© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
It is amazing to reflect on the wonderful job Co-Presidents George Klabin and Zev Feldman, in association with their marvelous team at Resonance Records, have done in issuing over the past decade [2012-2022] new recordings by iconic pianist Bill Evans and his trio.
The Resonance Association with the estate of Bill Evans began in 2012 when the label released Bill Evans: Live at the Top of the Gate which features performances taped at Art D’Lugoff’s club in 1968.
This initial offering established the format for the recordings by Bill on Resonance. No expense was to be spared in the packaging of these dual LPs and CDs; the audio was to be of the highest quality; photographs of Bill and the setting in which he was recorded would be plentiful; relevant interviews with band members and colleagues close to Bill would be represented along with essays by some of the more notable, contemporary Jazz writers.
The high artistic quality represented in Bill’s music was to be matched by the way it was in turn offered to the public by Resonance.
In 2016, Resonance released Bill Evans, Some Other Time: The Lost Sessions from the Black Forest followed in 2017 by Bill Evans, Another Time: The Hilversum Concert followed in 2019 by Bill Evans in England followed in 2020 by Bill Evans: Live at Ronnie Scott’s. Also in 2019 the label released Smile with Your Heart: The Best of Bill Evans on Resonance which, as the name implies, is a sampler drawn from the growing repository of Bill’s recorded music on the label.
In 2022, Resonance is treating us to not one, but two recordings by Bill’s trio done in performance in Buenos Aires, Argentina separated by a span of approximately six years: Bill Evans: Morning Glory and Bill Evans: Inner Spirit [N.B.: The limited edition LP versions of these recordings will be available as Record Store Day releases on April 23rd and the CD and digital downloads will follow on April 30, 2022].
The first was recorded in a 1973 concert at the Teatro Gran Rex, Buenos Aires with Eddie Gomez on bass and Marty Morell on drums [a trio which stayed together nine years] while the second was recorded in a 1979 concert at the Teatro General San Martin, Buenos Aires with the members of Bill’s last trio, bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe La Barbera.
Following Bill’s recordings for Orrin Keepnews at Riverside during the late 1950s and early 1960s and his output on Verve under producer Creed Taylor in the mid-1960s, and with the exception of a smattering of recordings the 1970s on Columbia, Fantasy and Warner Bros, the seven recordings on the Resonance label represent a concerted and consistent reflection of his work during the second half of his career before his tragic, early death on September 15, 1980.
Resonance makes available the press releases and descriptive information for each of its Evans releases on its website along with audio samples and you can access this information by going here.
Each of the Buenos Aires recordings is made up of thirteen tracks that feature a blend of Bill’s original compositions, selections from the Great American Songbook and a couple of Jazz standards - Tadd Dameron’s If You Could See Me Now [a tune that Bill played infrequently - regrettably] and Nardis [which Bill often used as a set closer].
What is very much in evidence on these new Resonance recordings of Bill in Buenos Aires is that they offer the listener examples of many of the elements that had always been characteristic of Bill’s style, except now they can be heard and appreciated in a much more mature form.
Perhaps the most definitive exposition on the elements that made up Bill’s unique style is contained in fellow pianist Enrico Pieranunzi’s loving tribute to Bill Evans, a man who unquestionably, was his greatest influence. It is entitled Bill Evans: Ritratto d’artista con pianoforte/Bill Evans: The Pianist as an Artist.
This book, using a side-by-side Italian/English format, was published in Rome in 1999 by Stampa Alternativa with Darragh Henegan providing the English translation. Each edition of the book included a CD entitled Evans Remembered featuring Pieranunzi in solo piano settings including a track displaying 6 variations of Bill’s composition Very Early. Also included are four, sextet tracks in which Enrico plays his or Bill's original compositions or tunes closely associated with Bill in a group made up of a number of prominent Italian Jazz musicians.
The book is featured on JazzProfiles and you can find the complete post via this link.
In addition to Pieranunzi’s treatment of the characteristics of Bill’s style, many of them can also be discerned in the following excerpts from writers who are extremely knowledgeable on the subject of the piano in Jazz.
Peter Pettinger - Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings
“Then my friend brought along the trumpeter's latest — something called Jazz Track. The piano on this stunning record was being played by an unknown musician with an ordinary name: Bill Evans. But the way he was shading his tone was anything but ordinary; he sounded like a classical pianist, and yet he was playing jazz. I was captured there and then — the archetypal pivotal moment. The concept of the "Bill Evans sound" instantly enshrined and distilled what I had always hoped to hear. It was the plaintive harmony, the lyrical tone, and the fresh textures that captivated so; it was the very idea that one style of music could be played with the skills and finesse normally only brought to another; it was a timeless quality, a feeling that the music had always been there; and above all, it was a yearning behind the notes, a quiet passion that you could almost reach out and touch.
