Someday Well Be Together Again Harry Evabs Trio

March 19, 2022 Post a Comment

I've never approached the Piano like a matter in itself, but equally a gateway to Music.
William John Evans

BILL EVANS was born in Plainfield, N.J., on Aug. 16, 1929, to a female parent of Ukrainian beginnings and a father of Welsh descent. His male parent had alcohol-related disorders. His early training was in classical music. He began piano lessons at the historic period of six and also studied violin and flute. He started playing in a high-school band when he was 12. Later he played a diversity of piano jobs as a teenager in a number of Dixieland bands while he studied at the Southeastern Louisiana University. He was recruited past Ralph Pottle, a old band director, to come to Southeastern. Pottle discovered Evans on ane of his recruitment tours around the country. Even though Evans is known equally a pianist, Pottle actually offered him a scholarship to perform the flute in the Southeastern ring. About 1950 Neb formed his showtime trio with his friends, the recently deceased Connie Atkinson on bass and Frank Robell on drums and played in clubs in New Jersey (The CDVery Early with posthumous released rehearsal tapes). Student by twenty-four hours, performer by night. He graduated with loftier honors and was the recipient of the university's "Distinguished Alumnus Award." After Pecker played in the 5th Army Band from 1950-1952. While there he formed a combo chosen "The Casuals" that played near the base, on the radio and various other venues. It was guitarist Mundell Lowe who encouraged him to go to New York. In 1955, with 75 dollars in his pocket, he moved to New York where he played with Herbie Fields and Jerry Wald. His early gigs were with Mundell Lowe, Cerise Mitchell, Tony Scott and Charles Mingus. From an interview with Mundell Lowe (by Ron Nethercutt)

Evans' kickoff pregnant record engagement was theJazz Workshop album for George Russell in 1956. Information technology included "Concerto For Billy The Child," the piece that kickoff brought Neb Evans to the attention of many musicians and listeners. Bill Evans had to go in the army and played flute in the 5th Regular army Band. Back in normal life he studied at the Mannes School of Music in New York limerick and counterpoint. From 1955 he recorded as a sideman numerous albums. In 1956 he signed with the Riverside label, which featured his first revolutionary piano trio with drummer Paul Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro, whose virtuoso cello-similar improvisations highlighted the trio's unique harmonic and melodic interactions. The Bill Evans trio developed an almost telepathic sense of interplay and a great common musical independence. The Bill Evans trios are sometimes interactive, intimate sleeping room music making that is like to the greatest classical trios like the Beaux Arts, the Guarneri and the Altenberg trio. From an interview with Miles Davis well-nigh Pecker Evans

2 years later, he worked with Miles Davis, who shared Evan's beloved of the French impressionists Ravel and Debussy, which constitute their fullest expression on the 1959 modal masterpiece anthology and best-selling jazz record of all time,Kind Of Blue, which besides featured the Bill Evans-Miles Davis evocative and beautiful ballad, "Blue In Dark-green".

The album opened a whole new world of melodic and harmonic possibilities. Nowadays all the players are jazzicons, all the compositions are jazz classics and the album still sounds sublime. Later his collaboration with Miles Davis, resulting in several albums in one year, Evans worked with his ain trio, until 1961 when Scott LaFaro was tragically killed in a automobile crash. Bill Evans was a serenity revolutionary whose Bud Powell, Ravel and Chopin based pianisms introduced a more florid way of playing ballads. Evans was an incredibly lyrical pianist, but he had the ability to exist forceful and aggressive likewise. Evans' expressive piano work inspired a whole generation of players who appreciated his unique harmonic arroyo, his introspective lyricism, and his unhurried improvisation forth with an analytical perfection. His chords take its own intrinsic colour, which creates a detail climate. Evans' essence was divers by his tastful economy of expression. The notes he chose not to play were fully as crucial equally the ones he did, "the breath in betwixt the phrase". The post-obit statement by the famous classical pianist Arthur Schnabel certainly applies to Bill Evans: "The notes I handle are no ameliorate than many pianists, only the pauses between the notes, that is where the fine art resides!" No pianist plays "deeper" in the keys, extracting a richer, more complex piano sound than Bill Evans. Most jazz pianists tend to retrieve "vertically" in terms of chords and are concerned with the rhythmical placement of these chords than with tune and voice leading. His sparse left-hand voicings back up his lyrical right-mitt lines, with a subtle apply of the sustaining pedal. The long melodic line, which, says Bill Evans, is "the basic thing I want in my playing because music must be always singing".

