Gunther Schuller and Bill Evans

[sgcim]

Was reading through the GS autobiography today, and happened on a few pages dealing with the friendship between GS and BE.

They were kind of brought together by Tony Scott and Geo. Russell, and first collaborated on Russell's "All About Rosie", whose piano solo GS calls one of the greatest in jazz history.

They got together in 1960 at GS' apt in NYC, and would play four hand versions of Wagner's operas, in addition to Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy!

Though GS had a long and close relationship with John Lewis as his jazz pianist, he said that BE was the only jazz pianist who could improvise on his third stream music and stay within the spirit of the piece.

He then recounted how BE SIGHT READ Milton Babbitt;s "All Set"- dynamics and all...

They lost touch with each other for a few years, and then BE knocks on his door in 1963, and asks to 'borrow' some money.

GS notices BE looks a little out of it, but gives him $15.

The next day BE is back, asking him for more money, and the next day, and the next day... until after a month or two of this, GS' wife tells him to turn BE down, or they're going to go broke.

GS finally realizes what's going on, and sends BE on his merry way- and never sees him again...

You have to admire GS' ability to recognize the ability of lesser known players such as Eddie Costa ('phenomenal talent') and Sticks Evans (could sight read difficult polyrhythmic parts, and then serve as house drummer for Atlantic Records' R&B artists).

And then there's the story of how Don Cherry and Ornette first got Jimmy Giuffre to play free jazz at the Lenox School of Jazz....

Fascinating reading.

[optatio]

[Larry Kart]

Was reading through the GS autobiography today, and happened on a few pages dealing with the friendship between GS and BE.

They were kind of brought together by Tony Scott and Geo. Russell, and first collaborated on Russell's "All About Rosie", whose piano solo GS calls one of the greatest in jazz history.

They got together in 1960 at GS' apt in NYC, and would play four hand versions of Wagner's operas, in addition to Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy!

Though GS had a long and close relationship with John Lewis as his jazz pianist, he said that BE was the only jazz pianist who could improvise on his third stream music and stay within the spirit of the piece.

He then recounted how BE SIGHT READ Milton Babbitt;s "All Set"- dynamics and all...

They lost touch with each other for a few years, and then BE knocks on his door in 1963, and asks to 'borrow' some money.

GS notices BE looks a little out of it, but gives him $15.

The next day BE is back, asking him for more money, and the next day, and the next day... until after a month or two of this, GS' wife tells him to turn BE down, or they're going to go broke.

GS finally realizes what's going on, and sends BE on his merry way- and never sees him again...

You have to admire GS' ability to recognize the ability of lesser known players such as Eddie Costa ('phenomenal talent') and Sticks Evans (could sight read difficult polyrhythmic parts, and then serve as house drummer for Atlantic Records' R&B artists).

And then there's the story of how Don Cherry and Ornette first got Jimmy Giuffre to play free jazz at the Lenox School of Jazz....

Fascinating reading.

I find it hard to believe that at this late date in GS' life, and given how much experience he must have had with jazz musicians over the years, it could have been news to GS that the BE who showed up at his door was a junkie on the mooch. Further, how could GS in 1963 not at least have heard through the grapevine that BE was an addict. He had been since at least 1959.

[AllenLowe]

Sticks Evans? huh; knew his ex-wife back in the '70s, she was friends with Nan Evans, Bill's wife, though no relation to Sticks.

Didn't know much about him.

[Larry Kart]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticks_Evans

[sgcim]

Sticks Evans? huh; knew his ex-wife back in the '70s, she was friends with Nan Evans, Bill's wife, though no relation to Sticks.

Didn't know much about him.

GS described him as a talented photographer and poet.

When I was doing student teaching in Brooklyn College, my mentor told me that Sticks had just quit teaching for the NYC public school system after a very short time.on the job.

I took this as a warning of some type, because my mentor had just found out I was a jazz musician...

Les Spann had also taught in the NYC system, but I haven't found any info about it. Gigi Gryce also taught chorus in the Bronx, under his Muslim name.

Yusef Lateef mentored in the Bronx under a friend of mine. They had some very memorable experiences...

Edited May 7, 2015 by sgcim

[Larry Kart]

Just got Schuller's book from the library. Gunther's not responsible for it, but the first sentence from the Introduction by Joan Shelley Rubin:

https://www.rochester.edu/news/experts/index.php?id=169

is almost astonishingly stupid:

"Near the beginning of his landmark study 'Early Jazz' (1968) Gunther Schuller describes a chord pattern called 'fours' that jazz musicians sometimes introduce into the conventional thirty-two bar song form. After noting that the pattern can give rise to intriguing sounds when the improvisers play different parts of the whole structure as the piece progresses, he remarks, 'The 'bridge' produces especially interesting combinations."

