Bill Evans

Several times Bill Evans spoke publicly of a singular moment when he first discovered the freedom that goes with being a jazz player. And several times also he spoke of the enormous requisite discipline that went with it. About the freedom, he was playing as a pre-teenager with a dance band in his home state of New Jersey. The group was doing ‘Tuxedo Junction’, a piece which was originally produced and performed in an atmosphere of improvisation in the Erskine Hawkins band, and in most of the other big swing bands that later adopted it. But by the time ‘Tuxedo Junction’ had become a dance-band ‘stock’ arrangement, the parts had been simplified, locked in, and ready to be read off the paper. ‘For some reason,’ Evans said, ‘I got inspired to put in a little blues thing. ‘Tuxedo Junction’ is in B-flat, and I put in a little D-flat, D, F thing—bing!—in the right band. It was such a thrill. It sounded right and good, and it wasn’t written, and I had done it. The idea of doing something in music that somebody hadn’t thought of opened a whole new world to me.’ On the question of the discipline that is a part of the equipment of any great improviser, Evans spoke often. Even on the most uninspired occasion, on the most, uninspiring job, he once explained, he could approach the bandstand with no hope of having anything good in him to play, and the accumulated discipline of knowing how to make his mind and hands and feet respond when the inspiration did come, that discipline itself would simply take over and let—even cause—the flow of musical ideas to be there.

Bill Evans could have been a major musician-critic. Take the notes he contributed to the seminal Miles Davis Kind of Blue LP (1959). Evans compared ‘the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician’ to the art of the spontaneous watercolorists of Japan, who paint on a thin parchment ‘in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline; that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.’ The pictures that result, he added, may ‘lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who will see will find something captured that escapes explanation.’ Or take the comments Evans wrote for one of Thelonious Monk’s Columbia LPs. He called Monk ‘an exceptionally uncorrupted creative talent,’ who was largely uninfluenced by any musical tradition except that of American popular music and jazz. Monk had, against huge conformist pressures, replaced formal superficialities with ‘fundamental structure’ and produced ‘a unique and astoundingly pure music which combined aptitude, insight, drive, compassion, fantasy and whatever else makes a total artist.’ Or these words on Miles Davis’s development (from an interview in 1981): ‘He is an example of somebody I think was a late arriver, even though he was recorded when he first came on the scene. You can hear how consciously he was soloing and how his knowledge was a very aware thing. He just constantly kept working and contributing to his own craft. And then at one point it all came together and he emerged with maturity, and he became a total artist and influence, making a kind of beauty that has never been heard before or since.’

That need to know what he was doing—intellectually, theoretically—was one pull of the dichotomy of this remarkable combination of careful deliberateness and intuitive spontaneity, of logic and sensitivity, mind and heart, that was Bill Evans the musician. He elaborated—in a singular account of a musical self-education—to Don DeMichael in the introduction to the music folio Bill Evans Plays. ‘I think it was a good thing I didn’t have a great aptitude for mimicry, though it made it very difficult for me at the time because I had to build my whole musical style. I’d abstract musical principles from the people I dug, and I’d take their feeling or technique to apply to things the way that I’d built them. But because I had to build them meticulously, I think worked out better in the end because it gave me a complete understanding of everything I was doing… I don’t want to express just my feelings, my feelings aren’t interesting to everybody.’

‘Blue in Green’ was also on Kind of Blue. It was written by Evans on a succession of unusually juxtaposed chords apparently suggested to him by Miles Davis, and on a ten-measure, rather than twelve-measure, phrase. Strictly speaking, ‘Blue in Green’ is neither ‘free’ nor ‘modal,’ but it is very challenging to the player, requiring him to get gracefully as well as correctly from one chord to the next and ‘think’ in phrases of unusual length. And just for the record, the other highly influential piece on Kind of Blue, ‘So What’, is opposite to ‘Flamenco Sketches’, but is like the flowing ‘Milestones’. Phrased like an AABA popular song, the piece gives the player 16 measures of one scale (or mode), eight of another, then back to eight of the first. In other words, he’s got the notes to choose from and his phrase lengths assigned, but no assigned chords to wend his way through. However, it was Evans’s left hand chord voicings that had the widest effect on other musicians, and they are not too difficult to explain to the layman. Bill voiced certain chords, that is, he chose the notes to go in those chords, leaving out the ‘root’ notes. The roots tie down the chord and its sound. Without them, a given chord can sometimes have several identities; it can lead easily, consonantly, to a wider choice of other chords, and it can accommodate a wider choice of melody notes and phrases for the player on top of the chords. The ‘open’ voicings that Bill used opened up melody and flow in new ways for jazz. It’s as simple, and as important, as that.

I suppose if Bill Evans had done nothing else, he brought some of Tristano’s ideas into the mainstream of jazz. But he did much else. To do it, he had to sacrifice some things. The swing that he gave us on ‘All About Rosie’, and which can be heard virtually throughout his first LP, was a conventional swing, and Evans, to be Evans, had to find his own kind of rhythmic momentum, a momentum integrated with his evolving personal touch and use of dynamics, and his own sense of musical phrase and melodic flow. I should not leave that first session without pointing out ‘Five’, Evans’s ‘I Got Rhythm’-based piece whose theme laid out his characteristic interest in rhythmic displacement, with ‘turning the beat around’ on a single short phrase. (If those words don’t make the challenge clear, play the opening chorus of ‘Five’ and it will be.) The twenty-six months that passed between Bill Evans’s first and second Riverside LPs were patently fruitful, and what can be heard on the second LP is a remarkable, emerging Bill Evans style, his influences assimilated (or abandoned), his own approach fully integrated, if not fully developed. And what one hears subsequently is the style’s development, and the development of an ensemble style for the Evans Trio. The Powell-like bluntness a touch was gone; the Silver-like bluesiness no longer evident (perhaps because the style came to seem all too easy to be truly expressive for anyone except Horace himself). The Evans touch—gentle, delicate, always integrated with perceptive pedal work—had begun to emerge. He seemed, as Miles Davis said, to make a sound rather than strike a chord, but try to decide which notes in any Evans chord were struck forcefully and sustained, and which softly, to achieve those sounds!

Time changes things. It would be foolish to deny that. Even our best and most thoughtful reactions, even our deepest and least transient selves, grow and therefore change. To Evans and the Trio themselves, the ‘live’ Village Vanguard sessions reportedly did not seem so remarkable while they were doing them as they did later in the studio editing sessions, and as they did later still on the LPs. And they no longer seem so uncommunicative to me as they did in 1961. Perhaps I did not properly respond to the rapport among the three men. Still, the Vanguard sessions seem no less introspective to me, yet Evans seems—paradoxically perhaps—no less uncompromisingly exposed emotionally. I think Bill Evans was the most important and influential white jazz musician after Bix Beiderbecke—and that statement is no reflection on the contribution or the importance of Bunny Berigan, Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Dave Tough, Stan Getz—does Django Reinhardt belong on such a list?—or any other. Partly my statement seems valid to me because of Evans’s intrinsic merit, and partly because his effect on the music has been so general—technically, in ways I have commented on, emotionally in its uncompromising lyricism. At the same time I. think that in the future, his work may come to seem somewhat isolated from the mainstream—as Bix’s now does—but no less valuable and no less authentic and no less beautiful.