Home » Jazz Articles » The Jazz Life » My Early Years with Bill Evans, Part 2
My Early Years with Bill Evans, Part 2
Chemical dependencies of various kinds became an inescapable fact of Bill's life. He told me that the only recording he ever made that wasn't under the influence of drugs was his first one.
—Chuck Israels
Herb Pomeroy
trumpet1930 - 2007
Charlie Mariano
saxophone, alto1923 - 2009
Joe Gordon
trumpet1928 - 1963
Serge Chaloff
saxophone, baritoneb.1923
Steve Kuhn
pianob.1938
Art Farmer
flugelhorn1928 - 1999
Jimmy Knepper
trombone1927 - 2003
Barry Galbraith
guitar1919 - 1983
Bill Evans
piano1929 - 1980
Joe Benjamin
bassb.1919
Gunther Schuller
composer / conductor1925 - 2015
George Russell
composer / conductor1923 - 2009
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic1922 - 1979
Chuck is currently writing a memoir of his life in jazz, and this is the second of three excerpts from it.
—Peter Rubie
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
I'd heard Bill Evans in 1955 or 1956 at a New York club called The Composer and was immediately taken with his playing, but I don't remember meeting him until June 1957. While I was a student at Brandeis University, three jazz composers and three classical composers were commissioned to write pieces for an orchestra of jazz musicians who would come to Brandeis, spend a week or two rehearsing the material, and then perform it during an arts festival. My teacher, Harold Shapero, wrote "On Green Mountain," based on something by Monteverdi.Milton Babbitt
composer / conductor1916 - 2011
Jimmy Giuffre
clarinet1921 - 2008
John LaPorta
clarinet1920 - 2004
Hal McKusick
saxophoneb.1924
Teddy Charles
vibraphone1928 - 2012
I was able to listen to rehearsals and hang around with the musicians. Bill, probably the youngest of the group, was quiet, but cheerful, with a sly smile and a hint of humor. And there was a palpable sense that all the musicians were impressed with him. Gunther, even with the responsibility of conducting and organizing everything, was accessible and friendly.
There was no nearby off-campus place for the players to eat after rehearsals, so they ended up at the student union cafeteria and snack bar. There was a piano there, so I figured out when the musicians were likely to turn up and arranged for Steve Kuhn and Arnie (Arnold Wise) to be there playing with me. This was a time when there was virtually no jazz played by university students. I knew we were a good trio. We'd played at a professional level in Boston gigs and as accompanists for
Coleman Hawkins
saxophone, tenor1904 - 1969
Stan Getz
saxophone, tenor1927 - 1991
As I mentioned, I heard the news of
Scott LaFaro
bass1936 - 1961
As far as I was concerned this phone call had been inevitable. Despite the powerful blow he felt at Scotty's loss, Bill was too much of a musician to stop playing for long, no matter how much he'd loved Scotty. And he was too strong a musician to have depended so much on anyone to shore up his musical spirit that he wouldn't find a way to go on. I was simply one of two logical choices, and I didn't think Bill knew about
Steve Swallow
bassb.1940
Orrin Keepnews
producer1923 - 2015
The three most important things in music are rhythm, rhythm, and rhythm—in that order. No two musicians feel and express rhythm in exactly the same way, but some are more compatible than others. On the strength of this issue alone, I thought Bill would like my playing. This is a sensual, intimate thing, and Bill's music just felt right... when I'd played with him four years earlier and when I heard the records he had made before the trio with Scotty. When Bill took aim at a point seven or eight measures ahead, superimposing complex cross rhythms on the meter until he landed securely in an intelligible place, I knew what was happening on the deepest, most intuitive level.
If you'd asked me about the pitches, or the harmonies, I'd have made educated guesses that were more right than wrong; but I was far more secure about the rhythm. True compatibility communicates itself—and if I knew it, Bill had to know it too. No question. We both felt the beat the same way and we both knew it. I recognized the potential for a partnership, and I thought Bill would be sensitive enough to feel the same conclusion. If I was scared, and I probably was in hindsight, I repressed it and didn't think about it. In retrospect, I can understand how that might come across as arrogance.
We had one rehearsal, if you could call it that . . . actually it was really an audition. I went to Bill's apartment on 106th Street, between the north end of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive.
Paul Motian
drums1931 - 2011
Paul was chattier, but both were clearly in audition mode. I needed to pass, so I concentrated on myself rather than them. When we played I focused on being as open and receptive to what they were doing as I could manage. There was a dichotomy in my behavior—social self-centeredness, likely because I was unconsciously trying to cover up my insecurities, and a musical, I hoped generous empathy when I could forget about myself and just focus on the music we were making. That at least is how I remember it. I don't recall discussing Scotty's death—it could be that my burning desire to communicate through the music, to be accepted as part of the trio blotted out all the rest . . . or maybe the poignant loss we all shared just couldn't be articulated in words by any of us. It was in the music where that conversation somehow happened.
After mis-timing a rubato ending, I asked if Bill would nod to indicate the changing tempo. That's what I was used to from watching the first violinist in string quartets back in my cello playing days. Bill said, "No, just listen." He was right. There's an inherent logic to appropriate changes of speed in music, and if you listen, you know. Visual indicators are mostly superfluous in good ensembles. I tried it. It worked perfectly then and for the better part of the next six years.
I remember that we played Bill's signature theme, "Five." I'd heard it on his first record and a few times since. It's tricky, based on the chords of "I Got Rhythm," overlaying quintuplets every four beats in the A sections and quadruplets over every three, quarter note beats in the bridge. That's complicated, and I couldn't have told you what it was at the time. I'd have a hard time reading it even now, but I heard it and played it in a New York minute. That was the stuff that counted. I didn't know enough tunes, or enough about harmony, and certainly not enough of Bill's highly developed way of treating the harmonies of standard tunes. All that could come later.
