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"I've never approached the Piano like a thing in itself, but as a gateway to Music". (William John Evans)
Evans' jazz trios, from the first with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, to his final trio of Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera, included jazz innovators, not merely sidemen. Throughout the '60s and '70s, Evans would lead some exceptional combos with drummers Larry Bunker, Jack DeJohnette, Eliot Zigmund, Joe LaBarbera, Marty Morrell, and bassists Chuck Israels, Gary Peacock, Eddie Gomez and Marc Johnson. His last officially recorded performance was at San Francisco's Keystone Korner between August 31 and September 8, 1980, just a week before his death resulting in two eight-CD sets "Last Waltz" and "Consecration". His very last gig, a one week one, which turned to be a two days one, happened at the Fat Tuesdays jazzclub in NYC. After two days of playing, Evans was much too sick to go on. An unofficial bootleg recording of this last performance on September 10 ends very touching with "Turn Out The Stars". On Monday afternoon, September 15, 1980, in New York, he died in the Mount Sinai Hospital at the age of 51 from bleeding stomach ulcer or oesophageal varices as a complication of his liver cirrhosis after a lifelong drug abuse. A service was held the next Friday at the "jazz church" of New York City: St. Peter's Church, Lexington Avenue at East 54th Street. A death announcement in the The New York Times from September 17, 1980 headed: "Bill Evans, jazz pianist praised for lyricism and structure, dies". In The New Yorker of October 6, 1980 Frank Conroy wrote an obituary of Bill Evans. Laurie Verchomin, who was 22 years old at that time, was Bill Evans' girlfriend during the final 18 months of his life. She had five exclusive interviews about Bill with Marc Myers on his JazzWax blog. With drummer Joe LaBarbera she took Bill Evans to the emergency room of the Mount Sinai Hospital where he died. She works on a forthcoming book "" The Big Love / My life with Bill Evans". In the next excerpt of the book she describes in a honest and poetic way his final moments in symbolic metaphors. Used here by exclusive permission of Laurie Verchomin.
Bill Evans is buried next to his brother Harry, who committed suicide in 1979, about a year before Bill’s death, at the Roselawn Cemetery in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, in the United States. The two brothers were incredibly close and Bill Evans always acknowledged the musical influence of his older brother
Harry who was also a pianist and professor of music at Louisiana State University. Harry recorded a documentary "The Universal Mind Of Bill Evans".
Bill teaches the viewer the meaning of jazz, through live performance and engaging discussion. Filmed as an informal discussion between Bill Evans
and his brother, this documentary features in-depth discussion of Evans' internal process of song interpretation, improvisation, and repertoire.
Through demonstration on the piano, Bill uses the song 'Star Eyes' to illustrate his own conception of solo piano and how to interpret and expand
upon the melody and underlying chord structure. There is a 2-LP recording of Harry's playing that his son Matt issued privately several years after
his father's death. He published on his site The Harry Evans Trio the album "Someday We'll Be Together Again", recorded in 1969 in a club in Baton Rouge. Likewise Bill dedicated an album to Harry "We Will Meet Again" in 1980. (Photo of the two brothers: © Matt Evans)
"Bill Evans committed the longest and slowest suicide in musical history" (Gene Lees, 1928-2010).
From the book "Friends along the way" by jazzwriter, lyricist and composer Gene Lees (Yale University Press, 2003).
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| "And when he touched the keys, he'd turn out all the stars. Oh, how his heart could sing! His song will live forever, even though his voice is still. I hear the music, feel the magic. Always, I remember Bill." |
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The Swedish Monica Zetterlund, who died by an accidental fire,
interpreted the song as well on her album "Bill Remembered" (2007); in 1964 she recorded with Bill Evans the album "Waltz for Debby".
Bill Evans recorded extensively for Riverside, Fantasy, Milestone, Verve, Warner Bros and other labels.
In 1981, Evans was elected by the critics into the Down Beat 'Hall of Fame'.
In 1963, 1968, 1970, 1971, and posthumously in 1980 he was awarded with Grammy Awards. Furthermore England's Melody Maker Award in 1968, Scandinavia's Edison Award in 1969 and Japan's Swing Journal Award in 1969. Helen Keane was Evans' almost longlife manager and producer. His second wife Nenette and son Evan founded the Bill Evans Estate.
In 1996 The Bill Evans Piano Academy in Paris was founded. As a tribute his alma mater the Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond organizes an annual Bill Evans Festival. A historic document is the recording of a radio broadcast in 1978 of Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz series with Bill Evans less than two years before his death in 1980.
