Plainfield, New Jersey, he looked more and more Russian, which his mother was. She used to read his Russian fan mail to him, and answer it. Russian jazz fans, I am told, think of him as their own.

His speech was low level but he was highly literate and articulate. He was expert on the novels of Thomas Hardy, and he was fascinated with words and letters and their patterns. Re: Person I Knew, one of his best-known compositions, which is recapitulated yet again in the second of the Paris albums, is an anagram on the name of Orrin Keepnews, who produced for Riverside all Bill's early albums and was one of his first champions. Another of Bill's titles, N.Y.C.'s No Lark, which it certainly isn't, is an anagram on the name of Sonny Clark, whom Bill said was one of his influences. He also, by the way, said that the Toronto pianist Bill Clifton was one of his influences. But Clifton, who committed suicide, never recorded. He simply was one of Bill's innumerable pianist friends. I've heard tapes of Clifton, who was much older than Bill, and you can hear a certain seed that grew in Bill's own playing.

Bill's knowledge of the entire range of jazz piano was phenomenal. Benny Golson says that when he first heard Bill — they were both in their teens — he played like, of all people, Milt Buckner. One night late at the Village Vanguard in New York, when there was almost no audience, Bill played about ten minutes of "primitive" blues. "I can really play that stuff," he said afterwards with a sly kind of little-boy grin. And he could.

And he had phenomenal technique. I doubt if anyone in the history of jazz piano had more. But he never, never showed off those chops for the mere display of them. He kept technique in total subservience to musicality. But he assuredly had it. I once saw him sight-reading Rachmaninoff preludes at tempo.

One of the greatest glories of his playing was his tone. Trilingual people will often be found to speak their third language with the accent of the second. I suspect this phenomenon may carry over into music. Oscar Peterson first played trumpet, which may account for the soaring nature of his playing and that shining projecting sound. Bill was a fine flutist, although he rarely played the instrument in the later years.

The level of his dynamics was usually low, like his speech. He was a very soft player. But within that range, his playing was full of subtle dynamic shadings and constantly shifting colors. Some physicists have argued that a pianist cannot have a personal and individual "tone" because of the nature of the instrument, which consists of a bunch of felt hammers hitting strings. So much for theory. It is all in how the hammers are made to strike the strings, as well of course as the more obvious effects of pedaling, of which Bill was a master.

One of the great piano teachers (and one of the unsung influences on jazz) was Serge Chaloff’s mother, all of whose students, including Dave MacKay and Mike Renzi, have, beautiful tone in common. Mike showed me how he gets it: it is a matter of pulling the finger toward you as it touches the key, drawing the sound out of the instrument, as it were. It is a comparatively flat-fingered approach, as opposed to the vertical hammer-stroke attack with which so many German piano teachers tensed up the hands and ruined the playing of generations of American children.

Bill used to argue with me that his playing was not all that flat-fingered, but I sat low by the keyboard on many occasions and watched, and it certainly looked that way to me. On one such occasion, I kidded him about his rocking a finger on a key on a long note at the end of a phrase. After all, the hammer has already left the string: one has no further physical contact with the sound. "Don't you know the piano has no vibrato?" I said.

"Yes," Bill responded, "but trying for it affects what comes before it in the phrase." That borders on the mystical, but he was right. Dizzy Gillespie and Lalo Schifrin were once in Erroll Garner's room at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Erroll was putting golf balls into a cup against the wall. Dizzy asked if he might try it, took Erroll's putter, and sank one ball after another, to the amazement of Erroll and Lalo, who asked if he had played a lot of golf. He said he had never done it before. How, then, was he doing it? "I just imagine," Birks said, "that I'm the ball and I want to be in the cup." He with a golf ball and Bill with a vibrato influencing events in time already past were, deliberately or no, practicing pure Zen.

Bill did not always have that tone. Some time before he recorded Everybody Digs, he took a year off and went into comparative reclusion to rebuild his tone, with which he was dissatisfied. I doubt that he consciously sought to be flute-like, but some ideal derived from playing that other instrument surely was in his conception. Whatever the process, the result of that year was the golden sound that in recent years has often been emulated though never equaled.

