bill evans time remembered transcription

Bill had been close to his older brother, and that night La Barbera noticed tears in Evans’s eyes while performing “Re: Person I Knew.” Bassist Marc Johnson later commented: “That was a horrible time. Just a few weeks later, during an April engagement at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., Bill learned that his brother Harry had committed suicide. And even if Bill had been more interventionist, this wasn’t a time in his life when he could micromanage anything. There weren’t even rehearsals, unless the trio was doing a rare gig with a guest artist. Sometime before I’d joined, Bill had begun using again.”ĭespite the pressures of playing with a jazz legend, La Barbera enjoyed tremendous freedom in this gig. “When I joined the band,” La Barbera writes, “his prior addiction was common knowledge, but it was also known he was in a methadone treatment program at Rockefeller Hospital. Evans had battled with addiction throughout his career, but it was now worse than ever, although few were aware how out-of-control it had become. These are good books if you want to learn more about Bill Evans’s lifeīut it was also a melancholy time to work with Evans, who was in the thick of the substance abuse problem that would lead to his death 20 months later. If you had this gig, you got used to celebrities showing up in the audience or backstage-because Bill Evans might not have had a huge crossover following, but the leading musicians definitely knew who he was and what he had done.

A new member of the band couldn’t help being reminded of this formidable history at every step-for example, when this new trio made its first studio recording, they did it at the same place where Evans had recorded Kind of Blue twenty years earlier. In January 1979, Bill Evans hired La Barbera, who would serve as the last drummer for his trio-completing a lineage that previously had included Paul Motian, Philly Joe Jones, Jack DeJohnette and other illustrious percussionists. I wanted to read it because I admire Evans greatly, but also because I’m still trying to process what happened so many years ago. It’s entitled Time Remembered: The Final Years of the Bill Evans Trio. It’s a song also known as “Suicide is Painless.”Ī new book by drummer Joe La Barbera casts additional light on this dark, concluding stage of Bill Evan’s life. For example, Bill Evans played the “Theme from M.A.S.H.” that night-as he did on almost every gig in his final months. Of course, there were other signs of self-destruction-but mostly those you would only notice in hindsight. I now believe that this intensity was part of Evans’s survival mechanism in this last stage of his life. By any measure, a gritty determination stood out in his approach that night at the Keystone Korner. But my conclusion, at least at the time, was that Evans wanted to modify his style, and was consciously moving away from the more introspective approach of his early career.Įvans had entered his 50s not long before, and in the jazz scene of that era many leading players were reinventing themselves in mid-career, even his former boss Miles Davis-so why not Bill Evans? Even if I admired his moody impressionism, I knew that most opinion-makers in the jazz world celebrated tougher, edgier styles, and it made a kind of brutal sense that Bill Evans would move in that direction. The tempos sometimes felt a little too fast-certainly when compared with his recordings, which I had studied carefully, especially the 1961 Village Vanguard tracks, which had profoundly impacted my conception of phrasing and rhythmic structure. But the music, despite an occasional jittery, unsettled quality, was still impressive that night. I now was in the perfect position to enjoy a fully immersive experience of Bill Evans at the piano.īut I probably focused too much on his hands, because I was surprised when my companion that evening leaned over and whispered: “Bill looks terrible-is he in bad health?” I responded by saying something glib, along the lines of: “Well, they never look the same in person as on the album covers, do they? He’s just older than what we’ve seen in photos.”Īs it turned out, I was clueless. I had seen other legends, from McCoy Tyner to Tommy Flanagan, from this same vantage point, and had picked up things no recording could capture.

This gave me a prime viewing angle of the pianist’s hands from very close range-I could almost stand up and lean over to touch the keys myself from this position. Little did I know that this would be my last and only chance.īy this time, I was an experienced veteran of the Keystone Korner, and knew I needed to show up early, if I wanted to get my preferred seat right behind the treble end of the piano.

But when Bill Evans came to the Keystone Korner for his final San Francisco engagement a few years later, I was determined to seize the opportunity.

Bill evans time remembered transcription