Through Bill Evans, the piano was freed from rhythmic constraints and allowed to create subtle new ideas of touch and emphasis. He was a major sideman with Miles Davis in the late '50s, and his groundbreaking trio with drummer Paul Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro in the early '60s introduced a freer conception of grouping improvisation during the famous Village Vanguard Sessions. The original Riverside releasesSun at the Village Vanguard andWaltz for Debby are reissued in 2005 with a 3 CD box setThe Complete Village Vanguard Recordings with a superb sound from the newly remastered original tapes adding previously unissued takes, spoken introductions and the band'south incidental conversations. The musical selections are presented in the chronical sequence of the original five sets, all of the highest historical importance.

Evans' jazz trios, from the first with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, to his final trio of Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera, included jazz innovators, non but sidemen. Throughout the '60s and '70s, Evans would pb some exceptional combos with drummers Larry Bunker, Jack DeJohnette, Eliot Zigmund, Joe LaBarbera, Marty Morrell, and bassists Chuck Israels, Gary Peacock, Eddie Gomez and Marc Johnson. His terminal officially recorded operation was at San Francisco'south Keystone Korner between August 31 and September viii, 1980, but a week before his death resulting in two eight-CD sets Final Waltz andConsecration .

His very final gig, from 9/nine – 14, which turned to be a 2 days one, happened at the Fat Tuesdays jazzclub in NYC.

After two days of playing, Evans was much too sick to proceed. An unofficial homemade recording of this concluding operation on September 10 ends very touching with his composition "Plough Out The Stars".

His very last gig, from 9/9 – fourteen, which turned to be a ii days one, happened at the Fat Tuesdays jazzclub in NYC. After ii days of playing, Evans was much too sick to go on. An unofficial bootleg recording of this last performance on September x ends very touching with his composition "Turn Out The Stars".

On Monday afternoon, September xv, 1980, in New York, he died in the Mount Sinai Hospital at the age of 51 from bleeding stomach ulcer or oesophageal varices equally a complexity of his liver cirrhosis after a lifelong drug abuse (FromJazz and Expiry by Frederick Spencer, Physician, Academy Printing of Mississippi, 2002). A service was held the side by side Friday at the "jazz church" of New York City: St. Peter's Church, Lexington Avenue at East 54th Street. A decease annunciation in theThe New York Times from September 17, 1980 headed: "Bill Evans, jazz pianist praised for lyricism and structure, dies". InThe New Yorker of Oct 6, 1980 Frank Conroy wrote an obituary of Bill Evans and Dave Dexter in september 27 in Billboard. More obituaries from Leonard Feather and Orrin Keepnews in Gimmicky Keyboard Magazine from Dec 1980 (PDF).

Laurie Verchomin, who was 22 years erstwhile at that time, was Beak Evans' girlfriend during the final 18 months of his life. She had five exclusive interviews about Neb with Marc Myers on his JazzWax blog. With drummer Joe LaBarbera she took Beak Evans to the emergency room of the Mount Sinai Hospital where he died. She wrote her bookThe Big Love / My life with Bill Evans. In the next excerpt of the book she describes in a honest and poetic fashion his final moments in symbolic metaphors. Used hither by exclusive permission of Laurie Verchomin.

Bill Evans is buried next to his brother Harry, who committed suicide in 1979, nearly a year before Bill'due south death, at the Roselawn Cemetery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the Usa. Bill heard the message during a gig at Dejection Alley in Washington. The two brothers were incredibly shut and Neb Evans e'er best-selling the musical influence of his older brother Harry who was also a pianist and professor of music at Louisiana Land University. Harry recorded a documentaryThe Universal Mind Of Bill Evans. Bill teaches the viewer the meaning of jazz, through alive performance and engaging discussion. Filmed as an informal discussion between Bill Evans and his blood brother, this documentary features in-depth discussion of Evans' internal process of song estimation, improvisation, and repertoire. Through demonstration on the piano, Beak uses the song 'Star Eyes' to illustrate his ain conception of solo piano and how to interpret and expand upon the melody and underlying chord structure. There is a two-LP recording of Harry'due south playing that his son Matt issued privately several years after his father's death. He published on his site The Harry Evans Trio the albumSomeday We'll Be Together Over again, recorded in 1969 in a guild in Baton Rouge. Likewise Bill dedicated an album to HarryWe Will Run into Again in 1980. Pat Evans, the wife of Harry Evans and sis-in-constabulary to Pecker Evans wrote a wonderfull article "The Two Brothers every bit I Knew Them: Harry and Pecker Evans". (Photo of the two brothers: Matt Evans, son of Harry)

"Pecker Evans committed the longest and slowest suicide in musical history"

