Jump to content

Further thoughts on the Resonance Bill Evans titles


Larry Kart

Recommended Posts

3 hours ago, Chuck Nessa said:

The only "late" Evans I have is "the Last Waltz" box. I bought it 12 years ago and can't remember listening. When I "jones" for some Bill I always gravitate to the early Riversides.

Not too long ago I was in the mood for some Evans trio work and threw on Explorations. I found it awful, like Miles Davis reacting to Cecil Taylor awful. Moved on to some Monk and that scratched the itch. 

 

3 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

About Chet -- allowing for times when he was totally out of it, arguably he got better as he got older, which seems miraculous if you go by the way he looked.

BTW, as Jim says, playing on top of the beat and rushing are not the same thing. One could play right on top of the beat and never deviate a hair tempo-wise. IIRC Shelly Manne was known for never rushing one bit.

A while ago sgcim posted about pianist John Mehegan who notoriously rushed and a bassist who took revenge by deliberately doing the same thing to him on a gig to the point where Mehegan couldn't keep up and then asking "So how do you like it?"

Interesting mention of Manne, who was Evans' drummer earlier in '68 before DeJohnette and Morrell. Again, I haven't noticed any rushing when Manne was there but this convo now has me curious.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You won't be enlightened, you'll be set!

9 hours ago, Dub Modal said:

 Again, I haven't noticed any rushing when Manne was there but this convo now has me curious.

The rushing, it didn't just come on all at once. It was a gradual development. Like, the first Montreux album with DeJohnette, on Verve, is a beaut. The next one, on CTI, not nearly so much. It was just sort of a developing situation, as they say on the TV News,

But the Bill Evans that played so truly awesomely on Blues And The Abstract Truth, that guy...he went away and never really came back. Some of us mourn his loss, actually.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A very tentative answer to the "why" of Evans's rushing has been percolating in the back of my brain for a while, and rather than let it sit there and fester, I'll trot it out and see if it strikes a chord, so to speak. With Evans, as with many pianists, there is/was a synergistic relationship between harmonic density and the rate at which harmonic material/information emerges. One wants -- or at least at one time found -- that the more or less vertical flow of harmonic information more or less matched the linear rate at which that material/information emerged. Examples of that in-tandem exposition from the first period of Evans' career -- say up to "Explorations" -- are so numerous as to not need mentioning. In period two, up through the Vanguard recordings with LaFaro and Motian -- the relationship between the density of the harmonic information's flow and the  rate of its linear emergence  remained in tandem, while at the same time much else shifted. In particular, the flow of harmonic density began to be "shaded" (in terms of variations  in timbre and volume) to a considerable degree and in group dynamics, so to speak -- with La Faro, especially, and Motian  being allowed or asked to take the ball and run with it.

For Evans, and for his trio mates, this increasingly fluid and delicate tri-part balance between the rates and the ways  which harmonic information and linear information emerged was well-nigh ideal. And, of course, that balance was definitvely disrupted by LaFaro's death.

Then, after a fair amount of time had passed, we have Evans and the rather wispy Chuck Israels, plus on a part-time basis Evans and other bassists -- the relationship between Evans and bassists being crucial. Lumping together all the  Evans recordings up to the partnership with Eddie Gomez took shape, I think one can say for sure that by comparison with the Vanguard recordings, Evans' own contribution to the musical mix was much more "foregrounded" in every way. Harmonic information was more spelled out, his touch was much firmer (or more blunt) -- as though the remarkably good-sized portion of the musical space that La Faro used to fill or occupy (more good-sized than was the case in almost any piano trio of the time) now had to be filled or occupied by Evans himself. And how could it be otherwise? At once a "professional" presenter of his music to the public and a man who no doubt needed and wanted to feel reasonably personally inspired to the degree that he felt it now was possible for him to be so, Evans in effect rushed in (no play on words intended; not yet) to fill the gap.

