In the spring of 1958, Miles Davis was in search of a new piano player, and a new sound. He found both in an unlikely figure: Bill Evans, a shy, neatly combed, bespectacled white boy from Plainfield, New Jersey. Evans, who was 28 at the time, had been in New York for a little less than three years, steadily building a reputation as a sensitive and original player. He joined Davis’s sextet, and seven months later the ensemble—which included Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, John Coltrane, Davis, and Evans—entered the studio and recorded, in just two sessions, the beautiful, contemplative, wrenching Kind of Blue, one of the great masterpieces of American music, and of American art in general.
Evans’s influence on Kind of Blue was profound; its deep, languorous palette, realized with such startling maturity so quickly, did not burst into being ex nihilo. Evans had patiently ground its pigments through years of serious training and careful attention. Attention is key—and for whatever reasons, Evans had the patience and courage to demand conviction from every note. He said that he always preferred playing a few fully meant notes to going “all over the keyboard on something I wasn’t clear about.” His playing seems to well up naturally, unrushed, from a deep emotional and intellectual reservoir. Davis had been searching for a cooler, more spacious sound and when he found it in Evans’s piano, he absorbed and expanded it, to immediate, wonderful effect.
The short-lived collaboration that produced Kind of Blue can seem almost fated—as if Evans and Davis, its principal architects, were brought together at the precise moment when each of them was ready to propel the other in new and spectacular directions. His triumph with the world-renowned sextet gave the ever-insecure Evans confidence to keep thinking and feeling for himself, and in doing so, to craft a rich and singular oeuvre that has repeatedly widened the expressive parameters of jazz.
Evans always strove, above all, for expressive fluidity, and insisted that such striving was accomplished by way of disciplined workmanship. Happily, he had habits of mind to match his scholarly appearance: He was a great student of music theory and connoisseur of the traditions that mattered to him, both jazz and classical. His classical training began at age six, and extended up through his bachelor’s degree, earned in 1950 from Southeastern Louisiana College. Much of Evans’s musical innovation is, in fact, a feat of syncretism. His jazz playing borrows, and very liberally, from the classical tradition.
When jazz aficionados look for words to describe Bill Evans’s sound, they often resort to dramatic sensual metaphors. In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote, “Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano . . . the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” The palpable beauty of Evans’s playing, its clarity, precision, and nuance, had been gradually forged by the unique demands of playing classical compositions. He explained, for instance, that it was through playing Bach that he had learned to depress the keys, not with his fingers, but by releasing the weight of his hand—a method that opens up a pianist’s dynamic range. His pedal work, too, was developed by his classical training far beyond the level of any of his jazz contemporaries.
Evans’s chordal idiom is similarly dazzling, a combination of limpid transparency and thick, meditative opacity. The piano, as Evans remarked with pleasure, is uniquely able to sing in multiple, beautifully overlapping, voices. No jazz pianist before him had endeavored to make so many different voices sing in such complex, lovely harmony; after him, very many have done so, and to beautiful ends. But while the emotional depths plumbed in Evans’s playing are deeply, authentically his own—he is a supremely vulnerable, candid player—this chordal language is unabashedly borrowed. Evans (like Miles Davis) was a longtime devotee of the French Impressionist composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and any Evans fan who listens to their piano compositions will recognize the provenance of his profound, glassy chords.
Grateful as he was to play in the Davis sextet, his tenure there was brief. Evans quit, in fact, shortly before the recording of Kind of Blue but, happily, agreed to come back for the sessions. His reasons for departure were mostly nonmusical: Evans had been the only white player in Davis’s group, at a time when black players (chief among them Davis) were beginning to earn the recognition and remuneration they had long deserved. Davis’s mostly black audiences were, by and large, rankled that the most prestigious piano chair in jazz was now occupied by a retiring white man in professor’s garb. Always sensitive, Evans found the chilly receptions and outright hostility unbearable.
Soon after leaving, he formed his own piano trio with a pair of players (drummer Paul Motian and the young bassist Scott LaFaro) who were ready and willing to push the classic trio model in exciting new directions. Evans was unsatisfied with the standard jazz combo dynamic, in which one player at a time would solo and the others would confine themselves to comping—essentially holding down the structure of the song, giving the soloist a canvas on which to paint. From its inception, this new trio began to explore a more flexible, fluid form of interaction. Once again, Evans’s classical training was a lodestar: “After all,” he remarked, “in a classical composition, you don’t hear a part remain stagnant until it becomes a solo,” and stagnant comping was anathema in the new trio.
Fifty years ago this summer, the group was engaged for a two-week stand at their favorite club, the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Orrin Keepnews, a producer for Riverside Records, quickly convinced the group to set down a live recording, and tape rolled on a Sunday afternoon and evening, June 25, 1961. The result is the stuff of jazz legend. Riverside released the session as two records, Waltz for Debby and Sunday at the Village Vanguard, and then in 2005 it issued a three-disc box set, The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961.
The Vanguard sessions capture a young group at the vertiginous height of innovation. And as with Kind of Blue, the music is not just novel; it’s wonderful. Evans’s playing is as lovely and understated as ever, as reflective and introspective—and even more so, because in Scott LaFaro he has an ideal conversation partner. LaFaro, only 25 at the time, casts himself headlong into the role. His beautifully lyrical lines twist and twirl around Evans’s solos, sometimes stepping up to the fore, answering Evans note for note or setting a contrasting foil, sometimes receding into the background, giving a note the air it needs to sing. His solos are imaginative and moving.
The collaborations on these recordings are always accomplished and sometimes sublime. What the trio had essentially achieved, and what many piano trios since have tried to replicate, is an audacious act of synthesis. They managed to take the model of complementarity, perfected in classical chamber music, and fuse it with the tilting bravura of improvised jazz. Great jazz improvisation is not formless and uncomposed: Its unique dare is to compose on the fly, to feel (as it goes) the form and direction that the music should take. But it is one thing to compose a lovely solo by oneself; it is entirely another to undertake, with other musicians, an act of simultaneous composition. To do so takes a phenomenal level of trust in your fellow players, and a mysterious level of spiritual, aesthetic communication.
All, in this case, amidst the chatter and clatter of a tiny New York nightclub.
The achievement of the Evans/LaFaro/Motian trio has inspired generations of jazz players, but the trio itself was not to last long. Ten days after the Vanguard session, LaFaro crashed his car on a New York highway and was killed. Evans was devastated, and though he was to produce many more fine recordings before his own death in 1980, he never felt or sounded so at home as he had with Motian and LaFaro at the Village Vanguard.
Fifty years later, their achievement stands as a monument to the expansive possibilities of jazz, that quintessentially American music that dares to make its stand, as Evans often said, “in the moment.” Throughout his career, and especially at the Vanguard, Bill Evans demonstrated that if a musician feels them both to the core, the American bravado of jazz and the European refinement of classical music can be authentically, and fruitfully, combined. In the case of the Vanguard sessions, the result is a great and deeply American work of art, at home in a society that descends, in innumerable ways, from Europe. Put more directly, jazz and classical music are two legitimate and wonderful parts of our cultural patrimony.
In a 1945 interview, Duke Ellington said that the burgeoning influx of white players to the formerly black-dominated jazz scene was not a bad thing; it just meant “Jazz is American now. American is the big word.” In the half-century since Evans, LaFaro, and Motian took their classically tempered jazz to the stage of the Village Vanguard, the word has gotten that much bigger.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a writer in Boston.
