Photo by Brian McMillen
Where to begin, with Bill Evans? Let’s start with what, to me, is his greatest work, because it’s one of those songs that can wring honest tears from a stevedore: “Blue in Green,” the version that the pianist recorded with Miles Davis on the Kind of Blue album.
It’s just the slowest, softest jazz, but not soft as in elevator jazz, soft as in this is what we’re made of; this is what we break down into when, at the end of the day, we come home, put down our bags, sit down, look at the wall, and take off the last mask. It couldn’t be more real. Miles’ and Coltrane’s horn solos make it lovely, yes, but it’s Evans’ tune. He wrote it, and his solo seems to ascend, briefly, from that valley of moodiness to a more joyous place in the version he recorded with his own trio. “Blue in Green,” to me, blurs the lines between jazz, poetry, painting, dance, you name it. Its modal lines are chromatic like a painting, and its beauty is haunting like a reverberating line from a Rilke poem. When art ascends to these exalted levels, putting lines between the mediums seems like so much foolishness. It’s the kind of ballad I could listen to on repeat till I fall asleep, and wake up to, knowing that it did something indescribable to my dreams.
Maybe I’m gushing, but I’m not alone. Jazz pianist Kara Baldus Vandiver loves Bill Evans’ music as much as I do, but she can actually play it—and play it she will, at a free Jazz at Holmes concert at Washington University, the evening of April 7.
Vandiver, a music professor, could be more of a fan than I am. She has a “shrine,” as she jokingly calls it, to Evans in her home, consisting of a framed, autographed photo of the man hunched over the piano in his distinctive poor posture, improvising in communion with his muse, plus a few other items.
The pianist, like most Evans aficionados, is crazy about his famous trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. When she plays the Jazz at Holmes series, she’ll play with her own trio, including her husband Miles Vandiver on drums and Eric Stiller on bass.
“We’re going to emphasize those Paul Motian/Scott LaFaro years,” she says, “with some songs from the Explorations and Sunday at the Village Vanguard albums. That was one of the greatest jazz trios of all time; there was so much interplay, they were blurring the line between who was soloing and who was an accompanist.”
In particular, Evans and bassist LaFaro enjoyed a rare rapport that came to a shocking end when LaFaro died in a car wreck at age 25. It was some time before Evans could write or play music again, and some say he was never the same.
Vandiver knows all the salient points about Evans’ life and work:
–The way Miles Davis offered him a rare respect. “Miles Davis was always quoted saying Bill Evans played sound, not chords. He played text and colors, he was like a painter—he had technique levels you hadn’t really heard before,” she says.
–Evans’ influence on the next crop of jazz lions. “He really influenced players of today like Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea,” she adds. “A lot of things that jazz pianists do with our left hand we model after Bill Evans.”
–His decline into heroin and cocaine, a jazz cliché, which ultimately ravaged his body and took him at age 51. “One of Evans’ friends once said his lifelong drug problems turned his life into ‘the longest suicide in history,’” she says. All that beautiful art, and all that unstoppable self-destruction, so often linked in the public imagination.
–Evans’ versions of “Some Other Time,” “My Foolish Heart,” and, of course, “Blue in Green,” sure would be nice to hear at Washington University next month.
Maybe Vandiver and trio will perform another of his signature tunes, “You Must Believe in Spring,” as a nod to the new season. The song of hope was released posthumously in 1980, right after the great man checked out.
