The Gene Harris Trio Plus One [Stanley Turrentine]

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

Unlike the grooves in an LP, thank goodness that it is impossible to wear out a compact disc because if that were the case I would have worn this one out a long time ago. It's been among my favorite recordings for many years and now, thanks to the wonder of YouTube, I've been able to append the audio files to the conclusion of this feature so you can listen to it in its entirety.

As was the case with his efforts in not allowing pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr. to pass into relative obscurity, we also have Ray Brown to thank for talking Gene Harris, who had settled in Idaho in the 1970s, out of a premature retirement in 1982.

Ray had a long association with pianist Oscar Peterson in the decade of the 1950s, Gene Harris also had a similar, lengthy musical involvement during this same period as the pianist in the Three Sounds with Andrew Simpkins on bass and Bill Dowdy on drums. With its heavy emphasis on a gospel-influenced, blues sound, the group specialized in what some have referred to a “soul-jazz” and was well-documented through its many records on the Blue Note label.

Here's how Ed Berger recounts the story in his insert notes to The Gene Harris Trio Plus One [Concord CCD-4303] which has long been one of my favorite recordings and which often finds its way to the number 1 slot on my CD changer.

“The reemergence of pianist Gene Harris on the jazz scene is one of the musical delights of the past two years. Gene is best remembered for his work with the popular Three Sounds, which he formed in 1956. The group disbanded in 1973, and after some commercial electronic ventures, Harris settled in Boise, Idaho, where he has been directing the music at the Idanha Hotel. Ray Brown was instrumental in prying Gene out of Boise, collaborating with the pianist on several dates.

"On The Gene Harris Trio Plus One [Concord CCD-4303], his debut recording as a leader for Concord, Gene Harris is joined by the dynamic Stanley Turrentine, who had not played with Gene since a 1960 recording with the Three Sounds. This auspicious reunion is enhanced by the impeccable rhythm team of Ray Brown and Mickey Roker. A lively and demonstrative audience at the Blue Note in New York lends a party atmosphere to this live date. "I like recording live, particularly in clubs, where they're right on top of you," Gene notes. "There's constant interaction between the musicians and audience. At the Blue Note, you could feel the electricity in the air." And the super-charged music which resulted cuts across all stylistic and aesthetic boundaries.

Harris's style is a fascinating personal amalgam of varied influences. Having assimilated the two-handed blues and boogie of early idols Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Freddie Slack, he added the fluidity of Oscar Peterson, and seasoned the mixture with a hint of Erroll Garner's timing and sly humor. Above all, Harris is a master of the blues, with the tools and imagination to weave endless variations on that timeless and universal pattern.

Stanley Turrentine is the perfect partner for Harris's blues explorations, as is immediately evident on Ray Brown's composition, Gene's Lament. The saxophonist builds nine soulful choruses, played with his characteristically warm tone and distinctive vibrato. Harris pours on the heat for five choruses and then shows his mastery of dynamics by switching to a sublimely delicate attack in the middle of the sixth. 

Misty is a feature for Turrentine, who effectively mixes mournful, longer notes with feathery light interjections for a new perspective on the Garner standard. The tempo is doubled for the middle chorus. Harris's comping, Brown's perfect bass lines and Roker's tasty brush work form a superb backdrop. 

Uptown Sop is another Ray Brown blues, but with a difference: here a 24-bar framework is used. Turrentine wails from bar one of his five solo choruses. After two romping choruses by Harris, Turrentine returns, gradually cooling things down to end the piece. 

The Ellington blues, Things Ain't, is an object lesson in controlled excitement. Even at its most fervent emotional peaks, Gene's playing retains an undercurrent of discipline, precision and clarity.

Yours is My Heart Alone is an unjustly neglected standard dating from the 1920s. In Harris and company's hands, it becomes an up-tempo swinger. Everyone shines here. Turrentine flies through the changes and Harris's dazzlingly fleet single-note runs show him to be as well versed in the bebop tradition as in the blues. Roker's crisp and imaginative drumming comes to the fore in some eight-bar trades.

Battle Hymn of the Republic may seem an odd choice, but it has received a surprisingly wide range of jazz treatments over the years. Gene's use of substitute chords adds some new twists to the familiar melody. His introduction is deceptively gentle, leading into eight choruses of unflagging, gospel-tinged swing. Just when you think the pianist must have exhausted his supply of ideas (not to mention himself), he somehow tops his previous effort. Turrentine is equally inspired, ending with a fade-out over an extended vamp.

Gene summed up his feeling about the sessions by stating, "It was a joy to be on the same bandstand with players of this caliber." The results show that Gene Harris is back where he belongs."

