`Intricate Footwork'

I worked with a reporter who had amassed a record collection too big for the cheap, cracked-ceiling apartments he favored. Almost all of his LPs fell into one of three grand categories – comedy, Count Basie and Bill Evans. Most of the comedy dated from the sixties -- Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Nichols and May, Jonathan Winters, Allan Sherman. On Jan. 6, 1993, the day Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev died and TV news covered only the latter, we fumed until my friend put The 2000-Year-Old Man on the turntable and we could finally finish our pizza. (Something similar happened on April 30, 1983, when Muddy Waters and George Balanchine shared a date with death.)

His Basie collection was immense – hundreds of recordings. I can date the start of our friendship from the day I told him I had interviewed Basie a year before the great man’s death. But Evans was something else. For Steve, the pianist was scripture – deep, inspirational and inerrant. He told me You Must Believe in Spring, an album Evans recorded in 1977, had saved his life. He was convinced the title song, by Michel Legrand, and the “Theme from M*A*S*H” (“Suicide is Painless”) had kept him buoyed when he wanted to sink.

Evans (1929-1980) has that effect on people, some of whom are not otherwise given to jazz. People take Evans personally. His recordings are accessibly moody, and many of us respond to music primarily or exclusively through the emotions – like my friend who, discordantly, played accordion. I’ve been listening to Moon Beams, an album of ballads recorded by Evans and his trio in May 1962. It was the first trio album he made since the death of his bassist Scott La Faro a year earlier. La Faro died at 25 and his work appears on fewer than 20 albums. He’s one of those sad, Keats-like figures in jazz – Clifford Brown is another – whose promise is exceeded only by the bounty of his abbreviated accomplishment. Here’s Whitney Balliett on the chemistry between Evans and La Faro:

“When Evans formed a trio, late in 1959, with [La Faro] and Paul Motian on drums, a peculiar thing happened: The burden of being the soloist instead of a soloist appeared too much for him, and he became increasingly ruminative and withdrawn. He experimented endlessly with slow, cloudy numbers, and the singing climaxes all but vanished. Then, in the spring of 1961, La Faro, a stunning musician who tried to draw Evans out by working contrapuntally with him and by playing daringly executed solos, was killed in an accident, and Evans work became even more closeted and gloomy. The irony was uncomfortably plain: Evans, shy to the point of pain, had become a young Werther.”

On Moon Beams, Evans is accompanied by Motian and bassist Chuck Israels. Even without knowledge of La Faro’s death, thoughtful listeners will recognize the album as emotionally wracked but free of self-pity. It’s grieving music, sometimes painfully beautiful. Absence is always present, and that’s why it reminds me of Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River.” Back from the First World War, Nick Adams hikes, sets up camp and fishes so methodically, with such obsessive attention to detail, every move becomes as quietly stylized as a Japanese tea ceremony. Hemingway never mentions shell-shock or trauma, and Evans never plays for tears. He’s not your run-of-the-mill heroin addict. On songs like “I Fall in Love Too Easily” (Sammy Cahn-Jule Styne), “If You Could See Me Now” (Tadd Dameron) and “In Love in Vain” (Leo Robin-Jerome Kern), he calmly and systematically dismantles melodies, sometimes reassembles them, and slows tempos. There’s no schlocky Sturm und Drang, and the performances illustrate the distinction between introspection and mere narcissism. This is from a piece Balliett wrote about Evans in the nineteen-sixties:

“The most impressive of modern pianists is Bill Evans, a pale, shy, emaciated figure who wears glasses and long hair combed flat, and who, when he plays, hunches like an S over the keyboard, his face generally turned away from his audience, as if the struggle of improvisation were altogether too personal to be practiced in public. For Evans, improvisation is obviously a constant contest – a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private, inner-ear music and an equally intense wish to express his jubilation at having found such a music within himself.”

Balliett said of a 1974 performance by Evans, “Henry James would have relished such intricate footwork.”