Peace Piece

Everybody Digs Bill Evans (1958), was Evans’ second album for Riverside as a leader. It was a trio date, recorded with Sam Jones and Philly Joe Jones, but for a couple of numbers Evans had the space to himself with as highlight “Peace Piece”. The gentle two opening chords of “Some Other Time” from the musical On The Town composed by Leonard Bernstein served as the building blocks to “Peace Piece”.

An analysis of “Peace Piece” demonstrates an extensive stylistic presence of sounds heard in the impressionistic music of Debussy and Ravel. Modes and other scalar collections are apparent. Traditional chord progressions are not present. Unresolved melodic and harmonic tensions and the constant presence of a pedal point containing two fluctuating chords also occur in this piece.

The piece starts out spare and melodic and is also a modal tone poem equal to anything Erik Satie composed. This modest and ultimately quiet “Peace Piece,” is a timeless, meditational, reverent, pastoral improvisation that is more a mood than a composition. The tune has no changes or a 32-bar structure, it consists of a freeform melody over a simple left-hand ostinato and is played in rubato. The tune is based on a succession of scales, which the player extends at will before going onto another scale, a kind of balance between structured and free. The tune, therefore, would never be played the same way twice.This is the nature of a free piece: the structure as well as the melody is unique to each individual performance occasion. The solo piece was done at the end of the recording session when everybody was sent home. Two takes have been recorded, the latest version was finally released on the original album. The Bernstein composition was taped later in the session, but was omitted from the original LP album. “Some Other Time” later did appear on the Milestone two-fold Peace Piece and Other Pieces and the box set Bill Evans: The Complete Riverside Recordings. The cover of Everybody Digs Bill Evans was designed by the famous designer Paul Bacon. He was the illustrator and art director of many early Blue Note albums and became Riverside’s art director until the 1960s, when he went on to an even more illustrious career as a book-cover designer. He designed covers for more than 200 jazz albums.

Playing a club date one evening Bill Evans slid unaccompanied into a fragilely twining song of his own composition titled “Peace Piece”. Afterwards, a teen-age fan rushed ecstatically up to the piano. “He told me,” recalls Evans with a faintly puzzled frown, “that when he heard it he felt like he was standing all alone in New York.” Few musicians ever captured a profound sense of aloneness like pianist Bill Evans.

Chuck Israels, the bassist of the Bill Evans Trio from 1961 till 1966 made a clarifying analysis of “Peace Piece” in an article on his website:
“Peace Piece” is an example of the depth of Evans’ compositional technique. It is an ostinato piece, composed and recorded long before the more recent superficial synthesis of Indian and American music; in fact, it owes more to Satie and Debussy than to Ravi Shankar. The improvisation starts simply over a gentle ostinato, which quickly fades into the background. Evans allows the fantasy that evolves from the opening motive (an inversion of the descending fifth in the ostinato) more freedom than he would in an improvisation tied to a changing accompaniment. He takes advantage of the ostinato as a unifying clement against which ideas flower, growing more lush and colorful as the piece unfolds. Polytonalities and cross rhythms increase in density as the ostinato undulates gently, providing a central rhythmic and tonal reference. The improvisation becomes increasingly complex against the unrelenting simplicity of the accompaniment, until, near the end, Evans gradually reconciles the two elements. (Published with permission of Chuck Israels)

There are however conflicting memories about the genesis of “Peace Piece”. Bill’s theory teacher at the Southeastern Louisiana University testifies that it was a written out homework composition when Evans was still a student. Peri, Bill’s girlfriend during that years (“Peri’s Scope” from Portrait in Jazz and We Will Meet Again) remembers that she often asked Bill to play “Some Other Time” for her. She had heard Bill improvising on ostinato of the first two chords of “Some Other Time” before the recording session for “Everybody Digs Bill Evans”. She felt that “Peace Piece” was the culmination of an idea Bill had been toying with for months. She said that in a phone interview with Win Hinkle for the newsletter “Letter From Evans”. Evans’ bassist Chuck Israels supposes that it was a “practised improvisation”. Others asume a parallel with Chopin’s “Berceuse” opus 57, also based throughout on a two-harmony left-hand ostinato like “Peace Piece”. (How My Heart Sings by Peter Pettinger, pages 68, 69)

The French classical pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet says that some parts of the improvisation recalls to him Olivier Messiaen’s tone poem Catalogue d’oiseau. Messiaen (1908 – 1992) was a French composer, organist and also ornithologist. Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age. He included stylised birdsong in some of his compositions integrating it into his music by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. Messiaen even notated the bird species with the music in his score.