Ed Berger

Curator

Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies

Bill Evans by Chuck Israels

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

Chuck Israels is a composer/arranger/bassist who has worked with Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock, J.J. Johnson, John Coltrane, and many others. He is best known for his work with the Bill Evans Trio from 1961 through 1966 and his recordings with the Bill’s Trio include The Town Hall Concert; The Second Trio; Trio '65; Live at the Trident; Time Remembered; and Live at Shelley's Manne Hole. 

While somewhat technical in places, Chuck’s essay offers a number of insights into what made Bill’s style unique and how through hard work and application he developed the immediately identifiable sound that most Jazz musicians strive to achieve. I thought it might also serve to enrich your listening experience of Bill’s music and provide a gentle reminder to either revisit his recordings if you haven’t in a while or perhaps look into them if Bill’s music is new to you.

The professional life of pianist-composer Bill Evans spanned a period of twenty-five years, from 1955 to 1980, coinciding with the careers of many musicians who made major contributions to the art of American jazz: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian Adderly, Philly Joe Jones (the last three worked with Evans in Miles Davis' group), as well as Jim Hall, Scott La Faro, Phil Woods, and many others. Each left his personal mark on music, but there are aspects of Evans' work that may prove uniquely significant. He was a pathfinder while others, claiming to be the avant-garde, trod all too familiar ground. Clifford Brown influenced the sound of almost every jazz trumpeter who followed him. Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins have had similar influence on their musical progeny. The full influence of Evans' music has not yet been felt.

General reaction to Evans' work has centered on easily recognizable idiosyncrasies, with much attention given to his voicings and the entirely mistaken idea that he was not playing in meter. Few have gone deeper into his work to find the underlying principles. Superficial imitation of Evans' obvious characteristics only results in the loss of identity of the imitator. In contrast, a search for the universally applicable principles in his music provides a broad avenue for the pursuit of personal jazz expression. His greatest contribution to the development of jazz lies beneath the surface of his style, in his creative use of traditional techniques. Evans was quick to recognize parallel cases to his own in which he could apply his extensive knowledge of the music. He did this by melding the appropriate device to the situation at hand, drawing from a wide range of musical background and history and putting old ideas to work in new ways.

Evans' view about rhythm was a combination of the swing of Bud Powell with the more varied cross rhythms of Bartok and Stravinsky; he carried this synthesis to great lengths, achieving a rare subtlety of placement and drive. He would start an idea with a short rhythmic motive, repeat and extend it with increasing complexity, and end it in a burst of notes that resolved those complexities. In this, he was not limited to the basic jazz unit of the eighth note and its typical subdivisions. He used complex relationships, adding to the swing that comes from the more usual duple/ triple conflict in jazz by layering other duples and triples over the more basic ones. He did this with a supreme clarity and unerring sense of his rhythmic goal, which often revealed itself in an exciting resolution many measures after the start of the phrase.

The development of these rhythmic techniques can be traced in a long line from Louis Armstrong's performance of "West End Blues" through Lester Young and Charlie Parker, to some of the work of Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz. These men clearly influenced Evans' sense of rhythm, but none drew on as many sources at once as he did. The integrity of this variety in Evans' playing was remarkable. Nothing sounded pasted on or eclectic; ideas filtered through him and emerged with deep conviction and he rarely did anything superficial.

Every great jazz musician has a highly developed sense of rhythm, which operates independently of the other musicians around him. He does not need any external input in order to keep time. Evans' internal clock was so well controlled that he could risk considerable rhythmic freedom at the same time that other musicians playing with him took risks of their own. It was rare when such adventurousness resulted in what musicians graphically refer to as a "train wreck." The incidence of dropped beats was remarkably small in Evans' playing, considering the number of opportunities there were for such errors in his daredevil rhythmic style. He actually welcomed the interplay of his colleagues' rhythmic ideas and was empathetic to what they were doing.

Another remarkable aspect of Evans' playing was his command of tone color. With fingers like pistons, poised a scant millimeter over the keys, he dropped into the depths of the action as if propelled by steel springs, or he would caress the keys with the stroke of a loving mother touching her baby's cheek. All dynamic gradations short of bombastic pounding were at his command, and he used them to express delicate nuances of melody, and to separate and distinguish various voices of the harmonic texture. In some important ways, Evans' harmonies consisted less of chords than of piling up of contrapuntal lines in which the tension and release between the melody and the secondary voices was exquisitely shaded by his control of pianistic touch. His legato line was unsurpassed by any other pianist. No note was released before its fullest time, giving his playing a richness that resulted from the momentary clashes of overtones as successive tones overlapped in the sounding board.

Evans' superficial imitators mistook this sound for the wash that comes from standing on the sustaining pedal. Critics pointing to Evans' influence on young pianists often confused over-pedaling with complex finger-work. His sound was in his fingers and the subtle linear aspect of Evans' harmony was Chopinesque just as his textural interjections were often derived from Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Debussy. His bass lines were steeped in knowledge of Bach. The entire piano literature was open to his voracious pilferage. Yet everything was synthesized into an integrated style; wide open and broad enough for any musician to find references to his own particular sensibilities.

