Am 13. Juni 1995 führte Bill Kirchner zwei Diskussionsrunden über Bill Evans in den Studios von WKCR-FM in New York – man hörte gemeinsam Musik von Bill Evans und unterhielt sich danach darüber.
An der ersten waren die Pianisten Warren Bernhardt, Marc Copland, Dick Katz, Steve Kuhn und Andy LaVerne beteiligt. Auszüge (Auslassungen sind nur innerhalb der zitierten Passagen markiert, meist gibt es davor und danach noch einiges mehr zu lesen):
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“Scrapple from the Apple” (vom Konitz/Marsh-Mitschnitt, bei dem Evans für Lennie Tristano einsprang – nicht in der Box, aber auch bei Verve erschienen – sehr lohnenswerte Doppel-CD)
KIRCHNER: What made Bill’s accompanying special?
KUHN: He stayed out of the way [while] he could direct a certain thing. He really accompanied in the true sense of the word, and that’s something to be learned. There’s a whole art to that. I heard him play for singers, which was rare, but I have him accompanying Monica Zetterlund, a Swedish singer. He really knew how to accompany her. What he played was meaningful, it wasn’t just there for the sake of being there.
[…]
KUHN: I just know that Helen [Keane, his manager] didn’t want him to back up singers, but [they] were on his case, they all wanted him.
[…]
BERNHARDT: A lot of Bill’s harmonic conception, he told me, came out of playing Bach. He’d base it pretty much on a four-voice polyphony. His basic chords were based on a melody, a counter line, some other textural note, and a bass note. And everything else evolves from that. The way he wrote changes is pretty simple – they usually boil down to a four-part thing.
“Spartacus Love Theme” (disc 2, track 3)
KIRCHNER: He was very picky about keys, too, wasn’t he?
BERNHARDT: I remember when he was staying with me: He’d go for days and days, playing the same tune through all the keys, never, making a mistake – whichh drove me nuts. Drove me crazy. He was very careful about selecting what keys he wanted, what felt right for him. He’d pick a lot of sharp keys that are generally neglected.
KUHN: Yes, but that still has a lot to do with the bass, the open strings and the natural harmonics of the [instrument], which I became aware of when I worked with Scotty [LaFaro].
BERNHARDT: [Playing] in A.
KUHN: And E and B. The sound is different, because every key sounds different. When playing with a string bass, the sharp keys sound especially nice.
[…]
“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” (disc two, track 18)
KIRCHNER: I think whimsy has been overlooked in a lot of discussion of Bill’s playing. What do you think about that?
[…]
COPLAND: I used to have a cassette of [an Evans performance] from the Vanguard, when he was playing with Marc [Johnson] and Joe [LaBarbera]. Some asshole in the audience said, “Play ‘Melancholy Baby’,” and Bill played a sixty-second solo rendition of it, it was hilarious, it was beautiful, you know, just very quick, and the whole audience just went crazy.
BERNHARDT: Did you ever hear “The Dust Rag Rag”? That’s another silly one. It sounds like your mom dusting the piano keys – [yet] it really made sense. He played that at the Vanguard one night and it killed everybody.
LaVERNE: Has anybody heard that tape floating around of Bill and Scotty rehearsing?
COPLAND: Arguing over one chord change?
LaVERNE: Yes, I think it’s “My Foolish Heart”. It’s really quite revealing; it seems like Scotty is the one in charge.
KUHN: Oh, absolutely. Bill had the greatest respect for Soctty. And Bill being the kind of personality he was, I mean, with his personal problems and all – if he really respected somebody he could let that person just go with it. No, he listened to Scotty quite a lot.
COPLAND: I remember when the trio with Marc and Joe was playing in Paris, [making those] records, which I don’t think are on Verve –
KIRCHNER: – Elektra/Musician.
COPLAND: On volume two there’s a version of “Nardis”, which they were doing [often] late in Bill’s career. All of a sudden he’s doing this serious harmonic exploration, and all sorts of innovation seems to be happening. Although it was clearly still Bill – maybe because he knew he didn’t have a lot of time left – at that point he leapfrogged a lot of pianists and became a vanguard force, musically, for the last couple of years lf his life. “Nardis” was just three solos; it was odd, they never played together except the head.
ERNHARD: I think they played the head at the end.
COPLAND: To have somebody at the end of his career make some serious musical strides, that’s almost unheard of. Guys usually flame out, it’s downhill, whether it’s physical, emotional, artistic, or whatever. Not that he wasn’t playing great [before] – but all of a sudden, he went into overdrive.
BERNHARDT: He was really excited with that trio, too. I remember at the Vanguard he just grabbed me and said, “You gotta listen to this. We got every molecule in the room scintillating.”