"[A] a chord pattern called 'fours'.... [T]he pattern can give rise to intriguing sounds when the improvisers play different parts of the whole structure as the piece progresses..." etc.

Would you run that by me again, Joan?

[sgcim]

Was reading through the GS autobiography today, and happened on a few pages dealing with the friendship between GS and BE.

They were kind of brought together by Tony Scott and Geo. Russell, and first collaborated on Russell's "All About Rosie", whose piano solo GS calls one of the greatest in jazz history.

They got together in 1960 at GS' apt in NYC, and would play four hand versions of Wagner's operas, in addition to Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy!

Though GS had a long and close relationship with John Lewis as his jazz pianist, he said that BE was the only jazz pianist who could improvise on his third stream music and stay within the spirit of the piece.

He then recounted how BE SIGHT READ Milton Babbitt;s "All Set"- dynamics and all...

They lost touch with each other for a few years, and then BE knocks on his door in 1963, and asks to 'borrow' some money.

GS notices BE looks a little out of it, but gives him $15.

The next day BE is back, asking him for more money, and the next day, and the next day... until after a month or two of this, GS' wife tells him to turn BE down, or they're going to go broke.

GS finally realizes what's going on, and sends BE on his merry way- and never sees him again...

You have to admire GS' ability to recognize the ability of lesser known players such as Eddie Costa ('phenomenal talent') and Sticks Evans (could sight read difficult polyrhythmic parts, and then serve as house drummer for Atlantic Records' R&B artists).

And then there's the story of how Don Cherry and Ornette first got Jimmy Giuffre to play free jazz at the Lenox School of Jazz....

Fascinating reading.

I find it hard to believe that at this late date in GS' life, and given how much experience he must have had with jazz musicians over the years, it could have been news to GS that the BE who showed up at his door was a junkie on the mooch. Further, how could GS in 1963 not at least have heard through the grapevine that BE was an addict. He had been since at least 1959.

GS described himself as being very naive about the drug scene at that time. He was more involved with the NY classical scene than the jazz scene at that time.

He was explicit in describing two different Bill Evans'; the articulate, well-groomed young man, who came for bi-weekly four hand piano get- togethers at GS' apartment.

and the second Bill Evans three years later; an unkempt, mono-syllabic guy that just asked for money and immediately left, with just a gruff, 'thanks'.

[sgcim]

Just got Schuller's book from the library. Gunther's not responsible for it, but the first sentence from the Introduction by Joan Shelley Rubin:

https://www.rochester.edu/news/experts/index.php?id=169

is almost astonishingly stupid:

"Near the beginning of his landmark study 'Early Jazz' (1968) Gunther Schuller describes a chord pattern called 'fours' that jazz musicians sometimes introduce into the conventional thirty-two bar song form. After noting that the pattern can give rise to intriguing sounds when the improvisers play different parts of the whole structure as the piece progresses, he remarks, 'The 'bridge' produces especially interesting combinations."

"[A] a chord pattern called 'fours'.... [T]he pattern can give rise to intriguing sounds when the improvisers play different parts of the whole structure as the piece progresses..." etc.

Would you run that by me again, Joan?

LOL! Two different worlds collide.

GS described his and Evans' in depth discussion of the Erwartung Triad, and hinted at his influence on Evans' use of it in his left hand voicings.

[Larry Kart]

I’m now in the midst of Schuller's vast and at times oddly toxic autobiography. Without doubt the man has lived a rich, varied, and valuable life, and the book is full of all sorts of information and some good stories, but Schuller can be such a damn know-it-all, and when he doesn’t actually know it all, that can really grate. For instance, “I didn’t hear Parker live most of that year [1947] because he was … in California, seriously … involved with drugs, which affected his playing quite negatively, as can be heard on the recordings of that year, especially 'Relaxin’ at Camarillo.'”

Schuller has to be thinking of Parker’s "Lover Man," where he had the infamous physical/emotional breakdown that led to his being hospitalized for six months at the state mental hospital in Camarillo -- a recording that Parker never forgave Ross Russell for issuing. Made upon his return from Camarillo, at its title makes clear, "Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” is one of Parker’s best recordings.

