Portrait in Jazz
And Bill Evans’ “ability to make his conception of a number seem the definitive way to play it.”
I heard Bill Evans’ Portrait in Jazz for the first time twice. I heard it in 2016 (at least that’s when it joined my Spotify library, but surely it was love at first listen), and again last year, when I hauled my grandmother’s record player down some 650 miles from northern Wisconsin to my Missouri apartment.
Portrait in Jazz was the first vinyl record I ever owned, and Evans’ stern face on the cover peered down at me from a dust-covered bookshelf for more than a year, waiting.
Then, finally, I had something to play him on. As soon as I got home, I plugged in the player and dropped the needle, leaning forward with my head between two speakers. My car was illegally parked and I had plenty to unpack, but I had been looking forward to this for a long time, and I think I had my priorities straight: “At its least great, it is merely brilliant,” Danny Eccleston wrote of the album for the UK’s Mojo.
Portrait in Jazz would soon make new memories as its sound filled my small college apartment time after time. But one track, in particular, has always struck me most of all.
Bill Evans’ death was the “longest suicide in history,” so said friend Gene Lees.
The pianist’s decades-long struggle with drug addiction was evident to those around him and, unfortunately, came as no surprise to anyone in touch with the jazz scene of the time.
In addition to Evans’ addiction, he was consistently in proximity to tragedy — abuse, death, suicide. Yet he seems to have poured every last drop of that emotion, pain and personality into his recordings.
That’s why, when I think of the classic jazz standard “Autumn Leaves,” I hear the Bill Evans Trio’s rendition. In 1959, Evans, joined by Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums, created a piece not only quintessential to jazz history, but to the standard itself.
The tune kicks off with an authoritative intro that I incorporate into my memory of the standard as a whole but in truth is an addition made only by Evans. He plays a few runs in the right hand as LaFaro and Motian match quick hits alongside him, before breaking into the classic melody.
One of the most impressive things about the track is how smoothly the group transitions from one musical atmosphere to another with only the three instruments, not to mention the group’s undeniable cohesion. The trio had only first started playing together earlier that year at the time of recording.
The melody first feels like mostly straight-ahead jazz, though the bass is not always walking, and LaFaro is often designing melodies of his own as Evans cruises through the head. It doesn’t take long for the chart to reach its solo sections, beginning with a bass solo, a noteworthy ordering and one that quickly shifts the energy of the piece to something more delicate.
As LaFaro plucks his way through an improvisation that grows more and more dense with notes, Evans and Motian inconspicuously duck in and out with short responses to the soloist’s ideas. All three are in a clear interaction, with LaFaro at the helm.
Then, Evans butts in more and more, until suddenly he’s at the helm. Motian jumps in behind him with a quick snare roll and then steady swinging rhythm on cymbal. That roll into Evans’ turn grabs my attention each and every time.
The piano solo begins mostly with an active right hand and discrete chordal foundations in the left. But it slowly builds until Evans’ left hand is making up more and more of the harmony and activity. At one point, as he moves up and down the keys on the right, making up the melody of his solo, he hammers the same chords repeatedly on the left, to ear-grabbing effect.
But there’s no time to get comfortable there. Of course, another shift in texture comes. Motian has slowly dropped out of keeping rhythm behind Evans, and the pianist is leaving so much space between ideas that it begins to sound like a bass solo again.
Then, just as I begin to wonder if Evans went out for a smoke, the keys return with the melody, just once through. The trio then closes out the tune, as Motian and LaFaro taper off and Evans lets out one last flurry of improvisation.
The group’s ability to create such an authoritative depiction of the already-established standard, despite minimal time together, could in part be attributed to Evans himself. The cover of a solo album Evans released earlier that same year, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, quotes jazz greats in their praise for the pianist. Perhaps most noteworthy in this context are the words of saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderly:
“Bill Evans has rare originality and taste and the even rarer ability to make his conception of a number seem the definitive way to play it.”
As a trumpet player, I don’t necessarily find myself drawn to this version of the tune for my own replication, as Evans’ trademark harmonies aren’t quite conducive to the one-note nature of the horn.
But the ideas the pianist puts forward throughout the tune have a way of sticking with me, and have a tendency to surface when listening to other versions of “Autumn Leaves.”
Take trumpeter Chet Baker’s version, for example. Baker, by his nature, plays the chart laid back, cool and with lots of space. But in those spaces, I can hear some of Evans’ ideas where my ear thinks they should be.
The same is true on other versions that leave room for it, including those of guitarist Joe Pass and trumpeter Miles Davis, who worked with Evans extensively (“He plays the piano the way it should be played,” Davis said of Evans).
The piece itself, as a standard, saw many recordings before Evans’. “Autumn Leaves” was composed in 1945 by Joseph Kosma, and was given lyrics in French and eventually English after the fact.
The song leans heavily on the ii–V–I chord progression, an extremely common progression in Western popular music. Evan’s use of complex harmonies can make it easy to forget that he’s really playing off one of the simplest blueprints of them all.
That could have been another piece of his music that drew me in as a musician just learning a new instrument: the idea that he could start with something so simple and turn it into something so complex, all while making it sound easy.
I also consider it rare that my taste within one genre remains with a single song for so long. Most of the jazz music I listen to now does not match much with the jazz music I listened to in 2016. I play in smaller groups more often now, and my interests have widened as I’ve learned to appreciate more styles.
Evans’ style, however, has not soured to me in the slightest, as others’ have. When I sought to teach myself a bit of piano one summer, I turned heavily to his sound, just as I had five years before.
One side of Evans’ playing is his unflinching commitment to including classical elements in his playing. He is, after all, a classically trained pianist, and repeatedly cited classical influences for his musical ideas.
“I never practice,” Evans once said, “but I play Bach.”
Evans’ classical influence is less evident in “Autumn Leaves” than in some of his other work — Skating In Central Park or Waltz for Debby, for example — and can be a bit harder to pick out when a track really gets swinging. It’s always there, however, and seems easiest to pick out by listening to the harmonies he chooses to use.
But just as his unique work was gaining recognition, the 60s arrived, and rock music surged in popularity.
Evans kept playing Evans, though, even as some of his peers worked to accommodate the trends. Davis, for example, turned to jazz fusion as a way to reach new audiences.
It seems to have paid off for the pianist. Evans won seven Grammys and, after his death, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
And long after his death, there’s something about the emotion Evans’ work evokes that keeps drawing me in. In “Autumn Leaves,” I hear his usual thoughtful approach applied in a more intense, up-tempo setting. In his ballads, he knew how to make a piano weep.
I’m not the only one still captivated by the pianist’s translation between emotion and jazz.
In 2015, Bruce Spiegel released his documentary on Evans, a product of years of research and interviews. He found that just about anyone could understand the music, on some level.
“I got a couple kids; they aren’t really into jazz,” Spiegel told NPR following the film’s release. “But in the course of making the movie I played [Evans] for them, and they say, ‘Jesus, that’s pretty good.’”
