The best possible tribute to the unhappy soul who is the subject of this unsettling book. Strung out.'' How, then, did he feel about his own exquisite playing? Was it also too beautiful for him to live with? Needless to say, Peter Pettinger has no answer, but that such a question can be seriously asked is perhaps It's almost as if he had to blur the world for himself by being He came down, when he kicked it, which he did on numerous occasions, the world was - I don't know how to say it - too beautiful. Two weeks later, he was dead, leaving his friends to wonder what demons had driven him to so squalid an end.Įri Cousins, the woman with whom Evans was living when he first began to use heroin, offered as plausible an explanation as any: ''When Late one night at a Sanįrancisco club, Pettinger writes, Evans played Johnny Mandel's ''Theme From M*A*S*H,'' remarking that the song was also known as ''Suicide Is Painless.'' ''Debatable,'' It was as if he were racing himself to the grave. Most astonishingly, his playing became markedly more intense and probing in the last year of his life, not long after he switched from methadone to cocaine. Though Pettinger skims over the details of Evans's plunge into the abyss of addiction, his biographyĬontains more than enough horror stories to make the reader wonder how he managed to function at all, much less to forge a powerfully individual style that would leave its mark on virtually every jazz pianist to follow him. One way for him to prove his authenticity was to do as Coltrane and Jones did (and as Davis himself had so famously done only a few years before). With celebrated sidemen like John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. got him out of his background.'' Compounding the problem was Evans's awkward relationship with Miles Davis, who set the gold standardįor hipness throughout the 1950's and who delighted in baiting the painfully shy pianist as the only white musician in Davis's group, he was also acutely aware that many jazz fans thought him unworthy of sharing a bandstand I think the drugs for him made him more mysterious. One of his sidemen would later speculate that ''his involvement with drugs (early on, anyway) was to get away from the fact that he really wasĪ very American kind of guy. The second son of a hard-drinking New Jersey printer, Evans had a conventional and uneventful youth. To the grisly particulars of what the writer Gene Lees, who knew him well, tersely called ''the longest suicide in history.'' But ''Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings'' is also the first full-length biography of Evans, and most readers will doubtless pay special attention That it reads at times more like an annotated discography than a biography. He is as interested in his playing as his private life his book is packed with so much shrewd critical commentary Pettinger, who died last month, was an English concert pianist who began listening to Evans as a teen-ager. He picked up the habit in 1958 as a member of Miles Davis's sextet, and despite occasional interludes of sobriety, it stayed with him, finally leading to hisĭeath in 1980. To drugs - first heroin, then cocaine - for much of his adult life. Lamp seemed at first glance incapable of such Debussyan subtlety something, one felt sure, must have gone terribly wrong for a man who played like that to have looked like that.Īppearances are seldom deceiving to the clear-eyed observer, and Peter Pettinger writes frankly in his fine new biography of what was no secret to Evans's appalled colleagues: The most influential jazz pianist of the past half-century was addicted Yet the bespectacled, cadaverous ruin who sat hunched over the keyboard like a broken gooseneck Pop songs as ''Young and Foolish'' and ''The Boy Next Door'' into fleeting visions of infinite grace. His shining tone and cloudy pastel harmonies transformed such innocuous Who could have looked more worldly-wise than Duke Ellington, or wittier than Paul Desmond? But sometimes a musician embodiesĪ contradiction, and then you can read it off his face, just as you can see a fault line snaking through a tranquil landscape. The sad life and slow death of one of the most influential jazz musicians of our time.Īny jazz musicians resemble their music.
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