COPLAND: In the last couple of years of his life he was certainly having health problems – but even then, Bill became the leader big-time, musically. Marc’s a wonderful bass player, you know, definitely one of the best in the world, and Joe was fabulous, [but] …
KUHN: Yes, but those were the two personalities he could lead, people like that.
BERNHARD: He had weak periods, too.
KUHN: That’s not to denigrate him (or them) at all.
COPLAND: He took real strong musical direction of that trio, and he [played] music that, with all the guys, coming up behind him, was just making real innovations.
[…]
COPLAND: You know the playing Bill does in that Don Elliott group? [disc eighteen] That is very germane to these Tristano discussions [die ich oben wegliess – gtw]. It’s the most aggressive Bill Evans I’ve ever heard. Real early. [And on these late recordings] he’s just reaching back to [that early music]. Obviously [his music] changed over the years, but he’s reaching back to the way he used to play before he got all romantic.
“The Dolphin – After” (disc eighteen, track 2)
BERNHARDT: I don’t think that the Fender Rhodes is Bill’s axe. Chick [Corea] could get a Fender Rhodes and make it sound like he owned it. For Bill it was a chore, you know.
COPLAND: It’s a primitive Fender Rhodes …
BERNHARDT: Yes, it’s not a good one.
[…]
BERNHARDT: Bill used to approach a Fender Rhodes [with resignation]: “Yeah, I’ll do it.”
COPLAND: I would have kept him off it. Bill feels uncomfortable on this.
KIRCHNER: Didn’t he and Eddie [Gomez] do a duo record in the Seventies where he played –
BERNHARDT: – Intuition?
BERNHARDT: He sounded great on that one. It was phased and souped up a little bit.
“Misplaced Cowpoke” (disc one, track 11)
KIRCHNER: The interesting thing to me is that Gary [McFarland]’s solo is in F, Jim [Hall]’s in A-flat, and Bill’s is in D-flat. I picked this particular cut because it’s an example of Bill playing the blues. I recently [reviewed] a new book on jazz records [„Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz“] by an author who will remain nameless. One of his comments about Bill that weren’t terribly favorable was, “Bill Evans couldn’t play the blues”.
KATZ: That’s all right, they said the same thing about Art Tatum. If you listen to “Aunt Hagar’s Blues”, that’ll put that one to rest.
BERNHARDT: I’d rather hear any of the gentlemen in this room play with that same rhythm section … to me it wasn’t really distinctively Bill’s thing. Once again I had the feeling that he [was] kind of uncomfortable.
KATZ: Yes, that’s an entirely different climate than he usually played in.
COPLAND: I understand what you’re saying. You know that George Russell record, The Outer Space –
KIRCHNER: – Jazz in the Space Age.
COPLAND: If I hear this record in that context, relating the two …
BERNHARDT: Oh, there is some great Bill on this record, too, it just didn’t happen to be there.
COPLAND: Bu he doesn’t sound as out of it as [he does on] “The Dolphin”. There are records where he got thrown into different situations and he responded great.
BERNHARDT: Like the one with Claus Ogerman. It was amazing: he didn’t who up – [Fussnote: this is a dispute, others day Evans was at the session]
COPLAND: Well –
BERNHARDT: But he didn’t show up.
COPLAND: What?
BERNHARDT: And they had to overdub the trio, the whole trio.
COPLAND: Really, it was totally overdubbed? (Fussnote: Claus Ogerman does not recall any overdubs, but Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra comprises two orchestra session – possibly one without Evans’s trio and a trio/solo session probably without orchestra, parts of which were edited together without being, strictly speaking, overdubbed.)
BERNHARDT: Yes, they had half of the New York Philharmonic at Rudy [Van Gelder]’s.
COPLAND: Unbelievable. And he didn’t who up. Well, that’s a great example [of what] we were talking –
BERNHARDT: It was typical, “the Phantom”.
KIRCHNER: That’s why that record sounds disjointed to me. It sounds like trio and orchestra.
BERNHARDT: It is, it was orchestra and trio.
COPLAND: See, I don’t feel that at all, I guess it’s a personal thing.
KUHN: When I first came to New York, in 1959, I had just spent some of the summer at the Lenox School of Jazz, where I had a chance to hang out intensely with Bill for three weeks. I then came to New York to seek my fortune and was really nervous about the whole experience. I had no money (not that I [have] any more now), but Bill was very, very supportive. There was never a feeling of any kind of competitive thing. It was hard to get work, I was trying to work with a trio and I couldn’t get arrested. I spent a ot of time with him in his apartment, yet he never tried to turn me on. Never once did we discuss anything about the chemical stuff, [which] I knew he was into.
KATZ: He did that very discreetly.
