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Features Disc of the day
Bill Evans Trio
Portrait In Jazz
(Riverside, 1959)
Jazz piano's magus of melancholy.
It's all there in the photograph on the cover. Evans would look squarer than Dave Brubeck if it wasn't for the tangible leagues of distance between you and him - the hint of autism that seems to freeze his features. Here's someone, the picture says, who lives inside music. Way, way inside. In there, the trash piles up and phone's off the hook. I'm sorry, Mr Evans is unavailable.
Watching clips of Evans hunched over his piano on YouTube underlines the impression of a somehow tragic figure. Everything great he ever did was sad or regretful, like those genius first notes of Kind Of Blue's So What or the Erik Satie-like clouds of elegance and dissonance of 1958's Peace Piece. By then, he'd taken up with the heroin, which is what hanging out with Miles Davis will do to your average classical piano-genius varsity quarterback. Just say no, kids.
Portrait In Jazz - Evans' fifth record as a band leader - gets you every which way. At its least great, it is merely brilliant, like the bit at 1.39 into Come Rain Or Come Shine where Evans seems to hit a bum note, likes it, goes back to it, and worries at it some more, like a hole he's just noticed in a favourite sweater.
But it's Evans' exploration of the album's ballads that fanfares his utter originality - there, in the troubling grace notes that unlock the melancholy fantasist at the core of Heyman & Young's When I Fall In Love, or in the way that Someday My Prince Will Come - even when it waxes upbeat - seems underscored by the suspicion that Bill's Prince will *never come. Contrast with the rictus jollity of Brubeck's Dave Digs Disney version, from two years previously, or that of Evans's witty and agile, but inevitably inferior replacement in Miles's band, Wynton Kelly (skip to 4.27, then 7.43), recorded two years later.
Davis wrote in his autobiography that "Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got, was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall." But what makes Evans extra-extra-special is the way his playing drags you in and shares the vulnerability at its core. Oh, the humanity!
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 27/09/2010
Further Listening
Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959)
Bill Evans & Tony Bennett - The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album (Fantasy, 1975)
Bill Evans Trio - Sunday At The Village Vanguard (Riverside, 1961)
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You sure have a real funny way of saying you love Bill Evans. You need to step outside and chop yourself a cord of wood or something. This is from a woman who wears high heels!
Posted by Anonymous at 4:26 AM GMT 28/09/2010 Report Abuse
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