Evans wrote out the the chords for “Flamenco Sketches” on the modal masterpiece album and best-selling jazz record of all time Kind of Blue with Miles Davis. The sober signature ostinato with that insistently repeated musical two-chord bass pattern is identical in harmony, tempo and initially in key to his openings to “Peace Piece” and “Some Other Time”. Although Miles Davis asked Bill Evans to record “Peace Piece” for the Kind of Blue session, Evans instead proposed not to tape individual pieces but to try something else: “Think up a progression of places with the same feeling”. “Instead of doing one ostinato, we could move through two or three or four or five levels that would relate to one another and make a cycle and Miles agreed.”

BALLET MUSIC

Evans was often asked to perform “Peace Piece” in later years, but he usually resisted, claiming that it had been the inspiration of the moment, and not something that could be recreated, he considered it as a one-time thing.

Only one occasion in 1978 he performed “Peace Piece” with the Bill Evans Dance Company in Seattle that was founded in 1975 by his namesake choreographer and director Bill Evans, who selected music from the pianist Bill Evans and choreographed it for four performances called Double Bill, an abstract and lyrical modern dance for five to eight dancers. Later they performed Mixin’ It Up, a fusion of modern, jazz and tap involving extensive improvisation, for six or more versatile dancers.

Personal note by the choreographer Bill Evans, who send next email:

The Double Bill performances took place on March 17 abnd 18, 1978 at Meany Hall, University of Washington, Seattle. The work was about 45 minutes long and included several other Bill Evans compositions besides Peace Piece. I know that we danced to Waltz for Debby. Bill brought Michael Moore and Philly Jo Jones. We performed together again in 1979, also at Meany Hall. This time, we repeated Double Bill and added another 45 minute piece called Mixin’ It Up. The new piece was choreographed to Bill’s recordings of jazz classics by other composers, including Nardis, Sweet and Lovely, How Deep Is The Ocean, Hi-Lilli Hi-Lo and other pieces, as well as an improvisation by the side men, Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera. Reviews for both shows were overwhelmingly positive. We sold out the theatre for all performances. Working with Bill was one of the highlights of my performing career.

Bill Evans, choreographer
Bill Evans Dance Company
Visiting Professor/Guest Artist in Dance
The College at Brockport 350 New Campus Drive Brockport, NY 14420

Other jazz musicians performed “Peace Piece” on several “tribute albums”: the pianists Richie Beirach, Ricardo Fioravanti, Liz Story and Stefano Battaglia, the guitarists Stephen Anderson and Nino Josele, the flutist Herbie Mann. In 1999, Don Sebesky won a Grammy Award for the album I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans. He matched the “musical personality” of Bill Evans by employing the softer side of the “orchestral palette,” according to Down Beat, using saxophones, flutes, clarinets, and muted trombones and trumpets. He achieves with his transformation of “Peace Piece” an elegant adagio, with Hubert Laws on flute, accompanied by strings, harp and woodwinds.

Classical musicians like pianist Jean Yves Thibaudet and The Kronos Quartet performed his music. Jean-Yves Thibaudet, known as the Champion of the French Impressionists like Ravel and Debussy, has recorded note-for-note transcriptions on his album Conversation With Bill Evans (Decca 1997). He is a longtime jazz aficionado of Bill Evans. In his hands the very Satie-like “Peace Piece” glowed like the finest songs without words. The pastel harmonies and introspective lyricism of Bill Evans have a common cause with those early French moderns, a fact that Thibaudet is able to make plain via this collection of well-wrought transcriptions. He included some pieces of Bill Evans in his piano recitals as an encore.

The famous Kronos Quartet, founded in 1973, is specialized in new music like Arvo Prt, Henryk Grecki, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The string quartet won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance. They released the album Kronos Quartet Plays Music of Thelonious Monk. They performed “Peace Piece” as a transcription for string quartet on the album Music Of Bill Evans (Landmark Records 1986) with Eddie Gomez on bass and Jim Hall on guitar. The first violin takes the role of Bill’s right hand throughout the performance, described by the violonist as possibly the hardest work he has ever attempted.