KUHN: I was doing a lot of stuff, but never as heavily into it as he was. He was like a big brother to me, and I’ll never forget that. At one point, a couple of years on, Helen Keane was managing me, and I asked her, “Doesn’t Bill get upset about this? I mean, it’s competitive in a way, although his name is certainly a hell of a lot bigger than mine.” She said, “No, I spoke with him, and he said there was no problem.” Now, I spoke with Helen in the last [few] years, and she said it used to bother him a bit.
And then in the early to mid-Seventies, he was having problems getting work. He was considering going back to Miles’s band, they were talking about a reunion band of some kind, which he never did, of course. Bu the struggled, he struggled a lot. Aside from his personal stuff, it was hard getting work for him.
[…]
COPLAND: I was working with Art Farmer at Blues Alley [in Washington, D.C.], and Bill was down the street at the Cellar Door. Ira Sabin of Jazz Times called me over during the break and said, “Art likes your playing so much, he called down to the Cellar Door. He’s got Bill coming down to hear you.” So I was very nervous, because I was sitting at the piano, and apparently about four feet in back of me was Bill at a table. I never did see how he reacted, but after the first tune, Art looked over my head and said, “See, I told you.” So it was very important for me – just his whole existence.
BERNHARDT: […] Every time I’d go to hear him, when he was with Marty [Morell] and Eddie [Gomez], it seemed like he was painting himself into some kind of corner. I don’t know if it was choice of material or chemical or what. He was rushing a lot and going through the motions.
And I thought it was odd for a guy that had so much – that’s why I suspected it might have been something else. Do you know what I mean, painting yourself into a corner? I mean he almost had no escape from the material.
KATZ: That could be physical, too.
KUHN: Oh, sure, I remember seeing him at the Vanguard when he had no use of his right hand, and he just –
COPLAND: Oh, you were there when he played all the notes with the left hand?
KUHN: [Yes,] maybe he just put the right hand down for a chord.
COPLAND: [Gary] Peacock still talks about that. I said, “What did it sound like?” He said –
KUHN: – “You wouldn’t know the difference.”
But for me, Scotty was the catalyst. Eddie was just coming on the scene at that time, he wasn’t where Scotty was at that stage. Scotty had an incredible influence on Bill.
COPLAND: Oh, man, “Jade Visions”, that last tune they played together [at the Village Vanguard] – I think he was looking for that for the rest of his career. Had Scotty been around or maybe had the trio with Gary kept going … that was pointing in a real forward-looking direction. Listen to that – it could have been recorded last week.
[…]
KATZ: I don’t think there’s anybody around that I’ve heard, who’ll make the kind of impact Bill made, in terms of affecting everybody.
KUHN: He used to talk about that and he’d say, “I just feel as though I’m vey lucky [that it’s] me. It could’ve been you, it just happened to be me.” And I said, “Bill, no.“
BERNHARDT: He tried to tell me he was just a regular 35-year-old piano player, and I said, “Wait a minute, you got something wrong there.”
KUHN: And he believed it, he’d say, “It could’ve been anyone.” He was talking [Don] Friedman, Hod O’Brien …
KATZ: There wouldn’t be any Don Friedman, with all due respect, if it weren’t for Bill. He really was a trailblazer.
MICHAEL LANG (Produzent der Box): Do you remember when you first encountered him?
KATZ: He played a sophisticated version of Bud when I first heard him. He already had internal rhythms going and his lines, but he hadn’t quite gotten into all the voicings yet – at least what I heard [in the beginning]. But very shortly after that he just was full blown.
LANG: But in terms of touch, do you hear any Teddy Wilson?
KATZ: No.
COPLAND: Bill cited Nat Cole.
KATZ: Yeah, Nat Cole is the one, if you listen to Cole’s records carefully, in the way he handled triplets, those records sound very fresh today. He was a very graceful player in any tempo. And the way he handled block chords, I’m sure that had a big effect on Bill, it had to.
COPLAND: When I was playing saxophone, if you were looking for piano players, you were looking for McCoy [Tyner] or someone like that to play with. I was talking with somebody about another piano player, and he said, “No, he’s into that Bill Evans thing.” It was almost derogatory.
Then I went over to the other side – one day I heard this Bill Evans record. It was like I’d reached enlightenment or something. I said, “Oh, my god, this was here the whole time and I hadn’t opened myself up to it.”
Once you open yourself up to it … What he’s doing is not in your face, it’s very subtle.
But it takes somebody with a little more sensibility than the guy having four cognacs and trying to pick up a chick to get it.
BERNHARDT: That’s right, but he could hit you like a ton of bricks when you got it. You knew when you got it, you really had it.
Alle Zitate aus dem Booklet von “The Complete Bill Evans on Verve” (18 CD-Box, 1997)
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