Gene Lees, 1928-2010

Published with permission of Jaap van de Klomp from his book "Jazz Lives" (Hardcover, 223 pages, Bruna, 2008)
Jaap has criss-crossed the U.S. and as well fabricated significant stops in Europe to photograph the graves of legendary jazz musicians. Jazz lives is a unique photograph book. Through the photographs and the biographies of Scott Yanow,
jazz critic and journalist, it tells the story of the life and death of the greatest jazz musicians the world has ever known. The book was presented at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Netherlands in 2008. Website: Jazz Lives

From the book "Friends along the way" past jazzwriter, lyricist and composer Gene Lees (Yale University Press, 2003).
Helen Keane was since 1962 well-nigh longlife for eighteen years Pecker Evans' personal manager and producer. Ed is the
artist Ed Pramuk who visited with Factor Lees Bill's grave and who painted in 2002 a large landscape "Plough Out the Stars".

The fourteen feet mural "Turn Out The Stars" in the Recital Hall entrance hall of the Pottle Music Building of Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, LA, is in 3 parts, to mark the 3 instruments of the legendary Bill Evans Trio, piano, bass & drums. The center panel of the triptych which is shown here features a silhouette of Evans at the piano.

In thinking of the great pianist Bill Evans, I retrieve of spatial grace, measured animate and nocturnal worlds. My strongest impressions of his music come from listening to his time-bending handling of ballads that he builds into exquisite expressive moments.

I welcome his invitation to share an intimate musical experience which is both confident and vulnerable at the same time. My goal is to approximate in visual terms the slowly developing voicings and rhythms that menstruum from the Evans keyboard.

In researching a setting for this painting (based on one of his most moving compositions) a passage from "Romeo and Juliet" came to mind, providing the impetus for a starry-dark setting. In a rush of emotion, the voice of the young Juliet defines her love of Romeo by crying out:

"…and when he shall die, accept him and cut him out in footling stars, and he volition make the face of heaven then fine that all the world will exist in love with dark, and pay no worship to the garish sunday."

The 2 moons, overhead and beneath, are meant to create the outcome of light from above and from within. They are a tribute to the magic that flowed from the hands and heart of Bill Evans.

Edward Pramuk, Baton Rouge (2002)

Recorded pieces like 'Some 24-hour interval My Prince Will Come' , 'Come Rain or Polish', 'Blue In Light-green', 'State of israel' and 'Waltz For Debby' became jazz classics. Evans recorded with Bob Brookmeyer, Toots Thielemans, Philly Joe Jones, Claus Ogerman, George Russell, Oliver Nelson, Shelley Manne, Jim Hall, Cannonball Adderley, Tony Bennett, Tony Scott, Art Farmer, Herbie Isle of man, Stan Getz and Lee Konitz.

He proved a bridge between the early bop style of Bud Powell and the mod approach of pianists like Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett.

His meticulous harmonic conceptions and pastel pianisms inspired legions of other pianists, including Warren Bernhardt, Richard Beirach, Bill Charlap, Marc Copland, Eliane Elias, Fred Hersch, Andy Laverne, Brad Mehldau, Michel Petrucciani, Enrico Pieranunzi, Ted Rosenthal, Kenny Werner and Denny Zeitlin. Subsequently Bill'south death in 1980, fourteen contemporary pianists recorded in 1983 a tribute album, including their statements on his music and personality.

Classical pianists admired his playing: the legendary pianist Glenn Gould and Beak Evans enjoyed a personal human relationship and Gould had several Evans albums in his record collection. Classical musicians like the pianists Jean Yves Thibaudet, Eric Ferrand N' Kaoua, Katia Labque and The Kronos Quartet performed his music. It is a mark of importance that the mod classical composer Gyorgy Ligeti cited him equally one of the influences on hisEtudes for solo piano. Pecker Evans "Young and Foolish," is mirrored in Ligeti'due south fifth tude, "Arc-en-ciel". "As far as touch is concerned, Bill Evans is a sort of Michelangeli of jazz" (Gyrgy Ligeti interviewed past pianist Benot Delbecq). John Mac Laughlin, Gordon Beck, Fred Hersch, Richie Beirach, Herbie Isle of mann, Roseanne Vitro, Karen Gallinger, Eliane Elias, Mitchel Forman, Stephen Anderson, Masahiko Satoh, Nino Josele, Chris Wabich, Bud Shank and others released "tribute albums" for Beak Evans. Don Sebesky composed the title vocal of his Grammy Award winning tribute albumI Remember Bill, Susannah McCorkle sang her beautiful estimation on the albumFrom Broadway to Bebop, Karen Gallinger on her anthologyRemembering Bill Evans and Sherry Jones with her husband pianist Mike Ning from Kansas City on their anthologyI Recall Mr. Evans.

