Bill Evans Trio: At The Village Vanguard 1961 Revisited

Liner notes generally avoid referencing current affairs, for the good reason that what is front page news when the notes are being written may be gone and forgotten by the time the album is released. But there are exceptional circumstances, and here is one of them.

On his father's side, Bill Evans was of Welsh heritage, and on his mother's side, Russian, or rather Ukrainian, the two countries during his lifetime often being conflated as a result of Ukraine's on-off history as a Russian-Soviet vassal state. We are concerned here, as you may have surmised, with Evans' Ukrainian heritage. He wrote that he would have liked to explore this at first hand, and he had two opportunities to do so, during proposed visits to the Soviet Union with his trio in the years before Ukraine regained its independence in 1991.

But fate intervened on both occasions. The first was in 1969, and Evans was actually going through departure protocols at Kennedy Airport, bound for Moscow, when he was busted for possession of heroin. He spent a day or two in jail before his manager, Helen Keane, got him released on bail and booked on a get-out-of-jail-free methadone programme. It is fortunate, perhaps, that Evans did not make it to Moscow, to be busted there, for the Soviet Union's narcotics laws were as barbarous then as Russia's are now.

The second opportunity came in late 1980. But in response to the Soviet Union's bloody invasion of Afghanistan just a few weeks before the planned visit, Evans felt compelled to withdraw. In an open letter to Down Beat magazine, he set out the arguments for and against fulfilling the engagement. After acknowledging that there was a case for taking his cultural message to the Soviet Union, in tacit solidarity with regime opponents, he concluded the letter thus: "[But] to perform there voluntarily, after all, is to walk passively in the atmosphere of the degradation of the human spirit. My gesture will have little or no significance, but I follow my code and am at peace with myself." A few weeks later, Evans passed.

As history relates, beautiful music has sometimes been created by monstrous men. But even so, as is also the case with Evans' close contemporary, sometime colleague, and fellow shaman, John Coltrane, it is impossible to conceive of Evans' music being created by anyone bereft of moral integrity and love of humanity. The same might be said of jazz's first globally acknowledged shaman, Louis Armstrong, of whom Duke Ellington said: "He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way." Evans was not born poor, and heroin and cocaine ensured he did not die rich, but he too never hurt anyone along the way (other than himself).

There are numerous stories testifying to Evans' good character, both from fans who rocked up to ask for his autograph between sets, and were invariably treated with courtesy, and from people who knew him well and for long periods. Two such testimonies will suffice. In 1989, Orrin Keepnews, for seven years Evans' producer at Riverside, and later his producer at Milestone, who had worked with a broad spectrum of the human species, wrote: "Bill Evans was an honorable man and a sincerely dedicated artist—pretty remarkable accomplishments for a junkie. He kept his promises, performed as scheduled, and without exception came up with musically sound and valid concepts."

In 1995, Helen Keane, Evans' collaborator from 1963 until he passed in 1980, described him with an economy of words of which Evans the pianist would have approved: "Bill was a gentle person, but very strong."

Keane was talking about Evans' moral strength, but she could equally well have been referring to the way he, like Coltrane and Armstrong, rose above the hostility he faced at points in his career, and how he responded with equanimity even to personal attacks. In 1958, for instance, Evans spent around seven months in Miles Davis' sextet, where he frequently encountered what he called "silent treatment" from audiences who objected to a white man replacing Red Garland in the otherwise African American line-up. Evans' solos would be met with tepid applause or silence. It must have been hurtful, but Evans, who in the late 1950s lived with an African American woman (Peri Cousins, the dedicatee of his tune "Peri's Scope"), endured.

Evans took criticism on the chin, too. Paul Motian once remarked on how hard Scott LaFaro could be on Evans: "If he didn't think the music sounded right, if it was good but not perfect, he'd say to Bill, 'Man, you're just fucking up the music. Go look at yourself in the mirror.'" Whether LaFaro was referring to Evans' playing or his physical condition—by 1960, heroin had already ravaged his once athletic body—is not clear. But again, Evans endured.

Mention of Motian and LaFaro brings us to this disc, perhaps belatedly. But other than observing that the music is presented here following immaculate and unprecedented sound restoration, what more needs to be said about it? What more, usefully, can be said? The performances are as close to perfection as makes no difference, and as close to immortality, too, and if you are still reading these notes, you will not need to be told why.

Liner Notes copyright © 2024 Chris May.

At The Village Vanguard 1961 Revisited can be purchased here.

Contact Chris May at All About Jazz.
Chris May is a senior editor of All About Jazz. He was previously the editor of the pioneering magazine Black Music & Jazz Review, and more recently editor of the style / culture / history magazine Jocks & Nerds.

Comments