Bill Evans was born 80 years ago today. He enriched music.
Bill Evans, 1929-1980
Bill Evans
August 16, 2009 By
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Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
Bill Evans was born 80 years ago today. He enriched music.
Bill Evans, 1929-1980
Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion to Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.
Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez, Paul Motian, Further Explorations (Concord)
The two-CD album is described in the notes as a “template,” a “tabula rasa,” rather than a tribute to Bill Evans. Nonetheless, Corea’s encounter with two great Evans sidemen underlines Evans’s profound influence on the development of the jazz piano trio and on Corea’s own playing. Released less than a month following Motian’s death at 80, the live recording from New York’s Blue Note beautifully captures the drummer’s freedom, swing and interaction. In pieces from Evans’s repertoire and others by members of the trio, there is a spirit of adventure and, in Evans’s newly found “Song No. 1,” the challenge of discovery.
Pinky Winters, Winters In Summer (SSJ)
To borrow from Paul Williams’s words to Ivan Lins’ “Love Dance,” Winters knows how to turn up the quiet. Using subtleties in phrasing, pitch, intensity and tone shading, she takes ownership of a song without violating its writer’s intentions. Here, her bossa nova repertoire includes Jobim, Lees and Moraes, plus Brazilianized songs by Cole Porter, Dave Frishberg, Bob Florence and Jack Jones. A highlight: her caressing of Jobim’s and Lees’ “Dreamer,” which also has one of several simpático tenor saxophone solos by Pete Christlieb. Years pass between Pinky Winters albums. When one appears, it is an event.
Ronnie Cuber, Ronnie (Steeplechase)
Cuber has been playing uncompromising jazz on the baritone saxophone for more than half a century. With pianist Helen Sung, bassist Boris Kozlov and drummer Jonathan Blake, he is in top form in this 2009 album that escaped my attention until recently. Following his hard-bop gruffness in Freddie Hubbard’s “Thermo,” Cuber floats with tenderness through Scott LaFaro’s “Gloria’s Step” and Michel LeGrand’s “Love Theme From Summer of ’42.” At the speed of thought, he burns through ”Ah Leu-Cha” and “All the Things You Are”, giving young Blake a run for his money in their exchanges.
Chet Baker, Candy (MVD)
In a private library in Sweden in 1985, Baker plays and sings with his working trio of the period, pianist Michael Graillier and bassist Jean Louis Rassinfosse. Red Mitchell is a guest, not on bass but at the piano showing Baker his preferred changes to “My Romance,” which the two perform together. Baker is relaxed and impressively fleet in the 1944 title tune and in “Tempus Fugue-it,” “Nardis,” “Sad Walk,” Mitchell’s “Red’s Blues” and “Love for Sale.” His “Bye Bye Blackbird” is tinged with blues. In brief interludes, Baker chats with Mitchell about his career. It’s good to have this on DVD at last.
Clark: The Autobiography of Clark Terry (UC Press)
The great trumpeter, flugelhornist and mumbler writes with joy about the good times in his long life and with frankness about the rough patches. His humor and generous spirit are intact whether he is telling of his love for Basie and Ellington, his triumphs as a performer, his legions of friends, or encounters with racists and bottom feeders in and out of the jazz world. Terry’s ear, eye and memory for detail provide insights into not only his remarkable career but also the trajectory and development of jazz as an art form and a social force during his many decades in music.
Ron Carter’s Great Big Band (Sunnyside)
The venerable bassist’s first recording at the helm of a big band has style, depth and power. The playlist of jazz standards may suggest that Carter and arranger Robert Freedman are plowing old ground, but they produce a crop of fresh ideas. They transform “Opus One,” “Con Alma,” “Sail Away,” “The Golden Striker,” “St. Louis Blues” and eight others. Harmonically and rhythmically, Carter leads. He solos, but does not dominate the album, leaving space for Steve Wilson, Greg Gisbert, Wayne Escoffery, Jerry Dodgion, Mulgrew Miller and Scott Robinson—a few of the 17 top-flight members of the band.
Thanks a lot, Doug, for remembering Bill’s 80th anniversary. Feel free to click on my name and you will have the chance for yet another comparison. Bill’s imagination was boundless.
Happy birthday, Bill Evans! Everybody with ears digs your swinging lines and voicings.
From Everybody Digs to Explorations, Vanguard to Montreux, Believe in Spring to Meet Again, and Paris to the (yes, controversial) last recordings, this one True Bill of Retainder… Evans on Earth.
Bill’s music was incomparable. Nobody else listened to his music as well as he did. Back in the 1980′s, when I was working on the Hubble Space Telescope by day, and listening to Bill Evans at home in the evening, it occurred to me that while the Hubble was (hopefully) going to provide mankind our best guide to the outer universe of planets, stars, and galaxies, it was surely the legacy of Bill Evans that he had guided so many of us on our path to the inner universe.
How often, in the course of reading interviews with people both within and outside the musical field, have I encountered some variation of the same basic tale—”I was well on my way to becoming” (fill in the blank here) “when I first heard the music of Bill Evans, and it changed my life forever!”
If the individuals were musicians, then perhaps they decided then and there to dedicate themselves to the jazz life. For others, the epiphany may have taken the form of a deeper awareness of the need to develop their own spiritual awareness, whatever the chosen form. But whatever the specifics, there would appear to exist a specific cast of mind for whom the initial confrontation with Evans’ music constituted an enduring call to strengthen and elaborate their own relationship to beauty.
For those so afflicted, the release of each new Evans recording was a major emotional event, the opportunity to hear for the first time a new Evans composition, or perhaps a reworking of some formerly nondescript tune which he would transform, by his unique alchemy, into a magical trip through previously unimaginable chord-changes and voicings.
Bill used to speak of the ability of music to show people a part of themselves that they never knew existed, and his music surely did that for me. There is in that music a profoundly mysterious power to penetrate to the very core of the listener’s consciousness, a power that, defying all our paltry efforts, cannot possibly be put into words, but that nevertheless exists just as surely as the changes that he generated in the lives of so many others.
At another end of the spectrum, Cecil Taylor is still with us at 80. I wonder what he thought of Evans. Anybody know?
Thanks Doug for the mention. Mike and Jack (among a few others) both contributed heartfelt tributes to my site. They know, as I do, that once you get deep inside Bill’s voluminous and engaging music, you never leave. It invites you into more levels as time goes on. It always keeps you inside its warmth and love. I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t playing piano, (as I started when I was five) so it’s a little hard to be objective. But over forty years I’ve often wondered actually HOW folks who don’t know piano — where you can read through, play and and see those immense and continually surprising rewards Bill gave us –can also have so much love for him. But they do. It is this kind of magic he had within the jazz milieu, but it is that spiritual sweetness that lives outside of the label “jazz.” He transcended it all.