Evans once said that he strove for the improvisational freedom to change direction at any moment. When you realize the rigorous and unflinching logic with which he followed that principle, the enormity of the challenge begins to become apparent. A motive-thirds or fourths, for example-would move upwards through the chord progression, then, in an instant, down, then up, then down, continuing through a series of chords without an error or harmonic miscalculation. The choice of sustaining or abandoning a direction was always made according to aesthetic and expressive principles and never for the convenience of technical limitations. This gave Evans his spontaneity and great flights of fancy, and the ability to accompany, to follow another's musical direction in conversational sympathy. He could listen and put his responses at the service of another musician's creative impulse, and he could do this while maintaining the identity of the accompaniment, adapting his own musical motives to the direction of the soloist.

A characteristic part of Evans' keyboard aesthetic lay in the way he separated the main line from the accompanying texture by tone and touch, as well as in the more conventional jazz technique of keeping the melody active in the right hand while the left hand was playing chords. He would sometimes play a darkly colored inner voice as counterpoint to the brighter line of the melody. The technique was certainly pianistic but it was also orchestral in its effect, suggesting French horns against trumpets, or violas against flutes. Evans' playing was colorful, not in the usual sense of flash and mercurial change, but in the sense that control of timbre was an integral part of his playing. This was simply the way he heard music and when he played a harpsichord, the result was the same; different colors for different voices without using the harpsichord's various stops or manuals.

This ability to give different color and weight to different voices gave Evans' playing a textural variety not found in the work of more conventional jazz pianists. Often, a single line served as accompaniment to the improvisation in the right hand, establishing a three-voice textural hierarchy. The right-hand melody carried the primary interest, with the bass player's line next in importance. Against this, the third voice appeared in Evans' left hand, clear and separate, shading the other lines, emphasizing a poignant harmony or nailing down a contrasting rhythm. Occasionally (in the blues, for instance) this was done with as few as five chromatic notes, extracted from the changes. The remarkable thing about this was the clarity it produced; by eliminating voices from the chords, Evans brought out the melodic character of the secondary lines, making them respond to, as well as guide, the progress of the improvisation. This also allowed for the possibility of increasing textural density by adding voices to the chords in order to build intensity from chorus to chorus. Another result of this simplified left-hand texture was the freedom to choose more varied colors in the melodic realization of the harmonic progression. If the thrust of melodic development called for chromatic alteration of the harmony, it would not be in conflict with a complete and specific left-hand chord. Motivic or serial development could then take precedence over the more limited interpretation of the harmony that a fully spelled out chord would require.

Evans' approach to arranging music was equally individualistic and exacting. The melody of each standard tune was subjected to intense scrutiny until every harmonic nuance was found. Accompaniments were fashioned from standard progressions which were then carefully adjusted and fine-tuned to the contours of each melody. This was done in so complete a way, tat when the accompaniment was played without the melody, the notes that were most strongly evoked were always those of the original missing tune. These exacting progressions were repeated during the improvised choruses, so that the individual character of the piece was implicit in the solo. Obviously this is not the only way to integrate an improvised solo into a piece of music, but if followed to its logical conclusion, as it was by Evans, it can be a strong organizational element and a liberating one.

Another aspect of Evans' approach to phrasing and rhythm was not unique to him but was developed from the tradition epitomized by the work of Charlie Parker. The great majority of jazz forms are four square in nature; their phrase structure occurs in regular multiples of twos or fours. The eight-measure phrase is such a commonplace occurrence that few musicians give it much thought once they have internalized it in their formative years. What makes jazz phrasing and rhythm interesting and inventive is how it plays off unpredictable irregularities against the regularity of the under- lying forms. In this, Evans, like Parker, was a master. His phrases would start and end in ever-changing places, often crossing the boundaries between one section of a piece and another. In a thirty-two-measure form, for example, the last two measures are usually a kind of vacuum between choruses where the harmony cycles from the tonic to the dominant in order to be ready for the tonic that normally comes at the beginning of the next chorus. Jazz musicians call this a "turnaround." Many sophisticated improvisers save some of their best "licks" for such moments, partly because the harmonies fall into a limited number of patterns which recycle throughout the performance.

Evans' view of the turnaround was that it belonged to the following chorus, rather than to the one just ending. In practice this meant that a new idea introduced at the turnaround could be carried over into the next chorus. This simple conceit is hardly earth-shaking, but it had an electrifying effect on the ensembles. One could move from one chorus to the next with confidence, knowing whether a solo was continuing, building, or ending, by staying alert during the tumarounds. Evans made it a guiding principle to dovetail the joints of a song, making for smooth and interesting transitions. He was not alone in this practice, but he was a master of it and it made everyone who played with him feel comfortable.