And that year was typical of him.

He made absolutely no claims for himself. Orrin Keepnews had a hard time talking him into making his first album as a leader, New Jazz Conceptions, recorded before Everybody Digs, in 1957, when Bill was about twenty-eight. It is, incidentally, a remarkable album even now, a highly imaginative excursion through bebop, in which we hear strong hints of the Bill Evans that he would within two years become.

When Orrin gathered glowing testimonials from Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal and others for the cover of Everybody Digs, Bill said, "Why didn't you get one from my mother?" But what he was — an emergent genius — was apparent to every musician with ears, though credit for the earliest discovery no doubt goes to Mundell Lowe, who heard him in New Orleans when Bill was still an undergraduate at Southeastern Louisiana College, and hired him for summer jobs.

Bill said once, "I had to work harder at music than most cats, because you see, man, I don't have very much talent."

The remark so dumfounded me that I did not retort to it for about ten years, when I reminded him of it.

"But it's true," he said. "Everybody talks about my harmonic conception. I worked very hard at that because I didn't have very good ears."

"Maybe working at it is the talent," I said.

Bill once said to me that despite the obvious differences in their playing, he and Oscar Peterson played alike in that their work was pianistic. This is a crucial point. The influence of Earl Hines had become widespread, resulting in the phenomenon of so-called one-handed pianists, that is to say pianists playing "horn lines" in the right hand accompanied by laconic chords in the left. It was an approach to piano that reached a zenith in bebop, but for all the inventiveness of some of these players, it was an approach that eschewed three-quarters of what the instrument was capable of.

The piano is not naturally an ensemble instrument. It is a solo instrument. It has no place in the traditional symphony orchestra, although some Twentieth Century composers occasionally use it for color as a member of the percussion section. It is wheeled onstage as a guest, as it were, for concertos. Even in chamber music, it always sounds a little like an outsider. Gerry Mulligan had good reason to leave it out of his quartet — and precedent in the marching bands of New Orleans. Played to its full potential, the piano overwhelms everything around it, and so, in jazz, it must in a context of horns be played with exceptional restraint. The perfect orchestral jazz pianist was Count Basic, who understood this and actually restricted a not inconsiderable technique.

If the piano is to be what it inherently it, is must be taken away from the horns, allowed to do its solo turn, like a great magician or juggler. It is not by its nature an ensemble actor but the spell­binding story-teller. It is Homeric. Because jazz is a music whose tradition is so heavily rooted in horns, the instrument is therefore very much misunderstood, which fact results in those strange comments that Oscar Peterson plays "too much", the logical extension of which is that Bach writes too much. Art Tatum so thoroughly understood the nature of the problem that he preferred, I am told, to play without a rhythm section. If, however, a pianist wants to partake of that special joy of making music with a rhythm section, the logical context is the trio, a format elected by Nat Cole in those too-few years before his success as a singer overwhelmed his career as a pianist.

Oscar Peterson changed the nature of jazz piano, and Bill changed it further. Oscar's sources were Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, although an overlooked influence is that of his sister, Daisy, who taught him.

I once had to write an essay on Oscar for Holiday magazine in New York. I was musing on what Bill had said about the similarity in their playing. I realized that there were also similarities in personality, including a profound stubbornness. When Oscar has made up his mind to something, a tractor cannot budge him. And Bill was the same.

I noted that Oscar was born August 15. On a whim I phoned Bill — this was when he was living in Riverdale — and said, "What's your birth date?"

"August 16," he said. "Why?"

"You're going to laugh," I said, and told him.

But he didn't laugh. He said, "I used to think there was nothing to it, but over the years I've noticed with my groups that the signs have often worked out. Leos do seem to be stubborn. You know," he said, naming a certain superb bassist whom he had fired, "he's a Leo. And he was always trying to run the group. I told him, 'Look, if you want to lead a trio, form your own.' But it didn't do any good, and I let him go." He paused a second, then said, "I'd never have a Leo in my trio."

I laughed out loud, partly at the sound of it and partly because he had in that generalization illustrated the very quality we were discussing. On the one hand, I cannot imagine that Bill would ever have rejected a man solely for his sun sign. On the other hand, as far as 1 know, Bill was ever afterwards the only Leo in that trio.

Bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe LaBarbera, who were with him at the end and in these Paris recordings, were beautifully sympathetic to Bill. Characteristically, he gave them much credit for what had happened in his playing, suggesting a direct relationship between this final trio and the one with LaFaro and Paul Motian.

The two Paris albums — whose covers, by the way, deserve graphic design awards — consist almost entirely of material he had recorded before, which gives us a chance to compare his early and late work. The first, Elektra Musician 60164-1, comprises I Do It for Your Love; Quiet Now, a Denny Zeitlin composition of which Bill was particularly fond; Noelle's Theme; My Romance, I Love You Porgy; Up with the Lark (a Kern tune; Bill had a flair for reviving forgotten gems); All Mine, and Beautiful Love. The second, Elektra Musician 60311-1-E, contains Re: Person I Knew; Gary's Theme, a Gary McFarland tune; three of his own tunes, Letter to Evan (his son); 34 Skiddoo; Laurie; and the Miles Davis tune Nardis.

My Romance was in that first Riverside LP, New Jazz Conceptions, recorded when he was twenty-eight, uncertain of his worth, and uncomfortable with the praise that was being poured on him. He truly believed he didn't deserve it, as he said to me once in a long letter I lost in a fire, which is all the more unfortunate in that it was one of the most remarkable examples of self-analysis by an artist I have ever encountered. I vividly remember one line of it: "If people wouldn't believe I was a bum, I was determined to prove it." He never succeeded in proving any such thing to any of us.

That early My Romance is two choruses long, ballad tempo, without intro. He simply plays the tune, twice, solo, with minimal variation. But already there is that enormous control of the instrument, and those intelligent voice leadings — Bill loved the writing of Bob Farnon. To go from that version to the one in Paris twenty-two-and-a-half years later, is fascinating, and somewhat disturbing. The later version opens with a long intro that has only the most abstract relationship to the tune, as Bill moves through a series of chords that float ambiguously (to my ear at least) between A-flat and E-flat, then goes into the tune itself, in C, up ­tempo, with rhythm section.

It is like a sudden sunburst, so bright, and the audience applauds. C, incidentally, is the key of the early Riverside version. Bill was very fussy about keys. When he was taking on a new tune, he would try it out in all the keys — and such was his influence on other pianists that his (and my) friend Warren Bernhardt learned Bill's My Bells with Bill's voicings in all twelve keys, as a discipline. In any case, My Romance stayed in C for all those years, but the last version is profoundly different, a distillation of years of musical wisdom, quite abstract, exploding with energy and life.

In the first album we hear a prodigy; in the Paris album we hear an old master. Bob Offergeld said to me once that revolutions in art do not come from the young upstarts but from old masters who have grown bored with their own proficiency. This is obvious in the work of Henry Moore, whose early sculptures are representational, excellent, and academic, and in the work of Beethoven, whose First Symphony echoes Mozart and whose late quartets foreshadow jazz, among other things. The change in

Bill's playing reminds me a little of the evolution of Rembrandt's brushwork, but even more of the development of Turner, whose representational landscapes gave way in his later years to something bordering on the non-objective. An exhibition of Turner's late work is startling for its modernity. In his seeking for light and pure color he anticipated the French Impressionists. Something like that happened to Bill's playing. What were once conspicuous and characteristic phrases, executed in some detail, have been condensed into quick slashes, elided into casual and passing comment in the search for something else, possibly even something beyond music. Everything about his playing has become condensed.

Phil Woods went into a fury a year or so ago when he read a critic's comment that Bill didn't swing. First of all, "swing" is a tricky verb as applied to music. What swings for one person may not swing for another, since the process involves a good deal of the subjective. It is impossible to state as an objective "fact" that something "doesn't" swing. What Bill did not do was swing obviously. If you want to hear Bill swing obviously, go back to the first Riverside album. The influence of Bud Powell was, it seems to me, not yet internalized, and Bill goes bopping happily away, backed by Teddy Kotick and Paul Motian, banging out the time in a way that only the deaf could miss. But like Turner making the implicit assumption that you don't need obvious waves and horizon and clouds to know what the sea looks like and giving you only his heightened perception of them, Bill often in his later years didn't hit you over the head with the time. He assumed you knew where it was.

