Who Was Bill Evans?

125 RICHARD TERRILL Who Was Bill Evans? START here 14. at his death, Oscar Peterson said, “Maybe he found what he was looking for” 1. his music, like his personality, had a 15. he knew a great deal about the novels of questioning quality Hardy and the poetry of Blake 2. he wasn’t a narcissist, apparently 16. loan sharks threatened to break his hands 3. he sought the essence of the material in its 17. “I had to work harder at music than harmonic implications most cats because, you see, man, I don’t have 4. Miles Davis said, “It’s a drag he’s dead. Now very much talent.” I’ll never get to hear him play ‘Alfie’ again” 5. he started as a flute player Thesis 6. he didn’t live as long as he might have otherwise; he didn’t live to be old Why would one of the great artists of his day 7. whereas many people don’t eat properly be so self-destructive as to kick a heroin habit when they’re kids, he didn’t eat properly at only to start a cocaine habit? “When I get into the end of his life. Malnutrition was listed as a something, I really get into it,” he is known to contributing cause of death. Coffee. Also cocaine have said. Does that explain? 8. he loved to golf, bowl Shortly before his death he told his young bass 9. his long-time girlfriend and first wife Ellaine player how amazed he was at the insidiousness of threw herself in front of a subway train in 1973 his new drug. 10. he had lifelong feelings of inadequacy We can read that his life was a fifty-year-long 11. he played early on with saxist Herbie suicide. We can read that he was a nice man, had Fields, whose career ended tragically in suicide a sense of humor better than your grandfather’s, 12. he was left handed, which may account in wanted a child and when he had one thought his part for his chordal proficiency life was complete, then got a divorce. Dying of 13. he wasn’t African American, and he never cocaine, he thought he was happy. resided permanently in a foreign country to Some jazz musician junkies played the music escape racial prejudice at home only to get money to score. Chet Baker would Crazyhorse 126 forget his trumpet on a bandstand in his haste to the pianist who most played as if from the same shoot up. Charlie Parker had to borrow money body. It’s not you play what I play, which would for cab fare. But Bill Evans practiced constantly. be an untrained listener’s first assumption. It’s you “I heard him practice Ravel, Debussy,” his wife anticipate what I’m about to play based on what said after his death, “but I never heard him I’m playing right this second, what I’ve played practice jazz.” since the tune has begun, what we’ve played in “You don’t understand. It’s like death and all the nights/years we’ve worked together, and transfiguration. Every day you wake in pain on the basis of everyone who’s ever played or like death and then you go out and score, and recorded this tune. that is transfiguration. Each day becomes all And of the trios Bill Evans led, it was his first, of life in microcosm” with bassist Scott LaFaro, that was the most prescient, where the piano and bass first melded Leaving my footprints into this new animal. No one accompanied nowhere anyone else. Rather, partners. south or north Play something that you think will fit perfectly— I go into hiding not too obviously, not unsubtly—with what you here by the bay full of moonlight… think I’ll play. Surprise me. But don’t get in the way, don’t piss me off. Muso Seki (W.S. Merwin, tr.) The audience? Are there people sitting out there? Ok, they’re allowed to listen over our Bill Evans is given credit for inventing the jazz shoulders. piano trio. Think about it: no blaring horns, no They don’t understand. chick singer, nothing to dance to. A piano is an Then LaFaro was killed in a car wreck, aged instrument that can’t color or bend tones. What 25. Bill Evans was 31. it is, it is. It’s so common as to be in every parlor or basement, so playing it is like making poetry His Reluctance from the words printed on a menu or a cereal box. –“The trouble with Bill—and, as much as In the years between Sinatra and the Beatles, anything, that was the cause for our deciding to Bill Evans formulated a new jazz instrument record him live—was always persuading Bill to consisting of three people joined at the beat— play at all.” –Orin Keepnews piano, bass, and drums. This rough beast was –“Of course, Bill would never have let any amorphous, something to be agreed on, not timed. work out at all if he wasn’t compelled to support And of the three players, it was the bassist and a career.” –Nenette Evans Who Was Bill Evans? 127 “It is a peculiarity of mine that despite the state, but played beautifully, all but unaware fact that I am a professional performer . as the chocolate melted over the keyboard. I have always preferred playing without an audience.” “The Perplexity of Never Knowing Things for Certain” You Don’t Understand A typical audition with Bill Evans’ trio would Bopsters of the fifties often took up heroin have the candidate come down to some place like because Charlie Parker used it (even though the Village Vanguard and sit in for the entire Bird said dope never made anyone play better). night. At the end of the evening, the pianist We listeners like to plug in the sociological would say nothing. Maybe a pleasantry, a nod of explanation that the racism of the day drove these the head. great but disrespected artists to despair. He rehearsed his trios only a handful of times Bill Evans was white. (“He was a punk,” said in his twenty-one years leading them. It wasn’t Stanley Crouch, an African American critic, necessary for him to tell his bassist and drummer years after this death.) While he was often broke, what tune they were about to play and in what he never lacked for work except when his habit key. He just started playing. got out of hand. He also apparently never wrote a set list in The pain is in the music. That much we can advance of a performance. He did, however, hear, especially in the ballads he was famous for. once copy down on a bar napkin for a young Why do we assume that the life of someone who pianist in the audience the chord changes for a was a great artist should be more easily explained new composition he had just performed in the than the mystery of our own experience? A previous set. fact is not sound. A collection of facts does not That’s it. He’ll call you. necessarily carry the logic of music, or even the I’m a jazz saxophonist. My drummer and I music of logic. have a running joke. In days past, when either Biography is tyranny. of us would sub on a gig with some bandleader we didn’t know, especially older guys, “ear guys,” The White Tuxedo who play everything without a page of music in front of them, the bandleader would call a tune One story has it that near the end of his life, by name, but not tell you anything about it. He performing at the Village Vanguard, he showed never said, “When you get to the B section, the up late for the gig, dressed in a white tuxedo changes go up in fourths, and then there’s a Latin and eating a chocolate popsicle. He was in a bad thing happening.” Nothing like that. Instead the Crazyhorse 128 leader would simply say, “Don’t worry, you’ll hear town (“song writer Jimmy Webb,” “The New it.” Soul Review,” Lucinda Williams), and the rest And sometimes you would hear it. But there of the week chick singers singing what Sinatra would be that moment of uncertainty when you stopped singing years before he died, in the last didn’t know if you would hear it, and what would century. But at the best jazz club in my city, you play then? That was the worry. instrumental jazz is seldom on the schedule, and Perhaps that’s where art resides, or maybe this that performed by local players like me and my moment merely marks the difference between band mates, almost never. professional and amateur. I drive friends through town and point out But that’s the punch line of our joke: you’ll the places I used to play (seventy five, maybe a hear it. Someone in our band brings in a chart to hundred bucks a guy, one free drink) which are rehearsal: “It’s in nine four time, kind of a tango, now closed or have cut out music: 1. Rossi’s— I wrote if for the funeral of my aunt.” belly up. 2. The joint on Washington—It’s now a And the drummer and I say together, “Don’t tiki bar. 3. Café Luxx—There’s still a graphic of worry, you’ll hear it.” two saxophones among the letters painted on the window outside the bar.

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