Evans' compositions are each constructed around one main idea. "Re: Person I Knew" is built on a pedal point; "Walkin' Up," on major chords and disjunct melodic motion; "Blue in Green," on doubling and redoubling of the tempo; and "Time Remembered," on melodic connection of seemingly unrelated harmonic areas. Each piece is so committed to a central idea that a program of Evans' music is foolproof in its variety from composition to composition.

"Peace Piece" is an example of the depth of Evans' compositional technique. It is an ostinato piece, composed and recorded long before the more recent superficial synthesis of Indian and American music; in fact, it owes more to Satie and Debussy than to Ravi Shankar. The improvisation starts simply over a gentle ostinato, which quickly fades into the background. Evans allows the fantasy that evolves from the opening motive (an inversion of the descending fifth in the ostinato) more freedom than he would in an improvisation tied to a changing accompaniment. He takes advantage of the ostinato as a unifying clement against which ideas flower, growing more lush and colorful as the piece unfolds. Polytonalities and cross rhythms increase in density as the ostinato undulates gently, providing a central rhythmic and tonal reference. The improvisation becomes increasingly complex against the unrelenting simplicity of the accompaniment, until, near the end, Evans gradually reconciles the two elements. This effective use of form to communicate abstract feelings and ideas is one of the strongest aspects of Evans' work, and one that separates him from most jazz improvisers. His interest in other music that contained this strength guided him intuitively even when his conscious attention was on smaller details. Monk, Bud Powell, and Bela Bartok were equally masters of things Evans needed; he borrowed from them without regard to their source.

Evans had an uncanny capacity for concentration and profound expressivity. He considered his work to be "controlled romanticism," and he exercised this control with exquisite care. He knew when to give rein to his imagination and when not to risk losing his grip on the piece. Intellect and deep feeling co-existed in his music, giving the lie to the view that they are mutually exclusive. In this respect he was a perfect partner for Miles Davis, and their recorded collaborations remain monuments in the history of American music.

It is true that Evans worked in small forms. The thirty-two-measure song was his own back yard, and he never ceased to find new corners of it to explore. He played with a sense of discovery, even as he worked and reworked the most familiar territory. He had the great improviser's gift for creating spontaneous expressivity in the performance of a piece he had played hundreds of times. But Evans did achieve a high artistic goal; he raised the performance of the simplest song into a worthy experience in expressivity and communication. That he stayed inside the boundaries of the song form is more a reflection of how Evans saw himself than of his depth as a musician. He thought of himself as a man of ordinary gifts committed to honesty in his work. He shunned superficial embellishments he did not feel, and probed deeply into music he had learned well. To some, he sold his talent and his training short by not embracing greater projects, such as a symphony or an opera. When opportunities for large recording and writing projects presented themselves, he left them to others of lesser talent who rarely brought out his best performances. In that sense, he remained, to quote Gunther Schuller, a "cocktail pianist" all his life-in the same sense that Schubert was a "song writer."

Evans made two records in collaboration with guitarist Jim Hall, in which one performance in particular stands out as an example of the highest level of achievement in ensemble playing. Their improvisation on "My Funny Valentine" ranks among the great jazz duets, along with the classic Amstrong/Hines "Weatherbird." It has every quality of memorable chamber music. I cannot imagine a note or nuance that might be changed. It is as perfect, in its way, as a movement of a Bartok string quartet. But spontaneous and inspired as that performance is, it is clearly the result of careful preparation. The saving of the chromatic line for the second section of the tune, the pedal tone at the bridge, the exchange of roles in the opening and closing choruses, all indicate an agreement about details that could only come from thorough planning. This is a responsibility that Evans took upon himself, and once a musician has been exposed to his arrangement of a song, it is difficult to accept any other. He found the crevices in which to insert harmonic details that fit so beautifully that later hearings of the melody seem to call his harmonies to your ear. The effect is one of melody, bass line, and inner voices having a three-way magnetic attraction binding them to one another. Sometimes, as in "My Funny Valentine," Evans would leave something out for clarity, or bring it in at a more effective moment. By leaving the chromatic secondary line out of its usual place in the first and last sections of this song, he focused attention on its entrance in the second eight measures, and kept it from disappearing into a background drone.

The sphere of Bill Evans' influence is expanding but its ultimate growth depends on the further understanding of the many artistic truths in his music. Time, the exigent critic and generous healer, will dole out the legacy in judicious portions as we find ourselves better prepared to receive it.

"Pianist Bill Evans and You, Professor"

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

Here is a writing on Jazz from a totally different perspective - the academic cloister.

