BILL EVANS, A POET BY PETER PETTINGER

AND A REVIEW BY TERRY TEACHOUT

Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“IT IS A COMMONPLACE of psychology that people remember very precisely the circumstances in which they learned of certain historic events — for Americans, the death of John F. Kennedy, in China the death of Mao Tse-tung. A great many musicians and other music lovers can recall with comparable vividness their discovery of Bill Evans.

In 1963, in Auckland, New Zealand, a fifteen-year-old boy, hearing piano music emanating from a shop, entered, listened to his first Bill Evans record, and burst into tears. This event changed the course of Alan Broadbent's life. He went on to become one of the finest jazz pianists in a generation of players influenced by Evans. And more than twenty years later, he recalled that moment of discovery as if it had been a week ago.

I recall my own discovery of Evans with similar clarity. It occurred in the early summer of 1959, shortly after I joined Down Beat. In the office, I noticed among a stack of records awaiting assignment for review a gold-covered Riverside album titled Everybody Digs Bill Evans, bearing the signed endorsements of Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Ahmad Jamal, and others of like stature. I took the album home and, sometime after dinner, probably about nine o'clock, put it on the phonograph. At 4 a.m. I was still listening, though by now I had it memorized.

I remember my amazement not so much at the brilliance of the playing — itself cause enough for wonder — as at the emotional content of the music. Until then I had assumed, albeit unconsciously, that I alone had the feelings therein expressed. His playing spoke to me in an intensely personal way. And as the years have gone by, I have discovered that he had the same effect on many people. Martin Williams, in his annotation to the complete set of Bill's Riverside recordings, reissued by the Fantasy label in 1984, refers to Bill's as "some of the most private and emotionally naked music I have ever heard."

Music is the art that expresses the inexpressible, the language beyond language that communicates what words can never convey, summoning shades of emotion for which we have no words. 

And no one had ever evoked emotions that I feel the way Bill Evans did. Since he has had this effect on so many other people, many of whom are fanatic in their admiration of his work, musicians and laymen alike, one faces the inescapable conclusion that Bill Evans was "saying" something in his music of prodigious pertinence to our era and the people doomed to live in it.”

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