"And when he touched the keys, he'd plow out all the stars.
Oh, how his heart could sing!
His song will live forever, even though his voice is still.
I hear the music, feel the magic.
Always, I recollect Bill."

The Swedish Monica Zetterlund, who died by an adventitious burn, interpreted the vocal as well on her albumBill Remembered (2007); in 1964 she recorded with Pecker Evans the albumWaltz for Debby.

Bill Evans recorded extensively for Riverside, Fantasy, Milestone, Verve, Warner Bros and other labels. In 1981, Evans was elected by the critics into the Downwards Shell 'Hall of Fame'. In 1963, 1968, 1970, 1971, and posthumously in 1980 he was awarded with Grammy Awards. Furthermore England'south Tune Maker Accolade in 1968, Scandinavia'south Edison Honor in 1969 and Japan'southward Swing Journal Award in 1969. Helen Keane was Evans' almost longlife manager and producer. His second wife Nenette and son Evan founded the Beak Evans Manor. In 1996 The Bill Evans Pianoforte Academy in Paris was founded. Equally a tribute his alma mater the Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond organizes an annual Beak Evans Festival. A historic certificate is the recording of a radio broadcast in 1978 of Marian McPartland'sPianoforte Jazz series with Bill Evans less than two years earlier his death in 1980.

PERSONALITY

Beak Evans was a gentle, honorable and extraordinarily intelligent musician, who strived for loftier standards and aesthetics in his musical idiom. He was as well a main of words, analytically talking almost music leaving an amount of quotes and statements. He was engaged in philosophy and had a fabulous cognition of English literature. But Beak Evans, bespectacled, shy, soft-spoken and vulnerable was too a minor, introverted and embarrassed human being with little self conviction, believing he lacked talent. He suffered, his Riverside producer Orrin Keepnews says, from "a paralysing combination of perfectionism and cocky-dubiousness". "Who Beak Evans was is an ongoing question for everyone, because he led such an introspective life" (His son Evan Evans in an interview inJazzImprov Mag). He appeared to have a dysthymic disorder. He experienced a low self-esteem and a pessimistic outlook.
"I look on myself as a rather simple person with a express perspective, and try to do things that will speak to me on the level that I respond. As I become older, I actually experience that my perspective and aims become more than uncomplicated" (Bill Evans). In interviews, though, he sounds thoroughly in control, completely aware of what he wanted from his art, and colleague musicians report that Neb Evans displayed a mischievous sense of sense of humor. His French friend Francis Paudras: "Bill Evans has a lot of sense of humor, sometimes unexpectedly, especially a dry out sense of humor", confirmed by his wife Nenette. Listen to Beak singing and playing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town". It's out of tune, but it's Bill Evans singing with a lot of humour. (The Complete Bill Evans On Verve Box, CD no.vii )

He preferred playing in a studio environment instead of performances with an audience. He communicated with a notable introspection that practically bordered on isolation. Evans was a shy, withdrawn performer that rarely communicated with the audition to fifty-fifty name the tunes played. It is obvious that this audience in turn seems to adopt a kind of voluntary exile, where the average Bill Evans aficionado may become so fascinated that he is inclined to consider him as a private discovered treasure. Many people take Nib Evans personally. His recordings are accessibly moody, and many respond to music exclusively through the emotions. He just chose a different path for himself, one entirely reflective of his in personality — and that's what seems to touch listeners inside and outside jazz the most.

"Possibly information technology is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional person performer, it is true that I accept ever preferred playing without an audience" (Bill Evans).

"You are the master audience for yourself" (Bill Evans)

"I want always to communicate, but commencement and foremost with myself. And I know that if my music communicates with me, communicating with the audition follows automatically, I'm professional enough to acknowledge people to my music." (Bill Evans)

"Jazz will never be a mass appeal music but there is cipher more than that I can requite an audience than I requite myself. I'thousand not trying to be abstract or esoterical. I'm only trying to play my conception of music, and I have to direct myself to that rather than the audition because I'm the but one who can tell if I'g achieving that objective." (From a old interview with Bill Evans by Brian Hennessey inJazz Journal International, Oct 1985)

"Ever since his early lyricism Evans had tended toward his natural introspection, and even when projecting strongly he seemed cocky-captivated. His first idea was to play music that would satisfy himself, hoping meanwhile that his audience would run into him halfway. (From Peter Pettinger:Nib Evans: How My Heart Sings, Yale University Press, 1998)

On the other hand a quote by his lifelong manager Helen Keane nearly Bill Evans and his audition:
"I think one of the almost endearing qualities of Bill's personality was the almost childlike pleasure he got from the star treatment he recieved wherever he went."