It appears in August 22, 2011 of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Its author is Jacques Berlinerblau and his essay was featured in the Brainstorm: Ideas and Culture section of that edition of the Chronicle along with the video that you will find at the conclusion of this piece.

© -Jacques Berlinerblau and The Chronicle of Higher Education, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

If you, professor, could live the academic equivalent of Bill Evans’s life would you abandon the “lazy safety of specialization” for the privilege and lacerating anguish of doing so?

This was the question I kept asking myself anyhow as I read Peter Pettinger’s encyclopedic, albeit gripping, Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (Yale University Press: 1998). After devouring that fine study I could only conclude that the great jazz pianist truly lived.

Of course, he died as a result of all that living. The enigmatic Evans passed in 1980 at the age of 51. He did so after having pivoted from heroin to cocaine and bringing to fruition what a friend of his called the “longest suicide in history.”

Pettinger's "Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings"

But along the way he got to do many of the things that, I imagine, we scholars would want to do if such things could be transposed into the key of academic life. For starters, he reached the very top of his field and is esteemed as one of jazz’s finest instrumentalists.

Miles Davis was greatly impressed by Evans dragooning him into his famed sextet. Pettinger recounts this dialogue where composer George Russell recommends a piano player to the famed trumpeter:

“Is he white?,” asked Miles.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Does he wear glasses?”

“Yeah.”

“I know that motherf*&^%^, I heard him at Birdland. He can play his ass off.”

I would very much like to have a conversation of that nature about some person I heard give a paper at a conference. So far I have not found that motherf*&^%^.

After parting ways with Miles, Evans would become as well known for his ability to recognize and cultivate talent. He had a penchant for finding young visionary bass players such as Scott LaFaro (who died tragically in a car accident at the age of 25) and later Eddie Gomez.

Scott LaFaro

One has to listen really carefully to the interplay between the bass and the piano to understand how forward-looking this stuff really is (when I was younger I disliked the music because it always sounded like the peripatetic bassist was crawling up Evans’ back). Take for example LaFaro’s work on “Waltz for Debby.”*[*On the re-issue Waltz for Debby: Bill Evans Trio, 1987, Riverside]. As one scribe noted, LaFaro treated the bass as if it were some other instrument.

For those of us who read, write, and lecture nearly every day, we could surely appreciate the immense body of work that Evans left behind.

Evans was constantly performing and recording from the 1960s to his death. Part of this had to do with his preternatural talent. And part of it had to do with the fact that he needed money to support his habit and pay off loan sharks. Be that as it may, total immersion in one’s craft–professor does that sound good?

Too, Jazz musicians get to have fun. We scholars don’t get to run off to Sears with fellow addict Philly Joe Jones and buy matching polyester suits of powder blue and pink, though that’s an awfully cool thing to do. Cocaine or no cocaine, I sort of wish we had characters on campus who did things like that (outside of a visiting professor, or maybe an artist-in-residence, who would dare pull that stuff within the campus gate?).

A friend of mine tells me he once saw Evans perform late in life at the Village Vanguard. Arriving one hour late in a white tuxedo and eating a chocolate popsicle, a strung-out Evans proceeded to set the confection on top of the piano. As he played an inspired set the treat melted over the keyboard.

Let us never lose sight of the actual works of art Mr. Evans produced. For those unfamiliar with his music might I recommend The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album, and From Left to Right (where Evans plays a piano with one hand and an organ with the other). He “owned” songs like the Disney ballad “Alice in Wonderland” or “Green Dolphin Street.”

As I think about it, no professor I know lives this life or could ever live this life. This was a life, incidentally, of constant collaboration with other musicians. Evans played with thousands of artists in his career, whereas we are consigned to solitude in those godforsaken archives.

So maybe it was foolish of me to even engage in this thought experiment. Still, a university is, in theory, a place where artists and intellectuals ply their craft. One would think that immensely talented and fatally flawed characters such as Evans would proliferate there.”

 

Bill Evans - Intellect, Emotion, Communication - By Don Nelsen

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

At the time of its publication in the December 8, 1960 edition of Down Beat, Don Nelsen was a 34-year-old feature writer for the New York News, for which newspaper he also wrote well informed jazz reviews. In 1959, he received his M.A., specializing in medieval literature and was at work on his Ph.D. He "studied trumpet privately for two years, and I still practice safely out of earshot of professional musicians." This article on Bill Evans was his first for Down Beat.

It reflects a tranquil Bill Evans, one who had not as yet been besieged by The Time of Troubles which was to be the recurring theme in his life from 1960 until his death in 1980.

The photographs that accompany the essay show a big, broad-shouldered Bill; a man who appears to be healthy and happy with his lot in life.

Bill had recently left the Miles Davis Sextet and formed his trio with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums.

