sgcim

Wow, thanks!

I didn't like "California, Here I Come" either, and the Turn Out the Stars sessions were bootleg recordings that had inferior sound recording. Why anyone would bother to listen to or criticize them is beyond me. As I said before, to characterize BE's recorded output as erratic because of poorly recorded bootleg albums made when he was at death's door is not even worth commenting on... As I'm sure you know, the "Turn Out the Stars" set was lavished with praise when it came out. Also, it was not a bootleg I'm pretty sure ("original sessions produced by Helen Keane," it says in the booklet) and was professionally recorded by Malcolm Addey. You and I both think that BE often is in harried form there, but we're apparently in the minority. OTOH, much though TOTS makes my teeth grind, I find that BE is in quite good form for his latter days on much of "The Last Waltz" -- performances that were dubbed off the mixing board at the Keystone Korner by Todd Barkan and that took place much closer to the very end (8/31-9/8 '80) than what's on TOTS (6/4-6/8 '80). (BE died 9/15 '80). When I first heard TLW, I expected the worst; its virtues were a surprise. I call any recording of BE that he didn't approve, bootleg, and I've never listened to TOTS so I shouldn't have commented on the recording quality. Helen Keane was both a curse and a blessing for BE; while she made his music available to a wider audience and took care of ALL of the business aspects of his career, she wasn't a musician, and shouldn't have made every decision for him. i think he did veer off from his original direction on the "New Jazz Conceptions" due to her, but without her, he might have wound up as a violinist who worked with him back then found him: banging his head on the piano because he was so disgusted with the wedding gig he was playing! Helene Keane became BE's personal manager in 1962 -- by that time "New Jazz Conceptions" and the the style associated with it were distant specks in the rearview mirror. Heck, by that time, the music of the LaFaro-Motian Village Vanguard trio also was a thing of the past. Wow, I didn't think it was as late as 1962. That explains a lot. As much as I like Tony Bennett, pairing BE and TB was not my idea of a good fit. I'm glad he's hooked up with Lady Gaga now. I hope they'll be very happy together...

I didn't like "California, Here I Come" either, and the Turn Out the Stars sessions were bootleg recordings that had inferior sound recording. Why anyone would bother to listen to or criticize them is beyond me. As I said before, to characterize BE's recorded output as erratic because of poorly recorded bootleg albums made when he was at death's door is not even worth commenting on... As I'm sure you know, the "Turn Out the Stars" set was lavished with praise when it came out. Also, it was not a bootleg I'm pretty sure ("original sessions produced by Helen Keane," it says in the booklet) and was professionally recorded by Malcolm Addey. You and I both think that BE often is in harried form there, but we're apparently in the minority. OTOH, much though TOTS makes my teeth grind, I find that BE is in quite good form for his latter days on much of "The Last Waltz" -- performances that were dubbed off the mixing board at the Keystone Korner by Todd Barkan and that took place much closer to the very end (8/31-9/8 '80) than what's on TOTS (6/4-6/8 '80). (BE died 9/15 '80). When I first heard TLW, I expected the worst; its virtues were a surprise. I call any recording of BE that he didn't approve, bootleg, and I've never listened to TOTS so I shouldn't have commented on the recording quality. Helen Keane was both a curse and a blessing for BE; while she made his music available to a wider audience and took care of ALL of the business aspects of his career, she wasn't a musician, and shouldn't have made every decision for him. i think he did veer off from his original direction on the "New Jazz Conceptions" due to her, but without her, he might have wound up as a violinist who worked with him back then found him: banging his head on the piano because he was so disgusted with the wedding gig he was playing!

Good, maybe you can help me defend Phil Woods from the barbaric assaults that go on against him here!

I didn't like "California, Here I Come" either, and the Turn Out the Stars sessions were bootleg recordings that had inferior sound recording. Why anyone would bother to listen to or criticize them is beyond me. As I said before, to characterize BE's recorded output as erratic because of poorly recorded bootleg albums made when he was at death's door is not even worth commenting on...

I once did a gig with an elderly Jewish trumpet player, who was a close friend of Davey Schildkraut, and he said DS was heavy into Jewish mysticism, the Kabala Bill Evans' recorded output was controlled by Helen Keane; he didn't choose the people he recorded with, Helen did. I'm sure if it was BE's choice, he would've recorded with musicians like Schildkraut, Don Joseph (whom he had a private session with) Jimmy Raney and others.