Visually, Bill Evans is a hunched mass of dorsum and shoulders to the audition, his confront barely a foot above the keys, his concentration mentally and most physically begetting downwardly on his listeners. Whitney Balliett (1926-2007), jazz critic ofThe New Yorker and author of many books on jazz, wrote about Bill Evans in the nineteen-sixties: "The most impressive of modernistic pianists is Bill Evans, a stake, shy, emaciated figure who wears glasses and long hair combed flat, and who, when he plays, hunches like an question marker over the keyboard, his face generally turned away from his audience, equally if the struggle of improvisation were altogether too personal to exist proficient in public. For Bill Evans, improvisation is obviously a constant competition – a competition between his intense wish to practise a wholly private, inner-ear music and an equally intense wish to express his jubilation at having constitute such a music within himself." Someone described Bill Evans in the sixties as "He looked like a Harvard professor on a Harlem street corner."

Your beliefs on the stage reminds me of that of a classical concert pianist. "I concord, I think it's truthful. When I myself attend a good concert I desire to communicate in the same way with the music. When you hear adept music performed by practiced musicians y'all practise non think after one minute 'at that place is someone who plays the pianoforte extraordinarily'. You feel only the music itself. It does not have to exercise with the musician, nor his visual image, but just the music."

Bill Evans picked up the heroin addiction in 1958 equally a member of the Miles Davis Sextet, playing in blackness clubs, where he was the only white musician. Perhaps he was aware that many jazz fans idea him as a white newcomer unworthy of sharing a bandstand with celebrated sidemen like John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Miles Davis'due south reaction to the oft-voiced complaints nigh Bill Evans'due south color was, "I don't care if he'due south purple, bluish, green or polka dotted, Bill has the piano sound I want in my grouping". Neb Evans in an interview with Steve Hillis in 1980: "Miles is almost a professed racist; he talks like a racist, you know. Information technology was a very heavy black-pride band at the time, you know. I consider to be maybe, still, perhaps the greatest jazz ring that'south always been and for him, you know, to call a white, you know, jazz pianist into the band, is but Miles, paradoxical and unpredictable." Bill Evans: "I never experienced whatever racial barriers in jazz other than from some members of the audience". Evans was not a good fit into the band-aid music business. In part to shield himself from the outside world, he turned to drugs. It was probably Philly Jo Jones who, drummer with the Miles Davis ring, kickoff introduced him to heroin. Read the article by Ashley Kahn (Kind Of Blueish: The Making Of The Miles Davis Masterpiece) inJazztimes September 2001: "Miles Davis and Beak Evans: Miles and Beak in Black & White".

Peter Clayton (1927 – 1991) was an English music broadcaster and writer, best known for presenting jazz music programmes on BBC. He wrote three books includingA Bluffer'south Guide to Jazz. A short office of an interview with Bill Evans past Peter Clayton talking about Bill'southward collaboration with Miles Davis (Courtesy of Brian Hennessey).

Evans's girlfriend of that time, Peri Cousins, felt that reality was simply "also precipitous" for him. "It was almost as if he had to mistiness the world for himself by being strung out." His lack of self confidence and shyness is probably responsible for his years of heavy heroin and afterwards a 10-year abstinence also cocaine use. Two failed marriages (the first catastrophe in a dramatic suicide) and the suicide of his older brother Harry have certainly contributed to his habit. The constant reference to his addictive tendancies in most manufactures often dominates over his work as a musician. Moreover in some articles, authors insist he was an alcoholic, but in fact Bill never drank alcohol. They ignore the fact that Bill wished to kept his private life strictly private. If he had to have a public persona, information technology would exist every bit a musician. But even then, his preferred playing environment was just an empty room without an audition. Evans took drugs only to aid him to relax and to calm his nerves and non, as some might suppose, to make him a amend musician. On the reverse, he would take abased the habit altogether, had he thought information technology was effecting his musicianship in whatsoever way (Brian Hennessey inAlphabetic character from Evans" Vol.2. No. 5, 1991). Possibly well-nigh astonishingly, his playing became more than intense, but besides too fast and too mechanical in the last yr of his life, not long after he switched from the use of methadone to cocaine. But after all his personal problems were seldom reflected in his playing; and to the very end, though he was obviously sick, whenever he sat down at the piano his pain turned into joy. Fortunately, he made a great many recordings during his lifetime, and it is the joy in his music that will live on.