Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings

Victor Verney

Contributing Editor since 2006

former sailor, steelworker, musician, professor & journalist turned freelance writer

Recent articles (34 total)

Published: May 19, 2006

But when Evans first set a Fender Rhodes at a 90� angle to a Steinway while recording the album From Left to Right in 1970, he changed the keyboard landscape forever. Over the next twenty years, one rarely saw the next generation of jazz piano giants—Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea—performing or recording without a cluster of keyboards draped over and around a Fender Rhodes, still used by many musicians of all genres but now considered a venerable old warhorse from the pre-digital era.

Evans was also largely responsible for reforming chord voicings played by jazz pianists. A voicing is the series of notes used to express a chord. Up until Evans' time chords had been expressed either by spelling the chord, with root, 3rd, 5th, 7th and sometimes 9th, or with a selection of these notes. Also before Evans, Bud Powell had pioneered the so-called shell voicings or alternations between outer and inner notes of a chord.

Evans, however, abandoned roots almost entirely to develop a system in which the chord is expressed as a quality—a color—with the root being left to the bassist, or to the left hand on another beat of the measure, or just left implied. "If I'm going to be sitting there playing roots, fifths and full voicings, the bass is relegated to a time machine," explained Evans. Pioneered and standardized by Evans (who derived it from classical composers), this is now a widely used system, and a student can find it explained in any number of books on jazz piano theory and technique.

Evans formed his last trio in 1978, and this briefly rejuvenated him—after years of heavy heroin and cocaine use he now suffered from hepatitis and other serious ailments. His narcotics addiction was continuing to create family problems and upheavals in his personal life. Despite rapidly failing health, Evans—a trouper to the very end—insisted on working until forced to cancel midweek during an engagement at Fat Tuesday's in New York. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital on September 15, 1980, where he died from a bleeding ulcer, cirrhosis of the liver and bronchial pneumonia. He is buried next to his brother in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

How My Heart Sings shows the reader Evans' clay feet, to be sure, particularly what Nenette described (in a 2001 interview) as his denial that drug use had "certain moral implications, even around children." The couple had purchased a home in suburban Closter, New Jersey, but Nenette's concern about Evans' drug use eventually led her to move into a separate residence in New Haven, Connecticut with the children. Evans moved to a rented apartment in Fort Lee, NJ. However, he and Nenette remained close until to his death.

The quiet ironies of Evans' personal life, just like those in his music, do indeed have a pronounced heartbreak quality. According to one anecdote, Evans—a lefthander who revolutionized the left hand in jazz piano—once showed up for a gig with his right arm virtually useless. He had hit a nerve and temporarily disabled it while shooting heroin, and he performed a full week's engagement at the Vanguard virtually one-handed, a morbid spectacle that drew other pianists to watch. He pulled it off thanks in large measure to his virtuoso pedal technique. According to one bassist in the audience: "If you looked away, you couldn't tell anything was wrong."

As in any junkie's life, sordid details are abundant. The image of Evans, whose phone had been disconnected, calling a string of friends from a telephone booth outside his apartment on a daily basis to cadge money is not pretty. As resentful as they became, his friends were nonetheless reluctant to withhold money, because Evans would then go to loan sharks who threatened to break his hands if he didn't pay them back on time. One such acquaintance was jazz writer Gene Lees, who was responsible for introducing Evans to Helen Keane, who became something like a sister to the troubled pianist.

At one point Lees and Keane colluded with record producers Orrin Keepnews and Creed Taylor to withhold cash from Evans while directly paying his bills, and they appointed the reluctant Lees to break the news. When Lees arrived at Evans' apartment, he found the electricity had been turned off for nonpayment. Evans was dodging the problem by running an extension cord under his door into the hallway and plugging it into a light fixture.

Evans was infuriated at the intervention. He had developed a taste for William Blake's poetry in his college days (as Jim Morrison of the Doors, another self-destructive visionary, did a decade later), and sounding like nothing so much as an over-educated junkie, he rationalized his addiction by exclaiming to Lees melodramatically: "You don't understand. It's like death and transfiguration. Every day you wake in pain like death and then you go out and score, and that is transfiguration. Each day becomes all of life in microcosm."

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