sgcim

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...

Let's get real; if you think BE sounded like a cocktail pianist, you're listening to him on a very superficial level. I've never heard any cocktail pianists sound even remotely like him. And for that matter, I honestly can't think of any jazz pianists who have the same touch, complexity of melodic invention, motivic development, harmonic sophistication and continuity of thought BE had. As a perceptive European audience member said at the Village Vanguard after the BE trio finished a tune, 'Thank Heavens for Bill Evans!'

2) Philly Joe was supposedly the guy that first turned BE on to horse (speaking of the horse's mouth ). The story was that someone told BE that he was rushing, so he asked PJJ what he should do. PJJ said "Here, try some of this... Maybe that's why he was BE's fave drummer... 5) Maybe so, but that would make BE JC The question is: who was the missing link between BP and BE? Andy LaVerne has postulated that it was Sonny Clark.

We just played a Ted Nash arrangement last night in a Tentet I play in- great writing!

According to a friend of mine who led groups at the real Birdland that featured at different times Eddie or Bill on piano, EC and BE were close friends, and may have had an influence on each other. BE had a more percussive approach, like EC, on the early stuff with Geo. Russell and "New Jazz Conceptions", while EC's last recordings,Shelly Manne's "1-2-3" and the Brookmeyer/Terry LP, featured a more modern BE harmonic approach. Another LP that had the two together was "Jazz Abstractions" which also featured LaFaro, Dolphy and Jim Hall. it don't get much better than that!

My sentiments, exactly. IMHO, there is BE, and then there is everybody else. i can't think of any other musician other than Bird or Trane that has had more recorded tributes to him. There's even a Bill Evans University somewhere in France! And we all know that "Everybody Digs Bill Evans"!!

I tend to agree with Joel's statement. I recently read "Jade Visions", Scott La Faro's bio by his sis, and there's a lot of talk about SL pleading with BE to get off of junk, so it was probably making his playing sluggish, while SL was a freaking dynamo up till his untimely death at 25. Yesterday, Phil Schaap played BE's early recordings with Geo. Russell and the "New Jazz Conceptions" LP, where he was a force of nature considering PS said it was recorded in 1956 (which sounds wrong). There's a tendency to overrate the SL, PM, BE trio, because of the innovation of the freeing of SL's role in the PBD trio, which is understandable, because it did change jazz history. However, as JF said, it was mainly SL's playing that stood out, and BE's playing was much better before and after the SL trio, I asked a pianist who I play with a lot (who jokingly refers to himself as an 'idiot savant BE', because he;s spent almost 50 years studying and copying BE's style) about the SL,PM,BE trio, and he said they were still developing the trio, and hadn't gotten it together yet.

Congrats! Fred's writing for small groups is a pleasure equal to the efforts of Geo. Russell, Manny Albam, Giuffre, John Benson Brooks, Bill Smith and others during that period.

Guy, I seem to have noticed a pattern on this board where you ridicule almost every one of my posts. I usually manage to restrain myself from commenting on your posts, which I rarely agree with, but your knee jerk reactions are getting a little tiresome. Consider yourself to be granted the privilege of being the very first person I've ever placed on my Ignore list, in my sixteen years of participating in forums on the net.

Just finished this one. I read it because I've always been interested in whether Johnny Mac was actually a mainstream (bop) jazz guitarist before he hit the fusion big time. The answer to that came pretty quick, when on page 91, Rick Laird, who certainly was a mainstream jazz player in the 60s, said this: "I never considered John a jazz guitar player. Not in the same sense I'd consider Jim Hall or someone like that... He didn't know the repertoire in the same way that I did, because I'd been exposed to it a lot with Ronnie Scott...He didn't strike me as being a real jazz enthusiast-more individual, and he did become quite individual. I still don't consider him a jazz guitar player...The way I would describe jazz guitar at that time was someone who knew the repertoire of material that was popular at the time, like Miles Davis compositions, all the jazz standards-"ATTYA", Stella By Starlight", those type of standard jazz things. He wasn't very knowledgeable in that area at all. Not a criticism, just an observation. He was an interesting guitar player, but not a jazz guitar player." I've found JM's attempts at mainstream jazz pretty sad- the Bill Evans album debacle,, the corny-ass "Cherokee" performance on the Tonight Show, the poor man's Django attempt on Coryell's "Spaces" LP ('"Rene's Song"). Sure, Johnny Mac has amazing chops, but it takes more than chops to bop. One of the few UK guitarists of that time who could play mainstream jazz well was mentioned a few times in the book, Terry Smith. The author, definitely of a more rock/folk background, seems confounded when Terry Smith won the Melody Maker Poll for Jazz Guitar in 1968 and '69.