About seven months later, in July, 1961, Scott LaFaro was killed in an automobile accident.

By December, 1961, one year after this piece was published, Bill would be a shell of his former self. Ravaged by an addiction to heroin and an inconsolable depression brought on by Scotty’s death.

As Mr. Nelsen notes in his opening sentence, Bill may not have had a “miserable childhood,” but Life certainly brought him some heavy burdens to bear after that such that he was dead at the age of 51.

December 8, 1960

Downbeat

By DON NELSEN

“It may distress believers in the jazzman legend, but the truth is that Bill Evans has become one of the most creative modern jazz musicians without benefit of a miserable childhood. With candor, he said:

"I was very happy and secure until I went into the army. Then I started to feel there was something I should know that I didn't know."

If the 31-year-old pianist upsets a few cherished illusions about the origins of jazz musicians, he demolishes another held by many jazzman themselves and fondly nurtured by the hippy fringe: that a jazzman must be interested only in jazz.

Evans is no such intellectual provincial. For one thing, he does not believe that jazz—or even music as a whole— necessarily holds the key to the "something" he began searching for in the army. His basic attitude is that music is not the end most jazzmen make it. It is only a means.

A glance into Evans' library provides an indication of what his mind is up to. The diversity of titles shows how many avenues he has explored to reach his "something"— Freud, Whitehead, Voltaire, Margaret Meade, Santayana, and Mohammed are here, and, of course, Zen. With Zen, is Evans guilty of intellectual fadism, since everyone knows that Kerouac, Ginsberg & Co. holds the American franchise on Oriental philosophy? Evans waved a hand in resignation and said:

"I was interested in Zen long before the big boom. I found out about it just after I got out of the army in 1954. A friend of mine had met Aldous Huxley while crossing from England, and Huxley told him that Zen was worth investigating. I'd been looking into philosophy generally so I decided to see what Zen had to say. But literature on it was almost impossible to find. Finally, I was able to locate some material at the Philosophical library in Manhattan. Now you can get the stuff in any drugstore.

"Actually, I'm not interested in Zen that much, as a philosophy, nor in joining any movements. I don't pretend to understand it. I just find it comforting. And very similar to jazz. Like jazz, you can't explain it to anyone without losing the experience. It's got to be experienced, because it's feeling, not words. Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when

people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling."

Such a manifesto may pain the academicians of jazz, but Evans is no pedant with a B-plus critical faculty. He is an intellectual in the true spirit of the word: an intelligent inquirer. His flights into philosophy and letters spring not from the joy of scholarly exercise but from the fierce need to comprehend himself. It is this need, whipped by surging inner tensions, that has driven him to Plato, Freud, Thomas Merton, and Sartre. It is responsible for his artistry on the one hand and his erudition on the other. The former has enabled him to catheterize his emotions; the latter has given him the opportunity to understand them. Hence his great emphasis on feeling as the basis of art.

Undoubtedly, the four years he lived in New Orleans and attending Southeastern Louisiana college had much to do with shaping this emphasis. It certainly exerted a powerful influence on his personality and playing. He himself admits it was the happiest period of his life.

"It was the happiest," he said, "because I had just turned 17, and it was the first time I was on my own. It's an age when everything makes a big impression, and Louisiana impressed me big. Maybe it's the way people live. The tempo and pace is slow, 1 always felt very relaxed and peaceful. Nobody ever pushed you to do this or say that.

"Perhaps it's due to a little looser feeling about life down there. Things just lope along, and there's a certain inexplicable indifference about the way people face their existence. I remember one time I was working in a little town right near the Mississippi border. Actually, it wasn't a town. It was a roadhouse with a few tourist cabins out back and another roadhouse about a half-mile up the highway. There didn't seem to be much law there. Gambling was open and thriving. I worked at the first place for months, and I never saw any police. Well, the night after I had left to take a job in the saloon up the road, a man walked in and pointed a .45 at another fellow. As I heard it from a friend, all he said was, 'Buddy, I hear you're foolin' aroun' with my wife,' and Bang! That was all. The second guy fell dead. As far as I know, nobody ever gave it another thought, and nothing was ever done.

"Still, there was a kind of freedom there, different from anything in the north. The intercourse between Negro and white was friendly, even intimate. There was no hypocrisy, and that's important to me. I told this to Miles (Davis) when I was working with him and asked him if he understood what I meant. He said he did. I don't mean that the official attitude is sympathetic or anything like that. Some very horrible things go on down there. But there are some good things, too, and the feel of the country is one of them."

Bill absorbed this feel not only by living there but also by gigging around New Orleans and the rural areas almost nightly. One job took him and his fellow Casuals (the name of the band suited these collegiate artistes to a man) far into the country. After turning off the main highway, they headed up a road, which appeared to have been paved with the contents of vacuum cleaner bags. Small tornadoes of choking grit swirled around them as they pushed along. Each time another car passed, the windows were closed tight to fend off suffocation. They were beginning to taste the Grapes of Wrath in their dust-parched throats when they sighted their target after about an hour.

