Heart under glass

New sets pinpoint Bill Evans's great spirit

by Jon Garelick

The pianist Bill Evans has a phenomenal emotional hold on jazz fans. When Evans died in 1980 at the age of 51, he was mourned, by consensus, as the father of modern jazz piano. His light hasn't gone out. Previously unreleased Evans recordings are now hitting the stores on the six-CD Turn Out the Stars: The Final Village Vanguard Recordings June 1980 (Warner Bros.), the eight-CD The Secret Sessions (Milestone), and two single CDs of live 1980 recordings released by Dreyfus Jazz. (Mail-order house Mosaic is also bringing out an LP version of the Warners set.) In the spring, Verve plans to release its entire Evans holdings in a special 18-disc set. These releases supplement two previous sets: the 12-disc Complete Riverside Recordings and the nine-CD Complete Fantasy Recordings. Most of the older material can also be had in individual CDs. But you can assume that for the Evans die-hard, it's not nearly enough.

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New sets pinpoint Bill Evans's great spirit
Introductory Evans CDs
Mike Harris's reel nights with Evans

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To get an idea of Evans's impact, check Gene Lees's memoir in the new anthology Reading Jazz (Pantheon). Lees recalls a night in 1959 when, as editor of Down Beat, he took home a copy of Everybody Digs Bill Evans. "Sometime after dinner, probably about nine o'clock, [I] put it on the phonograph. At 4 a.m. I was still listening, though by now I had it memorized. . . . I remember my amazement not so much at the brilliance of the playing -- itself cause enough for wonder -- as at the emotional content of the music. Until then I had assumed, albeit unconsciously, that I alone had the feelings therein expressed." As if that weren't enough, Lees goes on to cite critic Martin Williams, who called Evans's work "some of the most private and emotionally naked music I have ever heard."

You need only listen to a couple of tracks from Everybody Digs to get an idea of what Lees and Williams are talking about. On a tune like Gigi Gryce's "Minority," Evans is the consummate bebopper, peeling off extended lines at a fast clip over the percolating rhythms of bassist Sam Jones and drummer Philly Joe Jones. But Evans's own "Peace Piece" is another matter altogether. The tune was originally intended as an introduction to Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time." But Evans lays down a mesmerizing repeated open harmonic figure and, instead of proceeding onto the chord sequence and melody of the tune, sticks with it. As the harmony rocks back and forth in pedal point, Evans picks out simple melodic phrases over it, little single-note figures, accented by light tremolos and tentative, stuttered trills. In lesser hands, this kind of trick can spell self-indulgent disaster. The static harmony means that, essentially, you can't play any "wrong" notes -- anything will sound consonant. You can't be wrong, but you can easily be boring. (You could argue that, for good or ill, all of Keith Jarrett's solo work comes out of "Peace Piece.") Thus exposed, Evans breaks into what can only be called spontaneous song: now hesitant, now declamatory, at times seeming to create different voices, elsewhere extending the tune's harmonies -- to borrow from one of his own album titles -- in conversation with himself. The musical risk informs the "emotional content," those vulnerable melodies.

Evans's lyricism, enhanced not only by his delicate legato line and pastel harmonies but by his discerning use of the sustain pedal, earned him a reputation as jazz's Chopin (Oscar Peterson, as Lees points out, was its Liszt). Even that comparison implies that there was more to Evans than "emotional content." His knowledge of harmonies extended deep into the classical repertoire, and he knew how to play those voicings as jazz. From the jazz composer George Russell, he adopted modal playing -- a key device in playing over those static harmonies -- and used it most influentially with Miles Davis on the latter's Kind of Blue. He had a classical musician's touch -- not merely the articulation of past masters like Bud Powell and Art Tatum, but the sensitivity to dynamic range, and the ability to manipulate infinite varieties of crescendo and decrescendo in a few measures, to differentiate the sound of each note.

Evans also recast the concept of the piano trio. In past trios -- whether Powell's or Teddy Wilson's or Nat Cole's -- one instrument played "lead," or solo, while the others supported. Evans introduced collective improvisation to the format. "I'm hoping the trio will grow in the direction of simultaneous improvisation," Evans said, "rather than just one guy blowing followed by another guy blowing. If the bass player, for example, hears an idea he wants to answer, why should he just keep playing a background?" (It's an idea that pianist Paul Bley would take to the limit in his trios of the late '60s.)

Evans played in all kinds of ensembles, but the trio was his metier. All of the newly released material is from trio sessions, and it's as a trio player that he had his greatest influence. It's a cliché to talk about an ensemble "breathing" together, but when Evans's trios were cooking they did just that. The conventional rhythmic foundation of walking bass lines and swinging ride cymbal eighth notes were mere signposts in Evans's music. What Bob Blumenthal calls in his notes to the Warners set "leaning into the beat," and what Evans himself called a technique of rhythmic "displacement," created a surging, wave-like quality to the trio's sound. Instead of relying primarily on the spare left-hand offbeat chording and flowing right-hand lines of more traditional bebop piano, Evans's hands often swept the keyboard in breathtaking parallel motion, asymmetrical rising and falling sequences, phrases with a tidal ebb and flow. Drums and bass likewise moved in and out of a regular beat, and some of Evans's best illusions were created when he phrased against the bass and drums. (He wouldn't sound so free if the rhythm section weren't locked into such a strong groove; conversely, Evans knew, to borrow a phrase from Monk, how to "make the drummer sound good.") It's no wonder that some of his trios' best performances were in waltz time; that surging pulse seems more amenable to three than to four.