Just got back from a great gig with a great big band I never played with before, and they played a few Willie Maiden charts that smoked. They were all minor blues. One was a fast waltz that had a few bars of 5/4 in it. Hip genius indeed!

After reading about his lifestyle in the Harry Nilsson biography, I'm amazed he made it to 70. Harry barely made to 53. RIP, you party animals...

Do you want us to beg?

Yes, that's the CD I was talking about. It was recorded terribly by Mike Harris, who secretly recorded a lot of BE's gigs, and the sound on this CD is especially bad. Like the review said, it sounded like one long Philly Joe Jones drum solo because of the mic placement. It never should have been released. I don't think that you can compare this recording to "California Here I Come", because: 1) BE didn't know it was being recorded, and never would have approved its release in a million years. 2) The sound is horrendous on it. 3) "California Here I Come" had no examples of Evans as out of control as he obviously was on the "Gettin' Sentimental Over You " CD. 4) BE was aware that he was being recorded on "CHIC" and wasn't mainlining coke. The "GSOY" CD should be played as part of a drug abuse education course for young jazz pianists in college. Just from listening to the way he rushed through "In Your Own Sweet Way" would be enough to 'scare the kids straight'. Using one secretly taped,incompetently taped, drug impaired performance to assess a musician's playing in general, is not a good idea. I've heard so many poor live performances by musicians generally accepted as great, that using them as examples of their playing in general would be ridiculous.

The only time I thought that BE rushing unmusically was on one of the bootleg CDs they made towards the end of his life, when some people might have been aware that he was in bad shape, so they decided to tape every gig he played. I'm sure he wouldn't have let them release the live CD I'm talking about if he knew it existed, but he was obviously wired up on that one gig. BE was such a perfectionist that he didn't even want the first Verve LP he made with Getz released, but he had switched record companies after that, so he had no say in the matter. I saw the BE trio the last time they played at the VV, and as people here have attested to, his rhythmic/harmonic displacement approach was so advanced that even Marian McPartland had a hard time playing standards with him on her show. MM: "Oh, I feel like I'm swimming against the tide!"

He attributed it to drug issues.

I've always used The Vanilla Book. http://www.ralphpatt.com/Song.html

If you can put up with the obsessive, suicide-inducing verbosity of Phil Schaap every Monday at 12 noon on WKCR, he's still doing a two hour feature on BE's music leading up to the LaFaro- Motian BE Trio. Today he offered some crackpot theory on BE's tempo variation issues and told us about the significance of getting LaFaro's autograph on a napkin at the VV in 1961 with SLF penning the name SCOTTY instead of SCOTT!

Great find. Too bad he didn't sing "Make Me Rainbows" again.

She was interviewed on her 86th birthday on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC: http://www.wnyc.org/story/vocalist-sheila-jordans-70-years-jazz/

Yeah, I don't see the chicks going wild for the dude above when they could have Chettie to fantasize about. There was a French film about Bill Evans. Maybe they got Jerry Lewis to play Bill.

That's a laugh. By the late 60s he had lost almost every tooth in his mouth. Some British dentist couldn't believe how bad his mouth looked, and gave him a whole new set of teeth for free. On "The Bill Evans Album" there's a picture of his new set of teeth somewhere on the back cover. A friend of mine said there was a video of how he looked before he got his new teeth, and it's pretty ghastly. It might be on "The Universal Mind of Bill Evans", featuring the world's two most dysfunctional brothers together, for the first and only time. You can see the weird dynamic going on between the two brothers; how Harry is kind of putting words in his zonked out brother's mouth, and BE seems to be having a little problem with his mobility... When Helen Keane took over his career, she literally took care of everything for him. All he had to do was play.

In the Pettinger book, it made him sound like he ditched Ellaine for a young, beautiful blonde who would be a good mother for his kid. For Evan's sake I hope Larry and BE were right. The Evans genes were totally fucked up. The father was a serious alchie, Harry had been exhibiting schizophrenia symptoms when his wife dumped him and he killed himself, and BE........