He was quite conscious of what he was doing. He once explained to me how he felt about it, and I do not know whether he ever told anyone else. He drew an analogy to shadow lettering in which the letters seem raised and you see not the letters themselves but the shadows they apparently cast. That's how Bill played time, or more precisely played with it.

When Bill was recording the Spartacus track, he did any number of takes on the basic track, the one on which he would later overdub two more. This performance, which is a miracle, should be listened to in a special way, and on good stereo equipment. Bill said that he had to get a perfect basic track, or the others wouldn't work. His mystical perception of time is evident in this performance. There are three pianists, in effect, although they are all Bill. And they play separate solos. It's very weird. And the pianist playing the first, or basic track, is a very responsive accompanist to those other two soloists who are going to be playing an hour or so from now.

In some strange way, Bill is hearing what his other two selves are going to do. And then, when he dubs in the later tracks, his response to the earlier playing indicates that he is remembering it perfectly. That performance is free and rhapsodic, with a retard at the end. After Bill had made seven or eight passes at the basic track, Creed Taylor, who was producing the album, pushed the log sheet across the counter in the control room to Helen and me and tapped it with his finger, indicating the timings: 5:05, 5:06, 5:04, 5:05, 5:07, 5:05. Bill had that kind of time.

By the way, Bill is playing Glenn Gould's piano on that album, the one Glenn kept in New York. When I sent Glenn the test pressing and told him that it was done on his piano, he said "I'll kill him!"

There is no better refutation of the definition of jazz as a folk music than Bill Evans.

To be sure, it once was a popular music, though whether anything as complex as collective improvisation should have ever been called "folk" art is doubtful. As the music evolved in the 1920s, few of its practitioners apparently thought of themselves as Artistes, although it may now and then have crossed someone's mind that what they were doing might have more than passing value.

It is in retrospect that we see that what Louis Armstrong and those he inspired were doing was genuine art. A few pioneering critics seem to have taken the accurate measure of jazz before the performers themselves, although the striving for quality was always there, as it is (or should be) in masonry or cabinet-making. It is in the 1940s, really, that genuine awareness of jazz as an art becomes widespread among the musicians themselves.

No musician I ever knew consciously respected jazz as an art form more than Bill, and his encyclopedic knowledge of all music, quite aside from his own accomplishment, gave him more than sufficient qualification to make that judgment.

What we hear in the Paris album is a distillation of his intense dedication to it.

The playing is open and deeply communicative and very lovely, like that of Everybody Digs, but at the same time it is far more daring and complex, both in thought and texture. And the tone! Oh, the tone! It simply glistens.

If you loved Bill's playing, I would urge that you run, not walk, to a record store and get these two albums. Indeed, I would suggest that you get two copies of each, then tape them for listening and store the originals. The reason is that Bruce Lundvall has left Elektra Records to join Capitol, and the only reason that the Musician label existed is that Bruce willed it into being. Elektra is a division of Warner Communications. These albums are inextricably contracted to the company, sad to say. Given Warners' dedication to avarice and historic indifference to music, it is impossible to guess how long these albums will remain in print.

Bill knew pianists all over the world. They idolized him. One of them, Doug Riley, in Toronto, sat up all night and played in mourning when Bill died. And no one knows how many musicians wrote heartbroken farewells in music to him, including George Shearing, Steve Allen, Mickey Leonard. Phil Woods wrote a lovely melody simply titled Goodbye Mr. Evans.

I was in Canada at the time. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called me and, knowing of our relationship, asked me to do an interview about Bill. They played Tony Bennett's record of Waltz for Debby, the version he made with Bill on piano — Tony has recorded the tune three times. Music and fragrances have astonishing powers of summoning up the past and, as I listened, it all came back to me, all the places where I had spent time with Bill: Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, Paris, Montreux, New York.

