BILL EVANS: Suicide Was Painful

His friend Gene Lees called Evans’ death “the slowest suicide in history.”

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

The following is included in my BILL EVANS READER which is available exclusively on Amazon as a paperback and an eBook.

As a way of understanding and appreciating his music, it's always of interest to me to enter Bill’s world from different perspectives which brings me to the piece on Peter Pettinger’s biography BILL EVANS How My Heart Sings which was published by Yale University Press in 1998. A paperback copy remains in print.

Pettinger’s book is not a full blown, critical and discerning biography, rather it’s written more along the lines of Jerome Klinkowitz’s Listen Gerry Mulligan: An Aural Narrative in Jazz [1991] in which the recorded music forms the basis for observation and discussion.

Pettinger’s principal interest is in Bill’s music, more so than the man that made it.

Because the book is over 25 years old, it’s not easy to track down full reviews of it even with the help of internet search engines.

However, I’ve managed to find a couple, as detailed below, along with a slew of short commendations which follow the lengthy assessments by Terry Teachout and Terry MacDonald.

As Doug Ramsey explains in the introduction to his review in the JazzTimes, it might be a good idea to have your Bill Evans recordings handy as you read Peter Pettinger’s BILL EVANS How My Heart Sings.

“Bill Evans, one of the greatest creative musicians of the century, lived only to the age of 51. In the last half of his life, in a triumph of will and the creative impulse, he maintained iron discipline as an artist while he let heroin and cocaine drag him to destruction. His friend Gene Lees called Evans’ death “the slowest suicide in history.” Pettinger’s book weaves together analysis of Evans’ music with facts of his life before and after he became a narcotics addict. An English concert pianist and university music teacher, Pettinger died before the book was published.