Click to enlarge cover (J.P. Leloir)

Evan Evans, the son of Bill, is film music composer and produced in 2000 an album Practise Tape No.1 with originally magnetic recordings of unknow date at Bill’s New York City apartment in the 70s during personal practise sessions. “My father practised an average of eight hours a day in later years”. That this music was so powerful can only be a testament to the importance of perseverance, dedication, and above all, as he and I agree, discipline.
Again one can hear Bill studying classical music like Bach and Granados.


Bill, some critics say your music is impressionistic. What do you think?

"I love impressionists. I love Debussy. He's one of my favorite composers. I'm not crazy about painting, but if I was, I would prefer the Impressionists. Sometimes, I feel like I'm living two
hundred years behind, back in the eighteenth century, not in
the twentieth. So I don't know if I'm an impressionist or not. I
have the desire to change, but I feel I can't as long as I'm not
able to replace what I'm doing by something better. I haven't found anything better yet, so I'm satisfied with what I have".

(Interview in 1965 by Jean-Louis Ginibre, former editor-in-chief
of the French monthly "Jazz Magazine", March 1965, also published in JazzTimes, Febr. 1997)

Three excerpts from interviews with classical pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet (left) and from the former Bill Evans drummer Eliot Zigmund (middle) about the classical influences on Bill Evans (right).

               

Orrin Keepnews, the former producer of Riverside Records, looking back recently: "I couldn't discuss Bill Evans with other piano players back in the day - they couldn't stand the direct comparison to Bill - they could not figure out what he was doing ..... I still can't after 40 years ..... It's like having Ravel, Debussy and Satie coming back through Bill ..... how incredibly lucky we are to have been a part of his music and soul - well, they will never "Turn Out the Stars" on Bill ..... even in 500 years!"

"I went through a lot of mental pains and anguish about choosing between jazz and classical. I realized that where I functioned was where I should be, and where I functioned was in jazz, so that was it." (Bill Evans)

Evans' girlfriend Peri Cousins witnessed his daily fare: "He would usually play classical music. Of course, you know, he was a romantic. He played Rachmaninoff, but also played Beethoven and Bach. He would play that and then just drifted into jazz in a very fluid kind of way. It was wonderful to hear this, that was my privilege." (Letters From Evans, vol4, no3, 1993)

"Because there is no substitute for spending a couple of hours with Bach, and I know it’s necessary because it makes your fingers think in ways you would never let them think themselves. For a pianist playing a fugue by Bach is one of the deeper things that exists". (Bill Evans)

"Until I was 30 I did spend a great deal of time reading repertoire, from Bach through contemporary. I spent quite a bit of time on Bach for the purpose of developing tone control and independence and so forth. Bach changed my hand approach to playing the piano. I used to use a lot of finger technique when I was younger, and I changed over to a weight technique. actually, if you play Bach and the voices sing at all, and sustain the way they should, you can't really play it with the wrong ap-
proach. It's going to straighten you out in a hurry if you have a concept of what it should sound like" (Interview in Keyboard, June 1980)

From another interview: "When I got out of the Army I started to deal with playing a lot of different music. I covered a lot of ground, from Baroque up to contemporary classical music, but mostly I played a lot of Bach. And I think it changed my technique. It brought my hands closer to the keyboard, and it brought me to using a lot more of a weight transference thing - without appearing to be moving my hands a great deal. With Bach, one has to play that way in order to get any sense of the music at all. So, in doing that over a period of two or three years, my hands started to approach the keyboard differently, and I became more expressive in a different way. What I'm trying to say is that even though I had gone quite a good distance in my jazz and in my creative understanding, I still had to go through that period with Bach to just move a couple of inches further; I suppose I could have continued to do that to an even greater degree. So that's one example of how changes can occur even at a late stage in your development." (Interview by Michael Spector, Contemporary Keyboard, March 1977)

Bill Evans had an exceptional toucher, that's why the German music journalist and book author Joachim-Ernst Berendt dared to compare this with the touch of the classical pianist Arthur Rubinstein and called him "the Chopin of jazz".

Chuck Israels, the bassist of the Bill Evans Trio from 1961 till 1966 made a clarifying analysis of the music of Bill Evans in an article on his website : Evans' view about rhythm was a combination of the swing of Bud Powell with the more varied cross rhythms of Bartok and Stravinsky; he carried this synthesis to great lengths, achieving a rare subtlety of placement and drive. His sound was in his fingers and the subtle linear aspect of Evans' harmony was Chopinesque just as his textural interjections were often derived from Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Debussy. His bass lines were steeped in knowledge of Bach. The entire piano literature was open to his voracious pilferage. (Published here with permission of Chuck Israels)

When making a comparison between Bill Evans and Bach one can make reference to the tension in the music of Bach between linear autonomy and harmony. In the early music of Bill Evans as in Bach, that tension was alive, rich and productive. In the later approach of Evans, a more worked out harmonic activity restricts the linear melodic independence. His approach to the instrument reflects a firm commitment to the heritage of Western keyboard music that began with Bach and reached its final splendor in the impressionistic era. The improvisations of Bill Evans are then mostly harmonic, the significance of almost every note of the top line dependent on its attached harmony.