How the arrival of Gomez fit into this, I can only guess. Almost as swift as LaFaro but much blunter or more blustery in tone and with a good deal of "attack" in his phrasing but  with little of the sense of shading and  ever burgeoning lyricism that had made LaFaro a young master whose eventual course of development sadly remains unknown, Gomez - and again this is just a guess -- had the chops to at once vividly evoke for Evans LaFaro's missing presence and make that loss more concrete. Never again, Evans might have felt, will that gap in my musical solar system be filled (Mark Johnson?), and so I must, or I now find myself, pouring more and more harmonic information, often in fairly dense chordal form, into my own playing. And in an attempt to give that increasingly dense and I would say compulsively emerging chordal information the "legs" under its feet that Evans instinctively felt it needed, he began to rush; the problem being (if that's the way to put it) that the subjective sense of added space that Evans might have felt or hoped was the result of increasing the rate at which this increasingly dense harmonic information virtually had the opposite effect. At worst, one had a sense of a more or less clotted, even (by the time of the "Turn Out the Stars" set) frantic rush (again, no play on words necessarily intended, not right now) material, while at other times, even if atdhe pone-time balance between harmonic density and its linear emergence was seldom to be found, the push of the former principle against the latter was genuine -- I would say at least a joust on the level of language  -- rather than merely compulsive, almost a matter of frayed nerve endings,  as I find all those "hamster on a wheel" solo versions of "Nardis" on the "Turn Out the Stars" set to be. A comparison between those performances and Bud Powell's "Un Poco Loca" is enlightening. The latter speaks with daunting clarity of, and in effect masters, it's musical-emotional drama, its dilemmas; Evans' repeated attempts to ascend the slope of "Nardis" leave him and us only with another slide down a glass mountain where another pile of shards lies in wait.

OK -- that's enough for now, or maybe that's all I have to say.

No doubt there are typos in the above, but I don't have the juice left to find and fix them right now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So...the thoughts were coming to him faster than the bands he had would allow for him to play in one pocket, so he had to rush?

Doesn't that sound a bit...undisciplined (as a player and as a bandleader), especially for an artist who made so much about discipline and esthetics and balance an all that stuff?

If that's all it is, the bill Evans had a great mind but was too fucked up a person to really deliver to his optimum potential?

I mean, that may well be right, but that's not what all of his fans, devotees, worshippers are going to be able to get with...

Give me Ran Blake anyday - better harmonies, better time, plus he's living a good long time, the better to prove his points.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No or not quite -- I would say that he was "ingesting" or "emitting" the thoughts faster than they could be/should be emitted within the given frameworks that were in play. He was at the mercy, so to speak, of various sorts of personal-emotional  and musical, maybe even physical, imbalance. BTW when I got to emitting I realized that excretory metaphors were lurking about in the weeds. perhaps with good reason. Doesn't heroin clog you up big time?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Oh, so he was a victim, then?

This is funny to consider, because more than one Evans Worshipper (the highest level of Evansfan) I've known has gone one at great length, and with no small passion, about how "balanced" he was, his playing, his ethos, everything about his was "balanced", and I've always LOL'ed pretty hard at that notion from the first time I heard it, if only because I don't know what the fuck that is supposed to mean. What is this, The Three Jazz Bears, not too this, not too that, just right?

That line of thought seems to tell more about the advocate that it does the subject....all these people unsure of their balance and needing to look to Bill Evans to provide it. Wow....people done gone full-on crackoplestic with that shit.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Oh, so he was a victim, then?"

By "at the mercy of," all I meant was that Evans seemed to have little control over over this shit, not that he was a victim.

BTW, when I wrote for the Chicago Tribune a highly critical piece about Evans, I overheard in a record store an enraged local bass player say that he wanted to kill me. I felt vindicated in part because one of my points in the piece was that Evans' music of the time (this was the mid-'70s; the bassist worked with pianist-vocalist Patrica Barber) gave an air of legitimacy to their own IMO rather wishy-washy "lyricism."  I was less happy to discover that an excellent Chicago pianist whose name I won't mention wanted to punch me out. Around then, and maybe still in some quarters, Evans worship was serious stuff. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

40 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

By "at the mercy of," all I meant was that Evans seemed to have little control over over this shit, not that he was a victim.

Same thing, imo. If you have little to no control over something that negatively affects you, then you are victimized by it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

But the tone of your "Oh, so he was a victim, then?"  -- especially that rather snotty "then" -- was that I was out to give him a pass while you, the SCOTUS judge of all things moral, was made of much sterner stuff I. certainly was not giving Evans a pass, nor do I see how you could have read what I've posted on this thread and think that I was doing so. That's not who I am and it bugs me some that, after all the time we've spent yakking to each other here over how many years now, you'd think that I was that kind of guy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, JSngry said:

Same thing, imo. If you have little to no control over something that negatively affects you, then you are victimized by it.

Was he affected negatively? As noted above, he sometimes rushed when playing solo. So, either it was his own choice, or at least not caused by another musician. 

Edited by Daniel A
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...