Everybody digs Bill Evans

Yesterday someone told me I was a techno-optimist, and I replied that I had grown up in an era in which university libraries were the main repositories of high quality information. Sitting in front of the computer, I can share all kinds of things with my kids that weren't available to me as a child. Who could imagine a time when typing in a few words would evoke rich sounds and images of Bill Evans or Chet Baker? Thanks to all the jazz fans who are uploading this rare footage and music!




With vocals (Monica Zetterlund). See also this profile, The Universal Mind of Bill Evans.

The Universal Mind of Bill Evans

My Xmas present to you: The Universal Mind of Bill Evans

... Here is Evans, his hair slicked back, his terrible teeth uncapped, a cigarette waving in the air, in intense conversation with his composer brother Harry Evans (a professor of music at Louisiana State University) on the nature of creativity in jazz.

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.

Onstage, Evans was famously reticent about speaking, but here he's surprisingly, stirringly provocative.

Best introspective bits about his development, improvisational ability, intellectual / analytical approach versus raw talent @30 min and thereafter.

Not bad for a heroin junkie (like Chet Baker: see earlier post Time After Time).

All About Jazz: ... He played an equal role with Miles Davis in composing Kind Of Blue, the top-selling jazz album ever, yet the association proved disastrous as Evans' shyness and pressures of the stage fed a drug addiction that led to his death in 1980. His intelligence allowed him to surpass other players with more raw talent and he inspired a rare cult-like following, but also endured critics who saw him as a fraudulent lightweight.

Evans is generally acknowledged as the most influential pianist since Bud Powell, and a primary influence on players such as Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea. Many consider his Sunday At The Village Vanguard the best piano trio album ever and compositions such as "Waltz For Debby" are all-time standards. He is also credited with advancing harmonic and voicing structures. and pioneering modern trio format elements such as giving sidemen equal interplay during improvisations.

His career peaked early during the late 1950s and early 1960s, then went through a series of peaks and valleys for the rest of his life. The best of those latter periods were probably during the early 1970s and right before his death, although neither reached the pinnacle of his early days.

The Bill Evans Web Pages: ... Throughout his entire professional career, Evans was also hopelessly addicted to drugs, a fact that was no secret while he was alive, but one that remains difficult to absorb even today. Obviously drugs are not foreign objects in the jazz ambient, but it is too easy to simply throw Evans onto jazz’s steep junkie pile. He was too intelligent, too administrative over his physical and emotional capacities to allow himself to succumb to an addiction which he did not really want. Why then was the man whose shimmering touch and blush-hued harmonies were responsible for transforming the piano into a jazz instrument as expressive and beautiful as any sighing horn such an afflicted soul? For those who have truly fallen under his spell, this lingering question weighs on his entire legacy.

Time After Time

This poignant video incorporates footage from the Bruce Weber documentary Let's Get Lost. Weber contrasted the age and drug ravaged Chet Baker of 1987 with the young, beautiful cult figure of the 1950s. The Santa Monica scenes have a suffused warm light that makes me yearn for Southern California.

Wikipedia: ... Entertainment Weekly ... said that Weber "created just about the only documentary that works like a novel, inviting you to read between the lines of Baker's personality until you touch the secret sadness at the heart of his beauty". ... Terrence Rafferty, in his review for the New York Times, wrote, "The enduring fascination of Let’s Get Lost, the reason it remains powerful even now, when every value it represents is gone, is that it’s among the few movies that deal with the mysterious, complicated emotional transactions involved in the creation of pop culture — and with the ambiguous process by which performers generate desire".

Although Let's Get Lost is out of print, you can find it in segments on YouTube. I'll never forget watching it with my girlfriend (also a jazz fan) in New Haven, back in the 1990s.