I remembered writing the Waltz for Debby lyric in Helen's living room. (Jobim always calls it The Debby Waltz.) And it hit me that Bill was really gone, and I began to come apart. It was just at this point that the lady producer of the show asked possibly the most tactless question I have ever had in an interview. She said, "Can you tell us any funny stories about him?" I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Yet, oddly, I did think of several funny incidents.

Bill had gone to his mother's in Florida to straighten out his life, a phrase that needs no explanation to those who knew him, and he had done so, in one of his periodic acts of courage. When he came back to New York, he bunked with me in my small basement apartment on West End Avenue at 70th Street. A whole bunch of us lived in the neighborhood — Phil Ramone, Roger Kellaway, Billy Byers, Tony Studd, Erroll Garner. Bill and I wrote Turn Out the Stars at that time. The title was a variant on that of some dumb movie we saw on late-night television, Turn Off the Moon. The song is so dark that I have never had the guts to sing it, and, so far as I know, only Ruth Price ever has. And that is peculiar. Its hopelessness is at variance with the fact that it was a very happy time in both our lives.

That little apartment, with a sofa and rump-sprung armchairs, a rented spinet piano and worn carpet, seemed hidden and safe. Its kitchen and living room gave onto a small cement courtyard from which, if you looked up, you could see a rectangle of sky. Warren Bernhardt used to come by, and Gary McFarland, and Jobim. Bill used to wake me up in the morning and give me a harmony lesson. "I think of all harmony," he said one such morning, "as an expansion from and return to the tonic."

We were both nominated for Grammy awards that year, Bill for Conversations with Myself. He had nothing appropriate to wear to the banquet. As it happened, I was storing a closet full of clothes for Woody Herman, one of the dapper dressers in the history of the business. There was a particularly well-made blue blazer which, to Bill's surprise and mine, fit him perfectly. So he donned it. Just before we were to leave, I turned somehow and spilled a drink in his lap. Fortunately there was another pair of slacks that fit him. We picked up Helen and went to the banquet. And I managed to repeat the trick: I turned and spilled another drink in his lap. He said, "Man, are you trying to tell me something?" At that moment, they called his name. Bill picked up his Grammy for Conversations very wet.

Bill had never met Woody Herman, one of his early idols, and I arranged for the three of us to have lunch a few days later. Bill turned up wearing, to my horror, that blazer. "Do you like the jacket?" Bill said, after the formality of introduction. "It looks faintly familiar," Woody said. Bill flung it open with a matadorial gesture to show its brilliant lining. "How do you like the monogram?" he said. It was of course WH. "It stands," Bill said, "for William Heavens." And Woody laughed. Fortunately.

That evening we went to hear the band. Woody tried to introduce a tune only to be interrupted by some drunk blearily shouting, "Play Woodpeckers Ball." Woody tried to talk him down but the drunk persisted, "Play Woodpecker's Ball."

Finally, Woody said, "All right, for Charlie Pecker over there, we're going to play Woodpecker's Ball."

"Man," said Bill, who was of course quite shy, "that takes real hostility. If I tried that, some cat would come up on the bandstand and punch me in the mouth."

After I finished the CBC interview, the one person I wanted to be with was Oscar Peterson. I drove out to his house in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. I thought of an evening in New York when Bill and I went to hear him. When we entered the club, Oscar brought whatever he was playing to an early close and then played, beautifully, Waltz for Debby. Bill said afterwards, "I don't thing I'll ever play it again." He did, of course. Bill wrote that melody when he was in college. It is based on a cycle of fifths.

Oscar too had heard the news of Bill's death, and the banter and insult in which we usually indulge was suspended that day. He knew what I was feeling. Under that powerful Leonine facade, Oscar is a very sensitive man. We talked about Bill for a while and Oscar said softly, "Maybe he found what he was looking for."

In previous ages only written music and written words could be preserved, but with the coming of motion pictures and other recording devices, performance itself it immortalized and great performers take equal place in the pantheon with great writers and composers. Because of the fact of recording, Bill, in a very real sense, is still with us.

Helen tells me there is still some excellent material to be issued. Given her fierce protectiveness of him, it is unlikely that anything but the best of it will come out, the material Bill himself would want released.

I doubt, however, that any of it ever will excel what is in the two Paris albums.

Bill had found his grail.”