Ok not great. Too sanitized for my taste and few truly callous comments. I just finished Benson's autobiography, and found it an interesting and strange read. He seems to want to defend himself on two issues that must bother him a great deal. The first was his concert tour of Apartheid South Africa. The fact that he opened the book with the story of the tour, must mean that there was controversy at the time about it, though he doesn't give the year that it took place. Since he mentions that Warner Bros. was his record company at the time, I'm assuming it must have been sometime around 1976 to 1980, He admits when he signed the contract to play in Capetown, he didn't know that South Africa was a separate country from Africa (he thought it was just the southern part of Africa) and had never heard the word apartheid before. He said that the reason he did the tour was that they "made him an offer that he couldn't refuse". The second issue he deals with almost constantly in the book is the commercial viability of jazz. Repeatedly, he emphasizes that his main concern is pleasing the audience, and if that takes jazz, R&B, rock, blues, latin, fusion, pop, then that's what he'll play and sing. His concern with Bird's music undergoes a metamorphosis throughout the entire book, and the book ends with this exchange betwixt himself and a fan: "After telling me how much he enjoyed the show, he told me, 'Mr. Benson, there was one guy back in the day. He almost destroyed jazz. He had a name that sounded like an animal'. I said, 'You mean Bird?' He said, 'That's it!' 'Charlie Yardbird Parker.' Yeah, that's the name. Yardbird. They said he was going to destroy jazz.' On the way back to the hotel, I thought about what the man said, what the man believed, and you know what? He was right. Charlie Parker improvised in a manner that wasn't appreciated by every jazz ear at the time. He broke the mold. But he broke it in a way that enabled those who study his work to put together in a new, beautiful manner, with a whole new identity that brought us to where we are at now. And I think we're in a pretty good place."

I heard them at the Vanguard on consecutive nights in '79, and they were intense. They played, as I recall, Up With the Lark and Gary's Waltz, among others. They were burning, though the tempos speeded up quite a bit. Yea, BE was a total mess towards the end. Andy LaVerne said he wanted them to let him die in the hospital. They tried to create an image of a clean cut, professorial dude, but he was anything but... The narcissistic side of him came out when he became obsessed with having a son and ditching his prostitute/junkie GF of many years (Elaine, who threw herself under a subway in reaction)for a young blonde who was good breeding material... The funniest example of his ego came out on the live record he made with Getz. Getz called a tune that they didn't rehearse for the concert (I forget what country), and Evans sat on his hands and shook his head when the bass player and drummer tried to keep playing with Getz. Getz was left playing all alone. Where in the world did you hear that Ellaine was a prostitute? A former prostitute.

Getz was very apologetic about the scene with Evans, On the next cut, he makes a speech about it being BE's birthday, and he plays a beautiful version of "Happy Birthday" for the birthday boy. A friend of mine, who has pretty much based his entire life and playing style on BE, bought the DVD of the concert, and you can see BE with a sadistic little grin shaking his head 'no' to Eddie Gomez and the drummer(?) as they leave Getz out in the wilderness, all alone. As AL said, BE was probably in a severe clinical depression, (after the suicide of his beloved brother), and it touched off this desperate desire to breed at any cost. If you watch his last television appearance on The Merv Griffin Show, you can see what shape he was in, by the weird speech he made before he started playing.

Yea, BE was a total mess towards the end. Andy LaVerne said he wanted them to let him die in the hospital. They tried to create an image of a clean cut, professorial dude, but he was anything but... The narcissistic side of him came out when he became obsessed with having a son and ditching his prostitute/junkie GF of many years (Elaine, who threw herself under a subway in reaction)for a young blonde who was good breeding material... The funniest example of his ego came out on the live record he made with Getz. Getz called a tune that they didn't rehearse for the concert (I forget what country), and Evans sat on his hands and shook his head when the bass player and drummer tried to keep playing with Getz. Getz was left playing all alone.

How 'bout when he sang "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"?

That interview was done back in the early 60s, I believe, when Oscar was still playing with the swing, drive and intensity that made him a force of nature, so I could understand BE's admiration. I don't know what happened to Oscar after that. I can't listen to any Oscar from the Pablo period on. i spoke online with Evan Evans about his father's music. He and his father viewed his improvisation as an advanced form of spontaneous composition, on a higher level than jazz- a new form of classical music. No room for glibness...