So much happens in the course of any evening with Bill Evans. Many musical allusions make themselves felt as he plays. He has been strongly influenced by pianists Lennie Tristano and John Lewis, as well as by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and the Impressionist composers. But his style is no pastiche. It is highly original, and may well be the most exciting experience available in the arts today. Evans’s piano style incorporates two quite different directions, each of which supports and lends potency to the other. On the one hand, he is capable of a dazzling flow of long, beautifully wrought melodic lines which snake to violently explosive climaxes, played with a hard, percussive touch, in a manner similar to, but probably not influenced by, Sonny Clark. He can also draw forth a series of amazingly full, rhapsodic chords from the piano. These chords have a great inner richness and density of texture which makes them unlike anything else in jazz. Using these elements, Evans has been able to create a union of an intensely poetic romanticism and a colder, more classical (in the aesthetic sense) style of great formal beauty and graciousness. Often he is able to achieve this union – in a sense the object of all artists in all ages – in the course of a single improvisation on a single popular song.
Like all the truly great jazz musicians, Evans has strong roots in the blues, and in Negro music in general. His sense of rhythm is exquisitely subtle, comparable to that of someone like Elvin Jones, or to the finest examples of African and Indian music. This is probably the most difficult aspect of jazz for the white musician, exposed only at first to the crude and very simple rhythms of Western music, to assimilate. Evans can draw more subtle gradations of tone from the piano than any other pianist before him. He is often able, by shifting the internal voicings of his chords, to create the impression of playing quarter-tones. In the course of a solo, he will use repeated phrases in the same manner as a blues shouter, to heighten the emotional pitch of the performance. In all these ways, Evans shows himself to be a superlative jazz musician, thoroughly steeped in the language of Negro music, in all its most refined subtleties.
To date, all of Bill Evans’s greatest recordings have been made within the context of his regular trio. Though the trio’s membership has changed from time to time, it has always been notable for its ability to swing hard, while at the same time maintaining an extremely high level of collective improvisation. The bassist, Chuck Israels, has been with Evans, off and on, for about three years and has recorded with him (on Moonbeams, Riverside RLP 428, and How My Heart Sings, Riverside RLP 473). During this period, he has improved steadily. His technique, if not always his emotional range, now approaches that of Scott LaFaro, his brilliant predecessor in the trio. On one selection, George Gershwin’s Summertime, he got a sound from his bass that resembled a Hebraic wail, or perhaps the cry of a gypsy violin. Whatever you may want to compare it to, it was a wild experience. When they played Thelonious Monk’s ’Round Midnight, his solo showed a sensitive grasp of the distinctive flavour of Monk’s music. He improvised on the tune, not just the changes, and that is one of the surest signs of a fully mature jazz musician. The third member of the trio, and the weakest, is the drummer, Larry Bunker. Though he backs Evans quite sensitively, and is also capable of a good deal of swinging in the manner of Jimmy Cobb or Tootie Heath, he does not have as much going for him emotionally as the other members of the trio. In most other surroundings. Bunker would sound fine, but in comparison with Evans, or with Chuck Israels’ better moments, his playing sounds shallow and ordinary. It would be wonderful to hear what Evans would play with a really stimulating drummer like Roy Haynes or Tony Williams.
The mutual responsiveness within the trio is so acute as to be almost extrasensory. On one particular night there were two tunes on which they became especially alive: Nardis (by Miles Davis) and How My Heart Sings (by Earl Zindars). By their strong inner cohesion and subtle use of cross-rhythms, they made each tune seem to pulsate with an inner life. This was jazz as free and as intense as anything the avant-garde could create, but made ultimately sublime by the inner tension and discipline of the basic chord structure and tempo. In his masterful balancing of form and freedom, Bill Evans has created a music that is the most profound and exhilarating experience jazz has to offer.
Selected discography:
Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Riverside RLP 291
All About Rosie, from Outstanding Jazz Compositions of the 20th Century, Columbia ACL-31
Kind Of Blue, Miles Davis, Columbia CL 1355
Portrait In Jazz, Riverside RLP 315
New York, N.Y., George Russell, Decca 9216
Jazz In The Space Age, George Russell, Decca 9219
Explorations, Riverside RLP 351
Sunday At The Village Vanguard, Riverside RLP 376
Waltz For Debby, Riverside RLP 399
Moonbeams, Riverside RLP 428
Undercurrent w. Jim Hall, UA 14003
Trio ’64, Verve 8578