Bill Evans was a gentle, honorable and extraordinarily intelligent musician, who strived for high standards and aesthetics in his musical idiom.
He was also a master of words, analytically talking about music leaving an amount of quotes and statements. He was engaged in philosophy and had a fabulous knowledge of English literature. But Bill Evans, bespectacled, shy, soft-spoken and vulnerable was also a modest, introverted and embarrassed man with little self confidence, believing he lacked talent. He suffered, his Riverside producer Orrin Keepnews says, from "a paralysing combination of perfectionism and self-doubt". "Who Bill Evans was is an ongoing question for everyone, because he led such an introspective life" (His son Evan Evans in an interview in JazzImprov Magazine). He appeared to have a dysthymic disorder. He experienced a low self-esteem and a pessimistic outlook.
"I look on myself as a rather simple person with a limited perspective, and try to do things that will speak to me on the level that I respond. As I get older, I really feel that my perspective and aims get more simple" (Bill Evans). In interviews, though, he sounds thoroughly in control, completely aware of what he wanted from his art, and colleague musicians report that Bill Evans displayed a mischievous sense of humor. His French friend Francis Paudras: "Bill Evans has a lot of humour, sometimes unexpectedly, especially a dry sense of humour", confirmed by his wife Nenette.
He preferred playing in a studio environment instead of performances with an audience. He communicated with a notable introspection that practically bordered on isolation. Evans was a shy, withdrawn performer that rarely communicated with the audience to even name the tunes played. It is obvious that this audience in turn seems to prefer a kind of voluntary exile, where the average Bill Evans aficionado may become so fascinated that he is inclined to consider him as a private discovered treasure. Many people take Bill Evans personally. His recordings are accessibly moody, and many respond to music exclusively through the emotions. He simply chose a different path for himself, one entirely reflective of his inward personality — and that's what seems to touch listeners inside and outside jazz the most.
"Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience" (Bill Evans).
"You are the primary audience for yourself" (Bill Evans)
"I want always to communicate, but first and foremost with myself. And I know that if my music communicates with me, communicating with
the audience follows automatically, I'm professional enough to admit people to my music." (Bill Evans)
"Jazz will never be a mass appeal music but there is nothing more that I can give an audience than I give myself.
I'm not trying to be abstract or esoterical. I'm just trying to play my conception of music, and I have to direct
myself to that rather than the audience because I'm the only one who can tell if I'm achieving that objective."
(From a former interview with Bill Evans by Brian Hennessey in Jazz Journal International October 1985)
“Ever since his early lyricism Evans had tended toward his natural introspection, and even when projecting strongly he seemed self-absorbed. His first thought was to play music that would satisfy himself, hoping meanwhile that his audience would meet him halfway. (From Peter Pettinger: "Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings", Yale University Press, 1998)
On the other hand a quote by his lifelong manager Helen Keane about Bill Evans and his audience:
"I think one of the most endearing qualities of Bill's personality was the almost childlike pleasure he got from the star treatment he recieved wherever he went."
Visually, Bill Evans is a hunched mass of back and shoulders to the audience, his face barely a foot above the keys, his concentration mentally and almost physically bearing down on his listeners.
Whitney Balliett (1926-2007), jazz critic of "The New Yorker" and author of many books on jazz, wrote about Bill Evans in the nineteen-sixties: “The most impressive of modern pianists is Bill Evans, a pale, shy, emaciated figure who wears glasses and long hair combed flat, and who, when he plays, hunches like an question mark over the keyboard, his face generally turned away from his audience, as if the struggle of improvisation were altogether too personal to be practiced in public. For Bill Evans, improvisation is obviously a constant contest – a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private, inner-ear music and an equally intense wish to express his jubilation at having found such a music within himself.”
Your behavior on the stage reminds me of that of a classical concert pianist.
"I agree, I think it's true. When I myself attend a good concert I want to communicate in the same way with the music.
When you hear good music performed by good musicians you do not think after one minute 'there is someone who plays the piano
extraordinarily'. You experience only the music itself.
It does not have to do with the musician, nor his visual image, but just the music."
Bill Evans picked up the heroin addiction in 1958 as a member of the Miles Davis Sextet, playing in black clubs, where he was the only white musician.
