Bill evans biographyweather manufactured
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Bill Evans is Radio 3&#;s Composer of the Week this week. It inspired me to dig out an old piece I wrote about him. The quotes from various pianists are from a few years ago when I last dusted it off, but they all remain bang on the money. It&#;s a long piece, but then so was Bill&#;s career. Although not long enough.
It is July, . As the heat of the summer’s day fades, Simon Wallace, regular pianist at the soon-to-be-legendary Blitz Club, is standing on the corner of Poland and Oxford Streets, waiting for his girlfriend. A thin, middle-aged American, despite the warmth, wearing a thick overcoat, stops and asks for help: ‘Sorry, I’m kinda lost. I’m looking for Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. I’ve been there before, but I can’t seem to get my bearings.’
Wallace explains he is going to the club himself to see pianist Bill Evans, one of his heroes. Oh. Do you play? the stranger asks. Yes, Wallace replies, explaining that he, too, is a piano player, although not in Bill’s league, but ha
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Bill Evans
How My Heart Sings
By PETER PETTINGER
Yale University
Read the Review
Part I
Birth of the Sound,
CHAPTER 1
The Kid from
Plainfield
I've always preferred to play something simple than go all over the keyboard on something I wasn't clear about.
--Bill Evans
Harry and Mary's firstborn, Harry Jr., inherited the solid, chunky features of his father, but Bill, born two years later, took on the narrow bone structure and sharper countenance of his mother. He became her favorite. When Harry Sr.'s drinking bouts brought abuse and financial strain, Mary often took the boys to stay in nearby Somerville with her sister Justine and the Epps family.
Here, too, there was music. In the evenings, Earle Epps's father, who held a bachelor of music degree in piano and organ, would sit down at the piano and play through the great classics, an indulgence that had a crucial effect on the visiting Evans broth
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The Honest Broker
I only saw Bill Evans in the flesh on one occasion—and it was just ten days before he died.
I had already missed a chance to hear him in concert, when he came to Palo Alto in late to play at the New Varsity Theater. But I was 17 years old, and had just moved into my freshman dormitory—and was so ignorant that inom didn’t know the layout of downtown, or where this venue was located. I was struggling with all the confusion of the first few days of college and living away from home, and didn’t really grasp that Bill Evans was performing less than two miles from my dorm room.
I later heard through the grapevine that the Palo Alto gig was a financial disaster. A friend claimed that fewer than twenty people had showed up to hear Bill Evans. Maybe that was an exaggeration—as I said, I wasn’t there myself. But those were lean years for mainstream jazz, and even legends were struggling to get record deals and good-paying gigs at that juncture.
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