JazzProfiles: Jazz Pianist [Bill Evans] : Life on the Upbeat

According to Mr. Wilner, at the time of this writing,” I was just a copy kid, but I was encouraged in my work by the late, great [NY Times critic] Robert Palmer.”

I corresponded with Paul about posting this piece to the blog and he gave his consent.

It’s always a pleasure to feature more writings about Bill Evans on this site and our thanks to Paul for allowing us to bring up his interview with him on this page. 

© Copyright ® Paul Wilner, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.

CLOSTER By Paul Wilner New York Times, Sept. 25, 1977

“ I GREW up in Plainfield,” recalled Bill Evans, the jazz pianist who has won the Grammy Award five times. He was in the den of his house in Closter, the Bergen County community to which he moved a couple of years ago after an apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx proved oppressively small for his growing family.

Now he was remembering the family he came from.

“My mother was born of a Russian immigrant coal‐mining family in Pennsylvania, and my father was of Welsh heritage. My mother was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church—they have marvelous music—and my father was into harmony.

“I started taking piano lessons when I was about 6½. We had a teacher with a very humanistic approach, and by the time I was 9 I was wailing through a lot of moderately difficult classical music and sight‐reading moderately well.”

Mr. Evans fell in love with jazz early.

“I started playing with a high‐school dance band when I was about 12,” he recounted, “and I started ‘jobbing’ around with older guys. They were good musicians, and I learned a good deal.

“We worked anywhere from Elizabeth to New Brunswick three or four nights a week all through high school. Then I worked all summer at different resorts.”

After serving a stint in an Army band near Chicago during the Korean War, Mr. Evans “came back to Plainfield for a year to get my self together to go to New York,” which was then, as now, a mecca for aspiring jazz musicians.

He hit the metropolis in 1955, signed a standard contract with Riverside Records at scale wages almost at once and worked at different clubs.

In 1958, he got his break: A surprise phone call from Miles Davis inviting the young pianist to join Mr. Davis’s quintet for an engagement in Philadelphia.

“The first night there, he asked me if I wanted to come with the band,” recalled Mr. Evans, who jumped at the chance.

Was it tough to be the only white musician in the group?

“It was more of an issue with the fans,” he said. “The guys in the band defended me staunchly. We were playing black clubs, and guys would come up and say, ‘What’s that white guy doing there?’ They said, ‘Miles wants him there—he’s supposed to be there!’

“This is an age‐old disproven theory—that white men cannot play jazz. What black people who are talking that way might be saying is they want their race to get credit for developing the music as a tradition.

“Even then, however, many strains are in it. Most of the tunes in jazz are taken out of Broadway musicals. Miles would have been considered as militant as anyone, and yet he called me.

“Jazz is the most honest music I’ve come across. The really good jazz musicians only respect musicians they feel are worth respecting. There—there are no racial barriers.”

After a year with the Miles Davis group, which also included greats such as Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones, Mr. Evans formed the first of his famous trios with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums.

His home is decorated with photographs of different groups taken by jazz photographers, who are also fans of his.

Riverside releases of his early group are now collectors’ items. “Japan is the only place I know where they have those records freshly pressed and printed,” Mr. Evans said wryly.

Although he has just left the Fantasy label for Warner Brothers, in hopes that his records will be better promoted, Mr. Evans has not gone in for the currently popular jazz‐rock mélange of styles.

The electronic console he received as a signing gift from Warner’s sits forlornly in his music room, next to the more‐played standard piano.

Reticent on the subject of the mass success that groups such as Weather Report and Return To Forever are enjoying, Mr. Evans did say:

“I wonder, when people make a turn like this, how much of it is genuine musical desire and how much is ambition for larger commercial success. Everybody lives with their own destiny, you know. If somebody chooses to play a certain way, they’ve got to live with it.

“I came out of jobbing music, paying my dues, and that’s where I learned to feel a certain form and work with it. I respect musicianship and honest creativity.”

The pianist, who has been accused of aesthetic conservatism, added:

“I’m not scared by the avant-garde. Charles Ives and Schoenberg were out there in 1910, so the sounds don’t bother me. It’s just what you’re doing with them, you know.”

Primarily a family man in Closter, Mr. Evans played for his daughter’s music class one day to “try to give them a little insight into what jazz is and the difference between written music and a more spontaneous form.”

Although he is fairly apolitical, confining negative comments about his new neighborhood to the single observation of “I’d like to see a little more integration,” music in the schools is something that Mr. Evans feels strongly about.

“Whenever budget problems come up, the first thing they cut is the arts,” he said. “The music department in many schools has been almost phased out.

“Physical education has been phased out, too. When I was a kid in Plainfield, we were out of school an hour a day playing and being physical. Here, the kids get out of school very seldom.

“Plato said that gymnastics and music are the two polarities which, at balance, create a broad and balanced personality. Those are the two things that are getting de‐emphasized in the schools.”

Mr. Evans doesn’t socialize with fellow musicians in Jersey very much.

“I don’t know too many guys out here,” he said. “I just come out here to be just a family person.”

And he doesn’t seem to miss the bustle of the city at all.

“Most people think of New Jersey as the exit from the Lincoln Tunnel,” Mr. Evans observed. “They think of Secaucus as a dump. But I’ve been around a long time and, believe me, this is ideal. To live in this style this close to the city is just terrific.”

The pianist next turned his attention to the television set, and played briefly with his infant son, Evan Evans. Then he said:

“I look on myself as a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective, and I try to do things that will speak to me on the level that I respond.

“As I get older, I really feel that my perspective and aims get more simple.”

Mr. Evans has about 90 records released on which he has performed, along with perhaps 40 albums of his own groups and solo performances.

“I’m not so concerned with breaking barriers because I find that style and time aren’t important,” he said. “Things that are good are good and things that aren’t just aren’t.” ■