The piano music of Sergei Rachmaninoff was long a favorite of Bill Evans; on his final European tours he carried with him a cassette of the composer's "Fourth Piano Concerto", and the "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini", which he and the trio would study. Bill Evans was a friend and mentor of the also classical educated jazzpianist Warren Bernhardt. Warren recalls: "We played several times four-hand pieces and arrangements of Mozart and Beethoven. I remember how much Bill loved the harmonic construction of the slow movement of the third piano concerto of Rachmaninoff. Warren about these sessions: I never heard him make a harmonic mistake ...... sometimes he would search for weeks, even months, for the right keys."

Bill Evans did not consider the book of classical music closed after his student years to only live on his roots as a jazz pianist. Nenette Evans: "When he played at home it was primarily classical. Several times he and Warren Benhardt played 4 handed pieces. Bill had a vast amount of sheet music, some he would look at, others not. I rarely, if ever, heard him play jazz at home." His son Evan Evans about the discovered "Practise Tapes" of Bill Evans: "I get the impression that he would practise some classics like Bach or Ravel, and he would just do that for a while, as if to shake out the blues and traditional jazz and exercise his hands. It's like he goes into this classical music for 10 or 30 minutes, or an hour or two, and he would just bear down with this classical music. But then, suddenly, he would burst into his own thing. Obviously he was hoping there'd be some correlation with the mastery of the classical music - that something would be brought across, or, that part of what he discovered artistically by playing would be brought in his own music. A kind of osmosis."
About Evans writing about the philosophy of music: "There was someting around the order of ten to twenty thousand pages that my father wrote about very strange, abstract ideas on the philosophy of music." (Interview with Evan Evans in 2000 by Eric Nemeyer in Jazz Improv).

An example of his solid classical background is recalled by George Shearing during a visit at Shearings music library in the fifties. Shearing put on a record of a Schumann string quintet where the piano part was missing. Stunningly Bill played the piano part as if he has played the music for years. "People are perpetually astonished at record dates at how perfectly he can read and simultaneously interpret music he has never seen before. Paradoxically, Evans has always had an aversion to formal practise. He infuriated teachers at Southeastern Louisiana College by his inability to play the scales and arpeggios assigned for him to study. Unfortunately for academic theory, he could play flawlessly full compositions containing those same scales and arpeggios." (Gene Lees)

Bill Evans talking about modern twentieth century composers: "All the great masters like Bach, Brahms, Debussy, Beethoven, Bartok and Strawinsky are my favorite composers. But I don't quite understand what's happening today in classical music. I try to understand, but it doesn't move me."



About inspiring musical events and experiences in his life: "I can remember the 78 album of "Petruschka" by Igor Stravinsky which I got as a requested Christmas present in high school; and just about wearing it out and learning it. And my first hearing of the polytonality in the piece "Suite Provençale" by Darius Milhaud , which opened me up to certain things. From "Jazz Spoken Here" by Enstice, Wayne, and Paul Rubin. (Da Capo, 1994)

A consequence of the priority of the composer's written score is that improvisation plays a relatively minor role in the European and classical traditions, in sharp contrast to jazz, where improvisation is central. Improvisation in classical music performance was more common during the Baroque period than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and recently the performance of such music by modern classical musicians has been enriched by a revival of the old improvisational practices. During the classical period, Mozart and Beethoven sometimes improvised the cadenzas to their piano concertos but they also provided written cadenzas for use by other soloists. Bill Evans discussed this issue in an interview on the DVD “the Universal Mind of Bill Evans”:
“In the 17th century, there was a great deal of improvisation in classical music. And because of the fact that there were no electrical recording techniques or anyway to permanize, or to “catch” music, and to record it. The music was written so that it could be permanize that way. And so slowly and surely, the writing of the music and the intepreters of the written music, gave way to more and more intepretation, and less and less improvisation. Until finally, improvisation became a lost art in classical music, and we have only the composer and the interpreter.”

Bill Evans didn't see jazz and classical music adversary, he distinguished only between composed and improvised music. "The basic difference between classical music and improvised music is that in classical music you can take three months, to compose, for example, one minute of music, while in improvised music, one minute of time is one minute of music."

A striking statement: "If jazz is America's classical music, Bill Evans is our most classic pianist".

"I think jazz is the purest tradition in music this country has had. It has never bent to strictly commercial considerations and so it has made music for its own sake. That's why I'm proud to be part of it. What I like in jazz is, that it's basically straight and honest music." (Bill Evans)

"Bill Evans is the most "French" of American jazz musicians."

Question: "Bill Evans, is he a musician for pianists or a pianist for musicians? None of both, Bill Evans is an universal artist."

Oscar Peterson raised the level of playing the piano in jazz to the proficiency long the norm in classical music. One musician made his proper observation: "It was said in their own time that Liszt conquered the piano, Chopin seduced it. Oscar is our Liszt and Bill is our Chopin." (Quote from an article by Gene Lees, lyricist, composer and friend of Bill Evans. From his book: "Meet Me at Jim and Andy's", Jazz Musicians and Their World, 1988).

Finally, it is no coincidence that particularly a classical trained international concert pianist Peter Pettinger (1945-1998) wrote a biography on Bill Evans, one of the best jazz documents ever: "How My Heart Sings" (Yale University Press, 1998). "A concert pianist who looks at the work of a jazzpianist". This British pianist teached piano at the Cambridge University and recorded classical and jazz albums with the violist Nigel Kennedy and cellist Julian Lloyd-Webber.