It was the rhythm that mattered.
According to journalist, Adam Gopnik, in an article published in The New Yorker in 2001, Paul Motian said, "Bill was in a state of shock. Look at my gig book: nothing, nothing, nothing with Bill, until December. Bill was like a ghost."
Orrin said in his book I pulled Bill out of his slump and got him back into playing. I doubt it. Bill got himself out of whatever state he had been in, and for a number of reasons had to get back to playing. I was just lucky the timing was right.
Our first gig was at a club in the black section of Syracuse. There was an upright piano, painted white, and we stayed in a hotel above the bus depot. I think it was Bill's idea of a place to hide out while we pulled the music together. There were bookings in the next few months for a long run at the Hickory House and a couple of weeks at the Village Vanguard opposite the
Modern Jazz Quartet
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1952
Something happened at the hotel before that first gig that set the tone for part of my relationship with Bill. He invited me into his room where he and his wife Elaine were shooting heroin. It was a grisly scene: a belt around Bill's upper arm to make the veins stand out, a hypodermic needle in his forearm, and an eye dropper in place of a syringe, squeezing blood in and out of his vein. To Bill, it seemed a normal part of his life and nothing to hide. To me it was both morbidly fascinating, and frightening. I told him I'd rather not see that again, and in all the years I knew Bill, I never did.
Chemical dependencies of various kinds became an inescapable fact of Bill's life. He told me that the only recording he ever made that wasn't under the influence of drugs was his first one. I'd first met him around 1955 when he was playing at an east side jazz club called The Composer and again at Brandeis in 1957—both times before he had started using drugs. He was intelligent, with a wry sense of humor. His intellect and the beauty in his music never left him, but some of the humor slipped away, and as Bill's life became increasingly cloaked in a cocoon of opiates, his emotional contact with the world—and eventually even his music—became more remote. No one knows how much Bill's experience of the external world was changed by drugs, but careful listening to his music reveals how certain energies slowly ebbed from the expression of his inner world. You can hear something happening to his music if you compare the recordings he made before 1961 to those that came after. There are some positive developments, of course, but there is also a creeping introspection. There are momentary exceptions, but generally there is gradually less effort to reach outward to the listener. The precision of nuance and articulation never left, but the strength of emphasis abated.
Bill was a fascinating personality, at first a little shy then increasingly withdrawn. He was always articulate and insightful with words as well as music and brilliant when using words to describe music. His speech was as direct and un-flowery as his playing—avoiding unnecessary elaboration of simple ideas. When obstinately probed about what his secret improvising method might be during an interview (with a musician who ought to have known better), he had to answer three times that all he was doing was expressing the form of the tune as he heard it. The interviewer was reluctant to let go of the question and Bill, cordial as he usually was, didn't step out of his role to supply a new answer. He just kept answering what he had been asked until the interviewer relented. Which was more perverse: the inanity of the question or Bill's refusal to take the interviewer's cue and expand upon it? He demonstrated his process by playing. Though he could have talked a lot about what he was doing, the musical example was sufficiently eloquent to render talk superfluous.
Bill was usually kind-hearted. Once when drummer
Mel Lewis
drums1929 - 1990
Bill talked about his addiction only rarely; you got the feeling he was applying his powerful intelligence to a cleverly defended rationale for maintaining his habits. I imagine he might have done the same thing in his therapy sessions. We all try to do that—depending on our therapists to have even more clever techniques, so that over time we are helped out of our own traps. But you have to want to get out, and Bill seemed committed to strengthening his prison. There were things about it he liked.
I wasn't going to understand it, and I certainly wasn't going to get Bill to change his behavior. Many people who cared about Bill and assumed I held some power because of our daily contact asked me why I didn't help him. I cared as much as anyone, and I had a substantial investment in Bill's health, but I didn't know how.
Heroin remains a mystery to me. No one has ever tried to get me to use it, nor do I think they could. No description of its charms can overcome the picture I have of the ravages. I don't know any old junkies. They are motivated by some sense of self-preservation to quit, or they die. I don't always know an addict when I see one, nor do I always recognize when someone I know is using. Heroin affects people differently and seems to affect the same people differently at different times. I never knew when
Sal Nistico
saxophone1948 - 1991
I mention all this about drugs because they were ever present with Bill, hovering in the immediate background even when he was momentarily clean; their effects on his performance were usually not noticeable in the short term. If Bill's health and well-being weren't in obvious crisis we generally ignored the problem. No other course seemed productive. He showed up, communicated what was necessary to organize the music, and played like an angel.
Photo credit: Bob Rosenbaum
Tags
The Jazz Life
Chuck Israels
Peter Rubie
Herb Pomeroy
Charlie Mariano
Joe Gordon
Serge Chaloff
John Neves
Steve Kuhn
Arnold Wise
Art Farmer
Jimmy Knepper
Barry Galbraith
Bill Evans
Joe Benjamin
Gunther Schuller
George Russell
Charles Mingus
Harold Shapero
Milton Babbitt
Charlie Mingus
Jimmy Giuffre
Louis Mucci
Jimmy Knepper
Jimmy Buffington
John La Porta
Hal McKusick
Teddy Charles
Gunther Schuller
Coleman Hawkins
Stan Getz
Scot LaFaro
Steve Swallow
orrin keepnews
Paul Motian
Mel Lewis
Sal Nistico
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