I began to collect the records. So, I later learned, had hundreds of other people. But at the time I felt, strangely, that I was the only one who knew and responded to this music. Many Evans connoisseurs have had this experience and jealously guard what they regard as their exclusive found treasure. It surely stems from this artist's ability to communicate at a very personal level, a quality emanating from his character, which was quiet, introverted, and modest. He was not a glamorous person, and he appeared to play not for the masses but for himself. A listener felt like an eavesdropper, communing on a privileged, one-to-one level. Through this quality — this "presence" — Bill Evans today gets through to listeners from all walks of life in a way that many other musicians do not.
Evans's artistic development was long, slow, and, as he put it, "through the middle." It is fitting that his recognition today progresses in a similar way. Over the years since his death in 1980, his niche on the retail shelves has grown slowly but steadily, so that now the big stores offer a generous selection of his CDs. Gradually, the message of this giant is being valued for its true worth; one senses a slowly developing appreciation. He is especially "big" in France—but then, he always was—and it was there rather than in England or America that a portrait for television was made in 1996.
He was a supremely natural pianist. Indeed, he even looked like part of his instrument—an extension of it, rather than someone sitting at it. Or rather, it was an extension of him; he did not so much play upon it as coax it into life. His diffident and slightly awkward appearance when walking onto the bandstand was transformed when he began to play; then, somehow, he was complete.
His influence is pervasive, extending generally throughout jazz and specifically to countless instrumentalists. The interactive, chamber-music concept of the Bill Evans Trios has even permeated an entire recording label (one for which he never recorded); the whole aesthetic of Manfred Eicher's ECM company has been defined by the Evans approach to economy and
Silence.”
And on the subject of rhythmic displacement, a technique that was critical in creating the unique “feeling” of Bill phrasing:
“Evans had entered his last great period. One manifestation was the recapturing of a sense of the unexpected in his timing, but with a new precision and a confident edge, left-hand displacements being placed against the beat with an outright intent that shocks us into acceptance, part of an accelerating trend toward the communicative point.”
[On the subject of rhythmic displacement], The occasion, issued on Jazz Alliance as Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, with Guest Bill Evans, brought out the graciousness of the man as well as what Helen Keane called his "forthright, gentle majesty."
Bill got in gently with more or less the printed version of "Waltz for Debby" before the conversation turned toward rhythmic displacement. As demonstrated on the just-recorded Affinity, this pursuit was a higher priority for him than ever before. He explained: "I think the rhythmic construction of the thing has evolved quite a bit. Now, I don't know how obvious that would be to the listener, but the displacement of phrases, and the way phrases follow one another, and their placement against the meter and so forth, is something that I've worked on rather hard, and it's something I believe in. It has little to do with trends. It has more to do with my feeling about my basic conception of jazz structure and jazz melodies, and the way the rhythmic things follow one another. And so I just keep trying to get deeper into that, and as the years go by I seem to make some progress in that direction."^
There followed an astonishing display of deliberate phrase displacement, using "All of You," which Marian McPartland eventually slotted into with the melody itself. She did the same on Bill's next demonstration, a restructuring of "The Touch of Your Lips," using pedal points and chordal enhancements. For comparison, he played what the fake book might give. A discussion of key choice in general (Evans nominated A and E as two of his favorites) led to a complete solo performance of "Reflections in D." Along the way there were delightful two-piano explorations of some standards.”
Andy La Verne, who was playing the piano in Stan Getz's group on this tour (sometimes a day after Evans, sometimes as a double bill), recalls that Evans would tape the gig each night to listen to on the road, always intent on learning from his shortcomings. "He was working on some linear things at that point," said LaVerne. "What he was doing was playing ahead of the changes. His right-hand line would be ahead of where the changes were happening in the harmonic rhythm. That way he could create tension and release; when the changes caught up to his line, obviously that would be a release."9 This displacement of phrases came absolutely naturally to Evans, developed through feeling, not intellect. He was not trying to throw his listeners but to say more within the form of jazz.
Len Lyons - The Great Jazz Pianists
“Bill Evans was a warm, good-hearted, and extremely intelligent man. He stood for honesty, integrity, and beauty in music, and he never backed away from choosing high standards. Evans was the most influential pianist of the 1960's. The tone, touch, texture, and harmonic richness of his playing affected the majority of pianists who followed him.
Though acclaimed as a pianist, Evans was probably underrated as a composer. His "Waltz for Debby" and "Peace Piece" are acknowledged as classics, but Evans wrote other fine compositions, such as "Blue in Green," "Show-Type Tune," and "T.T.T." Like his improvising, his composing was typified by clear, melodic lines and rich, colorful harmonic sound on the acoustic grand.
Prior to my conversation with him at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1976, Evans had become a father for the first time. He rejoiced in the birth of his son (Evan Evans) as an apt symbol for a regeneration that was apparent in his music. "I think the most important element is the spiritual content of whatever you're doing," he told me. "My personal life has become so happy in the last couple of years, getting a whole family thing going, buying a home, becoming a father-all of this contributes to my motivation, which is a mysterious element in anybody's life. You can't turn it on or off very easily, and I feel like my motivation is returning. I'm just feeling more alive now, alive in a broader way than just being a musician. . . . When you have children, it seems you're more tied to the future and to everything that's going on in the world.