The conventional wisdom is that Evans's best trios came near the beginning and at the very end of his career: his sessions with his "first" trio of bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian in 1959-61, and the last trio with bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe LaBarbera from 1978 until Evans's death (the period of the Warners set). Blumenthal quotes Evans himself as saying that by the time Eddie Gomez came in as the trio's bassist in 1966, "I had become rather rigid. . . . I had arrived at a refinement of what we were doing to the point where it just wasn't as natural." But that wisdom is often overstated, and qualifications abound. Even the redoubtable Penguin Guide to Jazz concedes that although "some of the steam had gone out of Evans's career on record" after the first 10 years, "the individual albums are still very good and highly enjoyable." As in a lot of musical evaluation, the determination isn't "better" or "worse," merely different.

The easiest comparison is between the last trio of the Warners and Dreyfus sessions, and the first trio with LaFaro and Motian. The first trio was spare, nearly minimalist, laid-back -- even with LaFaro's pizzicato fireworks. The overall impression of the final trio, on the other hand, is explosive, almost driven. Typically, after any one of Evans's extended largo introductions on the Warners set, the tempos pick up. Like other bassists influenced by LaFaro, Johnson has a talent for rhythmic and harmonic freedom as well as guitar-like speed, but he's also an aggressive player, and his powerful glissandos help push the beat and contribute to those surges. (To offer a crude generalization, you could also see these two trios in terms of Evans's career-long struggle with drugs: the first is the product of a heroin addict, the last of a cocaine addict.)

Going back to a ballad-tempo piece like "Detour Ahead" (from 1962's Waltz for Debby), after spending a few hours with the Warners set, the difference is stunning. The collective improvisation of the final trio is seamless, almost monolithic. In the first trio, it's attractively exposed. On the first take of Waltz for Debby's "Detour Ahead," as Evans elaborates on the tune, LaFaro's dancing patterns, full of rests for "breath," move further and further afield, becoming increasingly agitated. Evans goes with him, always keeping the outline of the tune in sight. The counterpoint between the two players couldn't be more independent, and yet they're completely together. It's the aural demonstration of two independent minds thinking as one. Drummer Paul Motian, often given the backhanded compliment that he "stayed out of the way" of the other two players, is equally adept, moving his brushes from snare to cymbal and back, playing on and around the beat, thinning the texture out to an opaque wash, or whipping it up again into thick impasto.

The most recent crop of Evans recordings captures every range of his playing. If you're in the Evans boxed set market, Warners' set might look at first like the way to go. It's the more handsomely packaged, and the recording quality is obviously better, since it was recorded by Evans's label and not, like The Secret Sessions, by a fan with a tape recorder in his bag under the table. Even the repeated material -- for instance, the four 15-minute versions of "Nardis" -- wears extremely well. Oddly, though, the six-CD Warner Bros. set, as opposed to the eight-CD Secret Sessions, might be the one that's too much -- if only because it's all drawn from a week by one trio at the Vanguard.

The Secret Sessions, on the other hand, would appear to have everything going against them. Although they're not bootlegs, they're bootleg quality. With so much studio-quality Evans on the market, the murky Secret Sessions seem at first like a complete waste. On the opening tracks from March 1966, one audience member's coughing and hacking is as prominent as Teddy Kotick's bass. But by the time Evans gets to the fourth track, "Blue In Green" (his co-composition with Davis from Kind of Blue), you're drawn in. Evans's lines flow with relaxed clarity. The support from bassist Kotick (a bebop veteran) and drummer Arnold Wise is assured. "Turn Out the Stars," written in tribute to Evans's father, who had recently died, brings out all the subtle tenderness of Evans's harmonies and legato melodic line. His initial statement of the melody has a touching fragility.

There are other problems with The Secret Sessions: distortion, sudden fades. On portions of disc eight, Eddie Gomez's bass overloads the tape and buzzes likes some deranged Japanese koto. And yet, every disc here has its rewards. One session, with drummer Philly Joe Jones, deserves to be released as a solo disc. Jones, the sparkplug of the first great Miles Davis quintet, is a forceful presence. He articulates the beat more aggressively than most Evans drummers, marking the off-beats with tocking rim shots and driving the turnarounds out of the chorus with great flourishes. But he's on top of everything Evans plays, landing on the beat of the melody in unison with the pianist. Evans's unusual sense of time lead some critics to say he didn't swing, but with Jones he swings with a vengeance. On the rarely performed Sonny Rollins tune "Airegin," he plays some driving little repeated runs that are right out of Bud Powell, and a few bars later he summons the angular leaps of Thelonious Monk. And yet, he's more Bill Evans than ever. "Nardis" crackles with group interplay. "Easy Living" is swept along by Evans's two-handed rhapsodies.

There's beautiful playing on all these sets; for the confirmed Evans fanatic, the difference is in finding those performances that go beyond routine excellence. The early Riverside recordings captured jazz fans by offering a new kind of jazz romanticism, and a sense of discovery. If there was anything disappointing about some of the middle-period recordings, it was that many of the discoveries had by then become convention. The final trio rekindled Evans's own excitement. For some, the grand sonata-style intros to those 15-minute "Nardis" performances on the Warners set will never surpass the hushed vulnerability of the early trio recordings. The more you listen, the more you realize there is no definitive Bill Evans. But listening to the hours and hours of new live Evans recordings, it's not hard to get a sense of what Mike Harris, the fan who taped the performances at the Vanguard, was talking about when he said to his wife, right before one of those shows, "You know, what we're about to hear is the very best thing happening in the whole world right now."

(For information on the Mosaic vinyl edition of The Final Village Vanguard Sessions, call 203-327-7111).

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New sets pinpoint Bill Evans's great spirit
Introductory Evans CDs
Mike Harris's reel nights with Evans

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