I’m also put off by Schuller's seemingly out of left field references to his erotic life — e.g. about how his beloved wife Margie became at his urging more sexually uninhibited over time and how when he was in the south riding around with a group of people in a crowded automobile and an attractive woman ended up sitting on his lap, he twice became “tumescent.” OK, maybe, if these things had something to do with anything else, but they don’t. Also, I’m sure that Gunther’s two sons are delighted to read about their late mother’s behavior in the bedroom, though perhaps that was a frequent topic of conversation in the Schuller household.

BTW, on the Erwartung Triad, and GS' 'influence on Evans' use of it in his left hand voicings'; that's interesting because one of the things about much later Evans that I find off-putting is the disconnect IMO, both harmonically and emotionally, between those "advanced" left-hand voicings and the often relatively sugary songs Evans chose to play and the way he more or less preserved, even cherished, their arguably simplistic melodic sweetness. Erwartung meets "People" or "Make Someone Happy"? -- I think I'm going to lose my lunch.

[Larry Kart]

Something else I just learned from Schuller's biography: the gifted Julius Watkins was a longtime drug addict who died at a fairly young age (55) largely because of his necessarily scuffling lifestyle. Damn.

[JSngry]

Something else I just learned from Schuller's biography: the gifted Julius Watkins was a longtime drug addict who died at a fairly young age (55) largely because of his necessarily scuffling lifestyle. Damn.

I figured that was the deal when I heard that his nickname was "The Phantom" - nobody would see him until just a few minutes before downbeat, and then he'd be gone again soon as the gig was over. But he never developed a reputation for unreliability that I know of. I'm sure there were instances along the way, but it seemed like the guy generally worked in some pretty straightforward business environments.

[Larry Kart]

Another odd glitch in Schuller's autobiography. On page 389 he writes of the time the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in which Schuller was first horn, spent several weeks accompanying the Sadler Wells Ballet:

”I was really looking forward to playing with [conductor-composer Constant] Lambert... And I didn’t like it when some of our musicians, realizing that [Lambert] was a homosexual, kept calling Lambert ‘Constance’ — under their breath, giggling like little children.”

While I don’t doubt that the Met musicians did what Schuller says they did, Lambert most certainly was NOT a homosexual, viz:

'Lambert's first marriage was to Florence Kaye; their son was Kit Lambert, one of the managers of The Who. After divorcing Kaye, in 1947 Lambert married the artist Isabel Delmer; after his death, she married Alan Rawsthorne. Lambert earlier had an on-and-off affair with the ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn. According to friends of Fonteyn, Lambert was the great love of her life and she despaired when she finally realized he would never marry her.”

Further, if you don’t trust Wikipedia, I’ve read a great deal about Lambert’s colorful life over the years because one of my favorite fictional characters, Hugh Moreland in Anthony Powell’s “A Dance To the Music of Time,” is modeled on him, and I’ve never encountered any suggestion that Lambert was homosexual.

Lambert died in 1951. It would have been nice if Schuller, in the intervening years, had managed to get the facts about Lambert's personal life straight, so to speak.

[Michael Weiss]

I had the opportunity to play under the baton of GS for several years in the 1990s - in the Mingus Epitaph Orchestra and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. Notwithstanding all respects and courtesies due, etc...., there were any number of trying, one could say incredulous, sometimes pathetically hilarious moments. It was instructive to witness how many of the elder statesmen just rolled with it seemingly unperturbed - Eddie Bert, Britt Woodman, Joe Wilder, Buster Cooper, George Adams, Joe Temperley, Don Butterfield...

But just one case in point:

In one of the Epitaph movements, my part began with five bars of rests per stave all the way down the page. In the first rehearsal I'm counting my ass off making sure I don't get lost. As I'm counting I'm listening to the orchestra expecting to hear something having to do with five bar phrases. All kinds of polyphony going on. After a while without success I give up counting altogether and just listen. Sure as shit it's just a goddamn twelve bar blues!

[sgcim]

I’m now in the midst of Schuller's vast and at times oddly toxic autobiography. Without doubt the man has lived a rich, varied, and valuable life, and the book is full of all sorts of information and some good stories, but Schuller can be such a damn know-it-all, and when he doesn’t actually know it all, that can really grate. For instance, “I didn’t hear Parker live most of that year [1947] because he was … in California, seriously … involved with drugs, which affected his playing quite negatively, as can be heard on the recordings of that year, especially 'Relaxin’ at Camarillo.'”