"It was a church in the middle of a field," Evans recalled. "A boxlike structure about 40 x 20 with nondescript paint on the outside and none on the inside. It was more like a rough clubhouse than a church. I think they built it themselves."

"Themselves" were the 70-odd folk who had hired the Casuals to play for their outdoor do. "You wondered where the hell they came from because you couldn't see any houses around," Evans said.

The bandstand where they were to play was one of those little round summer pavilions you see in films like Meet Me in St. Louis when the town band plays concerts in the park. This one was fenced around with chicken wire.

"It was a dance job," the pianist said. "We played three or four tunes for them, and then blew one for ourselves. They didn't seem to mind. Everyone had a ball. The women cooked the food — it was jambalaya — and served it from big boards. Everything was free and relaxed. Experiences like these have got to affect your music."

Apparently they have affected Bill's, and all to the good, because his playing has caused much nodding of heads among musicians, critics, and fans for the last couple of years. Yet he scoffs at people who claim to hear two or three specific influences in a musician's playing.

"A guy is influenced by hundreds of people and things," he said, "and all show up in his work. To fasten on any one or two is ridiculous. I will say one thing, though. Lennie Tristano's early records impressed me tremendously. Tunes like Tautology, Marshmallow, and Fishin' Around. I heard the fellows in his group building their lines with a design and general structure that was different from anything I'd ever heard in jazz. I think I was impressed by Lee (Konitz) and Warne (Marsh) more than by Lennie, although he was probably the germinal influence. I guess it was the way Lee and Warne put things together that impressed me."

It was the way Evans put things together that brought him to the attention of his fellow craftsmen. In New York less than five years, he has worked with such as Charles Mingus and Miles Davis, who pick their bandstand associates with care and discrimination. Obviously,

Evans has the touch. But he is still not satisfied with his playing and, because he is an artist, it is doubtful that he ever will be.

"I once heard this trumpet player in New Orleans who used to put down his horn and comp at the piano," he said. "When he did, he got that deep, moving feeling I've always wanted, and it dragged me because I couldn't reach it. I think I've progressed toward it, but I'm always looking to reflect something that's deeper than what I've been doing."

What he is seeking to reflect came out in a conversation about William Blake, the 18th century poet, painter, and mystic. Evans had found that Blake's poetry was a sort of intellectual orgasm. Bill, in describing Blake's art, defined what he was looking for in his own:

"He's almost like a folk poet, but he reaches heights of art because of his simplicity. The simple things, the essences, are the great things, but our way of expressing them can be incredibly complex. It's the same thing with technique in music. You try to express a simple emotion — love, excitement, sadness — and often your technique gets in the way. It becomes an end in itself when it should really be only the funnel through which your feelings and ideas are communicated. The great artist gets right to the heart of the matter. His technique is so natural it's invisible or unbearable. I've always had good facility, and that worries me. I hope it doesn't get in the way."

Even a cursory hearing will indicate that the Evans struggle for simple beauty is not without its triumphs. When he plays, it is like Hemingway telling a story.

Extraneous phrases are rare. The tale is told with the strictest economy, and when it is over, you are tempted to say, "Of course. It's so simple. Why didn't I think of that?" He is, in essence, a synecdochist, an artist who implies as much as he plays. And moving all his music, coloring every note, is that deep, rhythmic, almost religious feeling that is the seminal force of jazz.

It was perhaps these qualities that recommended Evans to Miles Davis after the trumpeter lost the services of Red Garland. The move was somewhat of a departure for Miles. Indeed, there were rumbles in some quarters that the color of Bill's skin automatically depreciated his value to the group. But Davis knew what he was doing. The association was a successful one for both.

Bill worked with Miles for about eight months and quit. Just why has mystified a good many persons in the jazz arena. He was playing with one of the most respected musicians in jazz and getting a $200 a week salary. The job meant not only inestimable prestige but a rare opportunity to improve artistically. Bill's explanation of the parting is, like his music, a simple statement of how he felt:

"At the time I thought I was inadequate. I wanted to play more so that I could see where I was going. I felt exhausted in every way — physically, mentally, and spiritually. I don't know why. Maybe it was the road. But I think the time I worked with Miles was probably the most beneficial I've spent in years, not only musically but personally. It did me a lot of good."

Upon leaving the Davis group, he flew to Ormond Beach, Fla., to see his parents. "And think," he said. He stayed there three weeks, mostly relaxing and playing golf, which he had learned as a boy in Plainfield, N. J., where he was born and schooled.

