Bill Evans was one of the most famous and influential American jazz pianists of the 20th century. His use of impressionist harmony, his inventive interpretation of traditional jazz repertoire, and his trademark rhythmically independent, “singing” melodic lines influenced a generation of pianists, including Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Denny Zeitlin and Keith Jarrett, as well as as guitarists Lenny Breau and Pat Metheny.

The music of Bill Evans continues to inspire younger pianists like Fred Hersch, Ray Reach, Bill Charlap, David Thompson, Brad Mehldau, Geoffrey Keezer, Lyle Mays and Eliane Elias. Evans is an inductee of the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.

Biography:

Bill Evans was born in Plainfield, New Jersey on August 16, 1929 and began his music studies at age 6. Classically trained on piano, he also studied flute and violin as a child. He graduated with a degree in piano performance and teaching from Southeastern Louisiana College (now University) in 1950, and studied composition at Mannes College of Music in New York. After a stint in the army, he worked in local dance bands, and with clarinetist Tony Scott, Chicago-area singer Lucy Reed and guitarist Mundell Lowe, who brought the young pianist to the attention of producer Orrin Keepnews at Riverside Records.

Evans’ first album, which came out at the age of 27, was New Jazz Conceptions, featuring the first recording of his most loved and most popular composition, “Waltz for Debby”. In 1958, a whole two years after, he released his 2nd album, Everybody Digs Bill. The artist claimed that he did not have much new to say in him music, which was in line with his rather shy disposition.

Despite his inward self-criticism, he caught the eye of many in the New York jazz scene. Noticed for his original piano sound and fluid ideas, he was confronted by Miles Davis, asking him to join the group (which also featured John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley). He agreed, playing and touring with them for about year. This collaboration with the Miles Davis group would establish and solidify Evans’ reputation as a musician.

In 1959, Evans decided to go off on his own and create his own group. The result was a trio consisting of himself, bassist Scott LaFaro and with Paul Motian on drums. This group would prove to be him most innovative, and the albums that came from it remain the most popular in his extensive library. The group has since become one of the most acclaimed piano trios, and jazz bands in general, of all time.

The collaboration between Evans and the talented young bassist LaFaro was particularly fruitful, with the two achieving an unprecedented level of musical empathy. The trio recorded four albums: Portrait in Jazz (1959), Explorations (1961), Sunday at the Village Vanguard (1961), and Waltz for Debby (1961). The latter two albums are live recordings drawn from the same recording date, and they are routinely named among the greatest jazz recordings of all time. In 2005, the full sets were collected on the three-CD set The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961.

There is also a lesser-known recording of this trio taken from radio broadcasts in early 1960 called Live at Birdland, though the sound quality is unfortunately poor.

In addition to introducing a new freedom of interplay within the piano trio, Evans began (in performances such as “My Foolish Heart” from the Vanguard sessions) to explore extremely slow ballad tempos and quiet volume levels which had previously been virtually unknown in jazz. His chordal voicings became more impressionistic, reminiscent of classical composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, and Satie, as well as moving away from the thick block chords he often utilized when playing with Davis. His sparse left-hand voicings supported his lyrical right-hand lines, as much a product of the influence of jazz pianist Bud Powell as any classical composer.

Due to LaFaro’s untimely death, he reformed his trio in 1962, adding bassist Chuck Israels and initially keeping Motian on the drums. Two albums, Moonbeams and How My Heart Sings! were a result of this collaboration. In 1963, after having switched from Riverside to the much more widely distributed Verve, he recorded Conversations With Myself, an innovative album on which he employed “over-dubbing,” layering up to three individual tracks of piano for each song. The album won him his first Grammy award, for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance – Soloist or Small Group.

In 1966, Evans discovered the remarkable young Puerto Rican bass player Eddie Gomez. In what turned out to be an eleven-year stay, the sensitive and creative Gomez sparked new developments in both Evans’ playing and trio conception. One of the most significant releases during this period is Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival (1968). Although it was the only album Evans made with drummer Jack DeJohnette, it has remained a critical and fan favorite, due to the trio’s remarkable energy and interplay.

Other highlights from this period include the “Solo–In Memory of His Father” from Bill Evans at Town Hall (1966), which introduced the famous theme “Turn Out the Stars,” a second successful pairing with guitarist Jim Hall, Intermodulation (1966), and the subdued, crystalline solo album, Alone (1968), featuring a 14-minute+ version of “Never Let Me Go.”

In 1968, Marty Morell joined the trio on drums and remained until 1975, when he retired to family life. This became Evans’s most stable and long-lasting group. In addition, he had kicked his heroin habit and was entering a period of personal stability as well. The group made several excellent albums including From Left to Right (1970), which features Evans’s first use of electric piano, The Bill Evans Album (1971), which won two Grammies, The Tokyo Concert (1973), Since We Met (1974) and But Beautiful (1974), featuring the trio plus legendary tenor saxophonist Stan Getz in live performances from Holland and Belgium, released posthumously in 1996.

Morell was an energetic, straight-ahead drummer, unlike many of the other percussionists in the trio, and many critics feel that this was a period of little growth for Evans. After Morell left, Evans and Gomez recorded two duo albums, Intuition and Montreux III.

Bill Evans’ Sound:

Like his contemporary Miles Davis, Evans had begun to pioneer the style of modal jazz, favoring harmonies that helped avoid some of the idioms of bebop and other earlier jazz. In tunes like Time Remembered the chord changes more or less absorbed the derivative styles of bebop. Instead they relied on unexpected shifts in color.

It was still possible, and desirable to make these changes swing, and a certain spontaneity appeared in expert solos that were played over the new sound. Most composers refer to the style of Time Remembered as “plateau modal,” because the changes usually cover one to two bars.

Most of the 70s saw Evans continuing to experiment with new sounds. An example of this is his 19 release of “Nardis,” (shown in the video above) which plays off Evans’ own Russian ancestry. At this time, he was very much influenced by sounds that were modeled by Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. But most notably the “anticipatory meter” that Evans deliberately perfected with his last trio reflects late Ravel, especially the controversial second half of the French composer’s dark and turbulent La Valse.

Bill Evans’ Influence:

Bill Evans’s musicianship has been a model for many pianists in various genres. Although the circumstances of his life were often difficult, Evans’ music always displayed his creative mastery of harmony, rhythm, and interpretive jazz conception. His work fused elements from jazz, classical, and ethnic music. Bill Evans developed in his duos and trios a unique conception of ensemble performance and a classical sense of form and conceptual scale in unprecedented ways. His 60s recordings titled Conversations with Myself and Further Conversations with Myself were innovative solo performances involving multiple layers of music recorded acoustically without computers in studio by Bill Evans himself.

The works of Bill Evans continue to influence pianists, guitarists, composers, and interpreters of jazz music around the world. Many of his tunes, such as “Waltz For Debby”, “Turn Out the Stars”, “Very Early” and “Funkallero” have become often-recorded jazz standards.

During his lifetime, Evans was honored with seven Grammy Awards and received 31 nominations. In 1994, he was posthumously honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

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