Schuller has to be thinking of Parker’s "Lover Man," where he had the infamous physical/emotional breakdown that led to his being hospitalized for six months at the state mental hospital in Camarillo -- a recording that Parker never forgave Ross Russell for issuing. Made upon his return from Camarillo, at its title makes clear, "Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” is one of Parker’s best recordings.

I’m also put off by Schuller's seemingly out of left field references to his erotic life — e.g. about how his beloved wife Margie became at his urging more sexually uninhibited over time and how when he was in the south riding around with a group of people in a crowded automobile and an attractive woman ended up sitting on his lap, he twice became “tumescent.” OK, maybe, if these things had something to do with anything else, but they don’t. Also, I’m sure that Gunther’s two sons are delighted to read about their late mother’s behavior in the bedroom, though perhaps that was a frequent topic of conversation in the Schuller household.

BTW, on the Erwartung Triad, and GS' 'influence on Evans' use of it in his left hand voicings'; that's interesting because one of the things about much later Evans that I find off-putting is the disconnect IMO, both harmonically and emotionally, between those "advanced" left-hand voicings and the often relatively sugary songs Evans chose to play and the way he more or less preserved, even cherished, their arguably simplistic melodic sweetness. Erwartung meets "People" or "Make Someone Happy"? -- I think I'm going to lose my lunch.

Evans could have a sentimental side, but many of his decisions were made for him by Helen Keane.

While she probably saved his life and career, she also made some choices for him that he didn't necessarily agree with...

I've never heard his recording of "People"(and don't look forward to), but he did manage to make something interesting out of that schmalzy POS "Make Someone Happy".

I saw BE the second to last time he played at the VV, and his displacement of of the harmonic rhythm of the tunes he was playing was so beyond me at that time, I had no idea what the hell he was doing.

He demonstrated this displacement technique on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz show on the tune "All of You", and MM had great difficulty playing with him on it.

She was so unnerved by Evans' displacement of the harmonic rhythm of the tune, she called out, "I feel like I'm swimming against the tide!"

I thought his choice of playing "Suicide is Painless" towards the end was due to his fondness for Johnny Mandel tunes, but as Steely Dan put it in their song "Jack of Speed" BE had a 'one way ticket on the shriek express"...

[Larry Kart]

This from Dan Morgenstern's 1964 Down Beat interview with BE is at once the most direct and for me a quite puzzling series of remarks from him on some of this :

'The only way I can work is to have some kind of restraint involved, the challenge of a certain craft or form and then to find the freedom in that…. I think a lot of guys…want to circumvent that kind of labor…. I believe that all music is romantic, but if it gets schmaltzy, romanticism is disturbing. On the other hand, romanticism handled with discipline is the most beautiful kind of beauty.'

Also: 'After acknowledging that the brilliant, lucid, and “completely unpremeditated” two-piano improvisation that he and Paul Bley played on George Russell’s 1960 album Jazz In The Space Age “was fun to do,” Evans says: “[but to] do something that hadn’t been rehearsed successfully, just like that, almost shows the lack of challenge involved in that kind of freedom."'

[HutchFan]

Larry, why "puzzling"?

Don't you think Evans' remarks are standard, garden-variety criticism of New Thing freedoms?

Just like Robert Frost's critique of poetry lacking traditional structures: "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."

[Larry Kart]

I saw BE the second to last time he played at the VV, and his displacement of of the harmonic rhythm of the tunes he was playing was so beyond me at that time, I had no idea what the hell he was doing.

He demonstrated this displacement technique on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz show on the tune "All of You", and MM had great difficulty playing with him on it.

She was so unnerved by Evans' displacement of the harmonic rhythm of the tune, she called out, "I feel like I'm swimming against the tide!"

I thought his choice of playing "Suicide is Painless" towards the end was due to his fondness for Johnny Mandel tunes, but as Steely Dan put it in their song "Jack of Speed" BE had a 'one way ticket on the shriek express"...

OK -- but what's the musical/expressive point of radically displacing the harmonic rhythm of "All of You" or any such Broadway piece of material? First, there is an obvious organic connection between the song's harmonic rhythm as Cole Porter conceived it. Alter that if you will, and if you can, but why? Only, one would think, as Martin Williams once said of the way jazz musicians typically alter the melodies of standard tunes, "because they can come up with better melodies (e.g. Charlie Parker on 'Embraceable You.'") But are the displaced harmonic rhythms on standards that BE would come up with musically/expressively "better" in any sense or are they just trickier, more difficult to grasp and execute? Further, is the resulting musical/expressive relationship between those displaced harmonic rhythms and what remains of the original tune all that coherent? I think of the early BE piece that was (I believe) built around such displacements, "Five," where the piece itself and BE's solo work were close to one thing.

