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Posted: |
May 17, 2016 - 5:54 AM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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I need hear only a few bars of Bill Evans' piano playing and the Manhattan skyline comes into focus.
You could score a film set in Manhattan with nothing but select Bill Evans tracks and it would be 100% effective. Nothing else would be needed.
Not just any old Manhattan, but the black, white, and gray Manhattan of the early and mid '60s. Like Cassavetes' Shadows and Thomas Reichman's Mingus documentary. Evans' music--specifically the 1959-61 trio--is forever burned into my memory; my favorite music of all time.
Ever read the piece of perfection that is the Evans article by Dn Nelson in DOWNBEAT's December 8, 1960 issue? I first read it over twenty years ago and I still refer to it every so often. It not only captures Evans during that great time, it also screams early '60s Mnanhattan. Better than any biography and certainly better than any liner notes.
BTW, the FSM Boarde is a well-known Bill Evans appreciation stronghold--no, not the Star Wars nerds but actually Bill's son, Evan, who used to post here years back.
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Posted: |
May 21, 2016 - 2:30 PM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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Excerpts from Downbeat December 8, 1960:
Evans on Philosophy and Jazz:
"A glance into Evans' library provides an indication of what his mind is up to. The diversity of titles shows how many avenues he has explored to reach his "something"--Freud, Whitehead, Voltaire, Margaret Meade, Santayana, and Mohammed are here, and, of course, Zen. With Zen, is Evans guilty of intellectual fadism, since everyone knows that Kerouac, Ginsberg & Co. holds the American franchise on Oriental philosophy? Evans waved a hand in resignation and said: "I was interested in Zen long before the big boom. I found out about it just after I got out of the army in 1954. A friend of mine had met Aldous Huxley while crossing from England, and Huxley told him that Zen was worth investigating. I'd been looking into philosophy generally so I decided to see what Zen had to say. But literature on it was almost impossible to find. Finally, I was able to locate some material at the Philosophical Library in Manhattan. Now you can get the stuff in any drugstore. "Actually, I'm not interested in Zen that much, as a philosophy, nor in joining any movements. I don't pretend to understand it. I just find it comforting. And very similar to jazz. Like jazz, you can't explain it to anyone without losing the experience. It's got to be experienced, because it's feeling, not words. Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling."
Evans' Way of Life, Specifically His Apartment and Daily Routine:
Bill's way of life is consonant with his anti-hipster philosophy. Jazz jargon constitutes a small factor in his lexicon. "Dig" and "man" he uses frequently, but over-indulgence in hip talk, to him, is an "excuse for thinking." His clothes are just about what's in fashion, he shaves every morning, and his Manhattan apartment is an ordinary three-room affair. A bed, a few chairs, and a kitchen table is the furniture complement, all of it thoroughly bourgeois. A piano takes up half the living room. There is a hi-fi set and a television set, the latter of which he sits before almost every afternoon to apprise himself of the sports scene. He has some 50 books in two bookcases, but only two paintings decorate his walls. One, by Gwyneth Motian, wife of his drummer, Paul Motian, is a small but extremely effective abstraction. The other, by himself, is an attempt at design. It's terrible, but this has not stopped him. He continues to paint with this as his credo: "I can be as good as Klee at least."
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