The Artist in Profile: Bill Evans

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This article written for Listen In, Newsvine's premier music group.

Bill Evans was a quiet giant. This shy, innovative savant literally shaped the face of jazz: Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and a host of other iconic jazz artists have cited Evans as a formative influence on their music. Bill Evans' relatively short life was fraught with pain, but his legacy is embodied by the sparkling beauty of the precise, fluid lines that typify his work at the keyboard.

The music… ahh, the music. Bill Evans is hands-down my favorite jazz artist, though his work reaches a level at which it is impossible to make anything but a preferential judgment. Listening to a recording of the original Bill Evans Trio is like having a conversation with a good friend that flows effortlessly from witty banter to wistful remembrance to good-natured philosophical debate without raised voices, misunderstanding, or interruption.

Every performance is shot through with the sort of joy at being purely in one's element that simply cannot be imitated. This is the sort of fleeting perfection that anyone feels lucky to capture for even an instant. His most famous song, Waltz for Debbie, is a convenient example.

Evans' playing is simultaneously meticulous and effortless. His flowing improvisational lines reveal an underlying method and coherence that can only be achieved by a true master. Each time Bill Evans sat down at the keyboard, it was with a purpose in mind – with something to say.

Evans wrote most of his music for small ensembles that he led himself. The chemistry exemplified in his best recordings seems to imply that each part was written for the individual performer. Though he branched out into recordings with larger instrumentation (with uneven results) in the 1970's, Evans was always at his best either by himself or with a few trusted, handpicked accomplices.

If you have a chance, listen to each of the following albums from the early 1960's. Each is a classic in its own right from one of the most productive periods in jazz:

• The Bill Evans Trio - Sunday at the Village Vanguard: This album, recorded in 1961 just 10 days before the tragic death of Evans' bassist and close friend, the brilliant Scott LaFaro, is unquestionably one of the greatest recordings of live jazz ever produced. Excellent sound quality, an intimate atmosphere, and inspired performances make this album a timeless snapshot of perfection – and perhaps my favorite record.
• Bill Evans and Jim Hall - Undercurrent: A 1963 duet with iconic jazz guitarist Jim Hall (another of my favorites), this is the first record released by Evans after the death of LaFaro, and is widely considered to be one of the finest jazz duet records of all time.
• Bill Evans - Conversations with Myself: This pioneering 1963 solo album is an early example of over-dubbing, a technique in which multiple recordings of the same performer are layered over one another to create a more complex sound than is possible in real time. Conversations won Evans his first Grammy award.

One of the best ways to get insight into the makeup of such a personally enigmatic musician is to listen to takes that didn't meet his standards for release. Evans was a fastidious composer, arranger, and performer who would not be satisfied with anything less than perfection. Great artists would have been ecstatic to release some of the recordings that were not up to Evans' standard. He worked his ensembles hard and himself harder, without ever seeming to realize the significance of what he accomplished.

Evans got his start gigging with greats like Charles Mingus and Miles Davis during the 1950's - contributing heavily to Davis' seminal release Kind of Blue - but by the end of the decade he was a band leader in his own right.

He benefited from the help of a dedicated manager, Helen Keane, who was able to keep his career afloat in spite of his destructive lifestyle, but his musical output in the late 1960's was uneven as he struggled to recapture the chemistry of the original Trio and dealt with his drug addiction. Experimentation with orchestral and big band arrangements during this time was largely unsuccessful, and some albums were never released because they did not meet Evans' demanding standard.

During the 1970's Evans got back to his small-ensemble roots, recording important works like But Beautiful with his trio plus Stan Getz in 1974 and The Paris Concert with the final Bill Evans Trio in 1979. His compositional work grew more and more sophisticated and his tone darker, drawing comparisons to Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Ravel, and other greats.

For almost his entire adult life, Bill Evans was an addict. He didn't battle addiction so much as he immersed himself in it, and his health, finances, and career all suffered as a result. Evans spent most of the 1950's and 1960's addicted to heroin, and after kicking it in the early 1970's he spent the last years of his life on cocaine. Eventually, his unhealthy lifestyle proved to be fatal, as he died in 1980 of a bleeding ulcer, cirrhosis, and bronchial pneumonia.

Ultimately, Bill Evans is a mysterious figure. He was an introverted, quiet, and unassuming man in public who always let his music speak for him.

Evans is still regarded as one of the all-time great jazz musicians, and always will be. He is, in my mind, one of those personally flawed masters whose work and life compel deep questions with no easy answers. With his body of work, he expanded the jazz world's understanding of what was possible in composition and improvisation, leaving behind a legacy that is a central piece of the insoluble puzzle that is jazz music.

Cross-posted to the new ListenInMusic.com.

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© 2007 Evan Mix for Listen In. Some rights reserved.

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