Looking back on the passage from that 1964 interview with BE, I finally came to think that for him the attraction to romantic material per se and 19th Century musical Romanticism (two different things, the former implying "imaginative, visionary, idealistic," the latter referring to a movement in the arts whose hallmarks were the anti-rational, a belief in the values of intuition, instinct, and private expression and a search for transformation and transcendence that would go beyond the limits of human society) were one thing and close to omnipresent. Thus he introduces rational disciplined "labor" (e.g. tricky displacements of harmonic rhythm, left-hand figures based on the "Erwartung" chord, etc.) to undercut/transform the potentially "schmaltzy" nature of the romantic material to which he is drawn and come up with "... the most beautiful kind of beauty ... romanticism handled with discipline.'" For me, both the musical results and the thinking that seemingly underlies it are kind of f---ed up. Maybe BE is jazz's Franz Schrecker?

[Larry Kart]

Larry, why "puzzling"?

Don't you think Evans' remarks are standard, garden-variety criticism of New Thing freedoms?

Just like Robert Frost's critique of poetry lacking traditional structures: "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."

To partially repeat myself, this is what I wrote in my book:

Plausible words, perhaps, but the value that Evans seemingly places on restraint in itself leads one to ask, What is being restrained and why? Evans’s “challenge of [working within] a certain craft or form” is not merely an account of his own necessary practice; it lends to that practice an aura of moral virtue (“I think a lot of guys …want to circumvent that kind of labor….”). In other words, for Evans certain sorts of musical labor are not only valid but they also validate. And should an aesthetically valid outcome be reached in a seemingly non-laborious manner, that can be disturbing. Thus in 1964 , after acknowledging that the brilliant, lucid, and “completely unpremeditated” two-piano improvisation that he and Paul Bley played on George Russell’s 1960 album Jazz In The Space Age “was fun to do,” Evans says: “[but to] do something that hadn’t been rehearsed successfully, just like that, almost shows the lack of challenge involved in that kind of freedom.”

Drawing a comparison between Bach and César Franck in his Man and His Music: Romanticism and the Twentieth Century, Wilfrid Mellers refers to the “tension [in Bach’s music] between linear independence and the dramatic logic of harmony.” In early Evans, as in Bach, that tension was alive, rich and fruitful; in much later Evans, as in much Franck, logical and increasingly elaborate harmonic labor seemingly exists to curtail, if not defeat, linear melodic independence. (Pettinger says of Evans’s 1966 composition “Unless It’s You”--and the same could be said of many latter-day Evans improvisations--“…[T] he interest was mostly harmonic …, the significance of almost every note [of the top line] dependent on its attached harmony.” )

One thinks again of Evans’s recording of “Tenderly,” with its dramatized joust between restraint and the desire to break way from it, of Evans’s actute sensitivities, and of his apparent attempt to damp them down after the death of his uncannily empathetic musical partner Scott LaFaro. In 1983 I began by referring to Bill Evans as a minor artist. What I would say now is that Evans was an artist whose conflicts threatened to overwhelm his gifts, and that it was his fate to spend much of the latter part of his career making a music in which those conflicts were in effect disguised, even denied.

Me again, in the present:

Further, as I said in my previous post or two, there are several pretty real conflicts at work here in I think in Evans' mind and musical practice -- between his tricky/difficult rational-labor modifications of romantic popular songs and the organic musical nature of those songs and between the romantic as BE conceived it and between musical romanticism, as it is commonly understood and as I think BE understood it too. If BE's music had tried to and managed to express these conflicts, fine; Instead, especially in his later years, I think he tried to disguise them or even to deny that they existed.

In particular, the conflict and/or potential confusion arises because BE is trying to tame or modify or whatever the arguably anti-rational, instinctual tides of romanticism through hyper-rational means.

About Frost's famous quip, I think BE's " romanticism handled with discipline is the most beautiful kind of beauty" was not a quip at all, in tone or content.

[AllenLowe]

just to add, re-some of the above comments on Evans' later state of mind; the last year or two he was miserable and heavily addicted and seemed to be trying to kill himself; he also, in his final descent, refused hospital care.