Perhaps he was aware that many jazz fans thought him as a white newcomer unworthy of sharing a bandstand with celebrated sidemen
like John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Miles Davis’s reaction to the oft-voiced complaints about Bill Evans’s color was, "I don’t care if he’s purple, blue, green or polka dotted, Bill has the piano sound I want in my group". Bill Evans: "I never experienced any racial barriers in jazz other than from some members of the audience". Evans was not a good fit into the rough-and-tumble music business. In part to shield himself from the outside world, he turned to drugs. His lack of self confidence and shyness is probably responsible for his years of heavy heroin and after a 10-year abstinence also cocaine use. Two failed marriages (the first ending in a dramatic suicide) and the suicide of his older brother Harry have certainly contributed to his addiction. Perhaps most astonishingly, his playing became more intense, but also too fast and too mechanical in the last year of his life, not long after he switched from the use of methadone to cocaine. But after all his personal problems were seldom reflected in his playing; and to the very end, though he was obviously ill, whenever he sat down at the piano his pain turned into joy. Fortunately, he made a great many recordings during his lifetime, and it is the joy in his music that will live on.
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Francis Paudras and Bernard Maury, who was jazz pianist and founder of the Bill Evans Piano Academie in Paris ("If rhythm is the body of music, then harmony is its soul"), were close French friends of Bill Evans when visiting Europe.
The harmony specialist Bernard Maury was one of the best Bill Evans connoisseurs worldwide. "I had some great times with Bill Evans. When he sat down at the piano I never missed a note. He was one of the great names of jazz, try as he might to deny it - he was a very modest man. "It didn't come at all naturally," he told me. "I had to work darned hard." He would play certain sequences again and again so I could really understand them. He never gave lessons, but if he felt someone was receptive to his music and could see what he was up to, he would go out of his way to explain. I had already been trying to analyse his music for quite a while. Two years before, I'm not sure I would have had the faintest idea about what he was doing. Bill was one of the most important jazz pianists of the second half of the century, up there with Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Modern jazz musicians owe him an enormous debt. In the world of jazz he's also a direct descendent of the French school of Faure, Ravel, Debussy and Lili Boulanger" (Interview with Isabelle Leymarie). Bernard Maury introduced Evans the music of Lili Boulanger and he was fascinated with her polychordal and modal music. "When he returned to New Jersey in 1972 we wrote us a long letter to share his enthusiasm, indicating (underlined) the passages that in particular moved him". In the late '80s, after the untimely death of Bill Evans Maury began a series of tribute concerts with piano duets along with former Evans student Warren Bernhardt. He died in 2005.
The late Francis Paudras (1935-1997) was really fond of piano, not only jazz piano (Bud Powell, Bill Evans, Jacky Terrasson), but also classical piano, for example, Ravel, Debussy, and Rachmaninoff, and he had a special admiration for Glenn Gould.
He wrote a portrait of pianist Bud Powell (1924-1966): 'The Dance of the Infidels', a moving jazz memoir. Bill Evans wrote the foreword and coda of the book. He remarks, “If I had to choose one single musician for his artistic integrity, for the incomparable originality of his creation and the grandeur of his work, it would be Bud Powell." In turn Paudras wrote the liner notes for the last live recordings of the Bill Evans Trio at Ronnie Scott in London in 1980. The book served as the basis for Bertrand Tavernier's film 'Round Midnight' (1986), starring saxophonist Dexter Gordon and pianist Herbie Hancock.
Francis Paudras had a country house, a Manoir, 45 minutes drive from Poitiers. He recorded more than 300 hours of music in the two years he stayed there. It became a jazz haven, attracting other greats, including Gil Evans, Herbie Hancock, Bud Powell, Bill Evans, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday: the lady sang the blues there for more than two months. Paudras drank heavily. He had lost all his money, both his marriages had failed and most of his jazz friends were dead. He hanged himself in the cellar of the Manoir in 1997, aged 62, surrounded by empty wine bottles. During the funeral service, the pianists Maurice Vander, Jacky Terrasson, and Bernard Maury played some of his favorite tunes.
Francis Paudras and Bernard Maury made a fine photo assembly with Bill Evans shaking hands Bud Powell in front of a pictorial history of the piano in jazz on the cover of the French jazz magazine Le Jazzophone (1980).
Bill Evans was influenced by Bud Powell: "Because Bud got such a sense of the form". He considered him as a most underestimated pianist. Bill Evans: "He had the potential of a true jazz player..... Because of his history, he never got to use that potential that much, though he did plenty. His insight and talent were unmatched in hard-core, true jazz." (Down Beat's tribute edition 1966).
With permission and property of Nenette Evans |