The earliest evidence I had heard of Bill's enlivened playing was on the 1973 album Intuition (on Fantasy), a collection of piano/bass duets with Eddie Gomez. Compared to his earlier work, the melodic lines are longer, the ideas more definite, and the rhythms more forceful. There is new weight added to the bucolic lyricism of his past. He uses primary colors instead of pastels. Bill was articulate on the subject of his own development. His style was built on his personal interpretations of both classical and jazz influences. His acutely sensitive and lyrical technique or touch is unsurpassed on the keyboard. Bill worked ceaselessly to develop his music, and his achievements were hard-won.”
Ted Gioia - The History of Jazz, 3rd Ed.
“He brought to his jazz playing a deep knowledge of the classics, especially late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers such as Ravel, Debussy, Scriabin, Bartok, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff, supplemented by a keen appreciation of the jazz work of Powell, Tristano, Konitz, and others. In time, these disparate influences would coalesce into a unique, integrated style of Evans's own creation. Although previous jazz pianists had experimented with chords built on higher intervals, Evans refined a comprehensive and systematic understanding of voicings, derived primarily from the French impressionist composers, which made extensive use of ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth chords. At times, Evans would craft richly layered block-chord solos, as on the Davis recording of "On Green Dolphin Street"—a technique largely abandoned by the pianist in later years but which persuasively set forth the varied and subtle palette of sounds at his disposal, akin to a Maurice Ravel playing cool jazz. These same higher intervals figured prominently in Evans's melody lines, which employed altered ninths and sharp elevenths the way earlier jazz pianists had used blues notes: to add color, tension, and release to the improvised phrases. Evans's touch at the piano was equally noteworthy, tending toward a smooth legato, softening the staccato attack preferred by his bop predecessors. In time, Evans would learn how to construct phrases that broke away almost completely from the gravitational pull of the ground beat—a technique he would master with his later trios and teach by example to the next generation of jazz players—but even on these early recordings with Davis, Evans's attenuated approach to melodic development was evident, furthered by the frequent use of triplets and three-against-two rhythms, as well as the sometimes aeriform, free-floating quality of his solos.”
Edward Murray, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Barry Kernfeld, ed.
“Evans was one of the most influential jazz musicians of his generation, and the pianist who most successfully assimilated and developed a bop language based on the style of Bud Powell. He brought exceptional refinement and freshness to the jazz harmonic idiom, and this, together with his insistence on a more independent, quasi polyphonic role for his accompanists, his sensitive, well-modulated touch, and an often introspective, lyrical personality, had a lasting influence on many musicians, including Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, and Steve Kuhn.
Evans acknowledged a debt to most of the prominent figures of the bop era, and his early work bears the obvious stamp of Powell, Lennie Tristano, and - strikingly - Horace Silver. His relatively aggressive attack and strong links to the bop style in this period gradually receded in favor of a more lyrical approach including idiosyncratic melodic figures of irregular lengths and subtle voice-leading and harmony (ex.1). Still, his basic bop orientation never changed, and he showed little interest in the experiments of the 1960s and 1970s; even the use of the electric piano remained somewhat foreign to him.
Relationships with a few key double bass players (and, to a lesser extent, drummers) were important in Evans's career. Perhaps the most significant of these bass players was Scott LaFaro, who worked with Evans and Motian from 1959 to 1961. LaFaro's light sound, extraordinary facility, and melodic imagination were a fine foil for Evans, and the two evolved contrapuntal textures distinguished by rhythmic complexity and an elusive relationship to the pulse. This interplay was less in evidence in Evans's work with LaFaro's successor, Chuck Israels, though it re-emerged in his later recordings with Gary Peacock and Eddie Gomez. A similarly complex interaction may be heard in his recordings with Jim Hall, a performer whose capacities and temperament had much in common with Evans's. Here, too, Evans excels as an accompanist, combining discretion with rhythmic flair, an inexhaustible invention in the voicing of chords, and a wide variety of touch.
Evans chose his repertory of tunes carefully: over the years he increasingly emphasized his own compositions (Waltz for Debby, Comrade Conrad) and standard numbers unlikely to interest most other jazz musicians (Beautiful Love, Some day my prince will come). In his own tunes the progression of chords is often elaborately chromatic, though the tonality is always
in evidence. Evans also favored irregularities in phrase length (Show-type Tune) and metrical shifts (Peri's Scope). His recasting of familiar melodies was exceptionally resourceful: in My Foolish Heart, for example, by the careful placement of a few substitute bass notes and nonharmonic tones and a sensitive use of register, he produced a striking transformation of the original tune.”
Bill’s stylistic contributions to the evolution of Jazz piano is obviously a complicated subject, but one that has been made easier to explore with the addition of these new Resonance’s releases of more of Bill’s recorded music.
One can never get enough of a good thing!