[sgcim]

I saw BE the second to last time he played at the VV, and his displacement of of the harmonic rhythm of the tunes he was playing was so beyond me at that time, I had no idea what the hell he was doing.

He demonstrated this displacement technique on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz show on the tune "All of You", and MM had great difficulty playing with him on it.

She was so unnerved by Evans' displacement of the harmonic rhythm of the tune, she called out, "I feel like I'm swimming against the tide!"

I thought his choice of playing "Suicide is Painless" towards the end was due to his fondness for Johnny Mandel tunes, but as Steely Dan put it in their song "Jack of Speed" BE had a 'one way ticket on the shriek express"...

OK -- but what's the musical/expressive point of radically displacing the harmonic rhythm of "All of You" or any such Broadway piece of material? First, there is an obvious organic connection between the song's harmonic rhythm as Cole Porter conceived it. Alter that if you will, and if you can, but why? Only, one would think, as Martin Williams once said of the way jazz musicians typically alter the melodies of standard tunes, "because they can come up with better melodies (e.g. Charlie Parker on 'Embraceable You.'") But are the displaced harmonic rhythms on standards that BE would come up with musically/expressively "better" in any sense or are they just trickier, more difficult to grasp and execute? Further, is the resulting musical/expressive relationship between those displaced harmonic rhythms and what remains of the original tune all that coherent? I think of the early BE piece that was (I believe) built around such displacements, "Five," where the piece itself and BE's solo work were close to one thing.

Looking back on the passage from that 1964 interview with BE, I finally came to think that for him the attraction to romantic material per se and 19th Century musical Romanticism (two different things, the former implying "imaginative, visionary, idealistic," the latter referring to a movement in the arts whose hallmarks were the anti-rational, a belief in the values of intuition, instinct, and private expression and a search for transformation and transcendence that would go beyond the limits of human society) were one thing and close to omnipresent. Thus he introduces rational disciplined "labor" (e.g. tricky displacements of harmonic rhythm, left-hand figures based on the "Erwartung" chord, etc.) to undercut/transform the potentially "schmaltzy" nature of the romantic material to which he is drawn and come up with "... the most beautiful kind of beauty ... romanticism handled with discipline.'" For me, both the musical results and the thinking that seemingly underlies it are kind of f---ed up. Maybe BE is jazz's Franz Schrecker?

Evans' displacement of the harmonic rhythm of a song like "All of You" created an almost dizzying effect (that Marian McPartland experienced first-hand) that greatly added to the expressive nature of his improvisations on the tune.

That his displacements were initially hard to comprehend, didn't mean they were just attempts to be 'tricky', because after repeated exposure to said displacements, I found the sense of tension and release created quite profound.

Unfortunately, I can't find this sense of profundity after exposure to music not based on the tension-release emotional experience that Evans would create in his music; it seems that subjectively for me, there is no 'there' there.

In that same interview with Marian McPartland, Evans said the most important requirement of a tune he would choose to perform would be that it had to have a solid architecture.

Without said architecture, the results would not be satisfying, musically.

Edited May 11, 2015 by sgcim

[HutchFan]

just to add, re-some of the above comments on Evans' later state of mind; the last year or two he was miserable and heavily addicted and seemed to be trying to kill himself; he also, in his final descent, refused hospital care.

Despite those facts, I think many of Evans' final recordings are mind-blowingly good -- i.e., the Paris concert released on Elektra-Musician and the two box sets from the last Keystone Korner engagement.

Naturally, YMMV.

Edited May 11, 2015 by HutchFan

[Larry Kart]

I agree that some of the final or near-final recordings are very good: I like "The Last Waltz" in particular. OTOH, other live recordings from about the same period seem grimly formulaic to me. One assumes that the ingestion and effects of drugs played a fluctuating role in determining what shape BE was in when it came time to play. I can't stand most of the vaunted "Turn Out the Stars" set from the Village Vanguard in 1980, all those obsessive spinning wheels going pretty much nowhere versions of "Nardis" especially.

[AllenLowe]

I have to admit, my mind was quite blown one morning while living in New Haven, maybe '79 or '80; getting a phone call that went:

"hi Allen this is Bill Evans. Do you know where I can get some coke?"

[HutchFan]

I have to admit, my mind was quite blown one morning while living in New Haven, maybe '79 or '80; getting a phone call that went:

"hi Allen this is Bill Evans. Do you know where I can get some coke?"

Wow. I can see how a call like that would be a little... strange.