His father, now retired, owned a driving range, and Bill and his brother, Harry, were frequent customers and ball shaggers. According to Bill, Harry was good enough to be a pro — he played in the 70s — but music pulled him as strongly as it did his brother. Harry still lives in Baton Rouge, not too far from where he and Bill went to college together, teaching music in public school and playing three or four gigs a week.

Florida retreat was a productive one. By the time Bill was ready to return to New York in November of 1958, he had cleared some of the fog from his brain and shot a 41 on his last nine holes. Both accomplishments brought him a certain measure of satisfaction, and he came back to grapple with his music problems.

His method of doing this is a familiar one to artists whether they are musicians, writers, painters, or mathematicians. He concentrates on his stone wall intensely and when he breaks through, he explores the new terrain beyond for about six months. Then he gets bored and, as new problems are born, he abandons it to go through the same process.

"I wish it were easier," he said.

For the man who wishes to create, however, there can be no other way. He may hate the time he spends at it and fear that he may not be able to succeed; he may give up in disgust a hundred times, but he goes through with it anyway, because, in the summing up, nothing slakes the artistic thirst except the satisfaction of its own work well done. Yet Evans has some reservations concerning the sustained intensity with which an art should be pursued.

"Sometimes it can happen that you see everything in terms of music," he said. "It's like a fixation. You can't help it. I get that way every time I'm trying to work something out. But it's bad if you can't pull out of it. Nothing should be that dominating. If it is, it is perverted."

Because he respects his craft so deeply, he abhors those who would degrade it through a distorted loyalty. He looks with fascinated horror upon the hippies who try to live something they aren't.

"They live their full lives on the fringe of jazz and yet miss its essence entirely," he said. "They take the neuroses that are integral in every art and blow them up to where they're the whole thing. Do you remember the Platonic dialog in which Socrates argues the definition of wisdom with Hippocrates? As far as I'm concerned, Hippocrates was the first hippy, a guy who was smug because he thought he knew something. Socrates was wise because he realized how little he knew."

Bill's way of life is consonant with his anti-hipster philosophy. Jazz jargon constitutes a small factor in his lexicon. "Dig" and "man" he uses frequently, but overindulgence in hip talk, to him, is an "excuse for thinking." His clothes are just about what's in fashion, he shaves every morning, and his Manhattan apartment is a three-room piece of ordinary.

A bed, a few chairs, and a kitchen table is the furniture complement, all of it thoroughly bourgeois. A piano takes up half the living room. There is a hi-fi set and a television set, the latter of which he sits before almost every afternoon to apprise himself of the sports scene. He has some 50 books in two bookcases, but only two paintings decorate his walls. One, by Gwyneth Motian, wife of his drummer, Paul Motian, is a small but extremely effective abstraction. The other, by himself, is an attempt at design. It's terrible, but this has not stopped him. He continues to paint with this as his credo: "I can be as good as Klee at least."

His view of his piano playing is more in accord with reality. He is no longer the confused youngster whose feelings about music were badly shaken by the military psychology of the army.

"I took everything personally, because I thought I was wrong," he said. "I was attacked by some guys for what I believed and by musicians who claimed I should play like this pianist or that. Pretty soon I lost the confidence I had as a kid. I began to think that everything I did was wrong. Now I'm back to where I was before I went in the army. I don't give much of a damn now what anybody thinks. I'll do what I think should be done."

He is doing it with his own trio, featuring Motian and bassist Scott LeFaro. So far, he is fairly happy with the results and said, "If there is any dissatisfaction with the group, it's only with myself."

The question of whether a group of musicians who play together continually tend to become stale and/or rigid in their attitudes is one of individual capacity, Bill said.

"As a leader, it's my role to give direction to the group," he said, "and Paul and Scott have indicated that they are more comfortable in the trio than anywhere else.

Does a group get stale? It all depends on whether there is continuing stimulation, whether all the musicians concerned want to share each other's progress. As for myself, I want to grow, but I don't want to force it. I want to play as good as I can, not necessarily as different. I am not interested in consciously changing the essence of my music. I would rather have it reveal itself progressively as I play. Ultimately, what counts is its essential quality, anyway, and differences vanish in a short time.

"What is most important is not the style itself but how you are developing that style and how well you can play within it. You can definitely be more creative exploring specific things within a style. Sometimes Paul, Scott, and I play the same tune over and over again. Occasionally, everything falls in right, and we think it's sensational. Of course, it may not mean much to a listener at the time, but, then, most people in clubs don't listen closely anyway."

Up until now, the trio has been a unit for many months and acceptance is, in general, high. The fellows are not playing as many gigs as they might wish, but they are not starving. Evans himself puts no restrictions on the type of club they'll work.

"We'll play anywhere that people will listen," he said.

That should be just about everywhere."