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‘Bill Evans: Live At D’Lugoff’s Top of the Gate’ CD Showcases Evans’ Highly Nuanced Touch, Melodic Shapes, and Revolutionary Chord Voicing

June 11, 2012 By sdcnews

Photo by Fred Seligo© Delia Seligo. Fred Seligo Archives – CTS Images.

By Danny R. Johnson 

LOS ANGELES – The music world is very fortunate that Resonance Records’ June 12, 2012, release of newly restored and never recorded music of the late jazz pianist title, Bill Evans: Live At D’Lugoff’s Top of the Gate, prominently authenticates one of modern jazz piano most unique and influential artist of the 20th Century.

When Bill Evans died on September 15, 1980, from complications related to his life-long struggle and addiction to heroin and cocaine, he could not fully comprehend the effects his premature departure from this life at the age of 51 would usher in a new era of post-bop jazz piano playing technique, to the modern era jazz style in which Evans inspired and stirred the greatest possible emotion through the most advanced harmonic movement.

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The Top of the Gate album reminds us why Evans is still considered, even some 31 years after his death, an intellectual genius who could find ecstasy in the placement of one note within a simmering, complex chord. Modern jazz pianists of the day such as Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Jason Moran, and Cyrus Chestnut, to name a few, owe a great deal of gratitude to Evans’ immense contribution to jazz improvisation, which these and countless other artists have used quite often in their works.

The Bill Evans Revolutionary World of Jazz Improvisation 

The Top of the Gate CD, which captures Evans’ October 23, 1968 performance with his trio consisting of Eddie Gomez on bass and Marty Morell on drums, will reacquaint jazz aficionados with the bygone golden era of a major jazz venue of the 1960s New York City, where The Village Gate was a nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York. Art D’Lugoff opened the club in 1958, on the ground floor and basement of 158 Bleecker Street. The large 1896 Chicago School structure by architect Ernest Flagg, was known at the time as Mills House No. 1 and served as a flophouse for transient men. In its heyday, the Village Gate also included an upper-story performance space, known as the Top of the Gate, where Evans and many other musicians performed.

Throughout its 38 years the Village Gate featured such musicians as John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Vasant Rai, Herbie Mann, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and of course, Bill Evans. The show Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, debuted at the Village Gate in 1968.

When Bill Evans came to New York in the 1950s, he was already an exceedingly competent musician and was able to find work with Tony Scott, a highly regarded clarinetist who worked a good deal along 52nd Street. In 1956, Mundell Lowe, an exceptional guitarist with whom he had worked in college, brought Bill to the attention of Orin Keepnews and Bill Grauer of Riverside Records. Keepnews and Grauer were impressed, and in 1957 they issued an album of Evans’ work. It had very little impact, but musicians were becoming aware of him, and in February 1958, Miles Davis brought him into his group.

Bill stayed with the group for eight months, but it was during his tenure that Miles made Kind of Blue, one of his mot influential records. The record was an early foray into modes. Musically, Evans’ stint with Davis was a transformative experience, as each musician fed the other’s curiosities.

Evans’ fame was partly due to the presence in his trio after 1959 of a brilliant young bassist named Scott LaFaro. LaFaro had developed an almost guitar-like facility on bass, in part by lowering the bridge, which brought the strings closer to the neck of the instrument. He was getting away from strict timekeeping. In any case, bassists were listening closely to LaFaro, and he proved to be one of the major influences on his instrument. Working as a close-knit team, LaFaro and Evans, and drummer Paul Motian produced an inter-meshed music in which each was responding to the others. This was the group that made Evans famous.

Unfortunately, LaFaro was killed in an automobile accident in 1961 at the age of 25. Such was the blow that Evans retired from music for several months. He returned to play with shifting personnel, which finally settled down to drummer Marty Morell and another superlative bassist, Eddie Gomez.

The hallmark of Evans’ style is a concern with shaping melody, mainly in single notes. As demonstrated repeatedly in Top of the Gate, he does not simply let a line run on, as Charlie Parker and Bud Powell did, counting on the twists and turns to allure the listener, but tries to relate parts of the melody to each other.

Live At the Gate Captures Evans at his Musical Peak

Mandel and Mercer’s Emily track on the first and second set is quite revealing, stunning and a stroke of musical genius! Gomez’s improvisation around Evans’ piano playing on parts of Emily target and bring out the strongest part of Bill Evans’ imagination by encouraging him to focus on harmony, rather than rhythm, as the source of his groove. In response Evans plays more texturally, and with more rhythmic and melodic restraint, than he did with more conservative bassists in his career.  Similarly, when Gomez moves out for his own solos, Evans outlines extended textural suggestions for him, rather than dropping formulate chords here and there.

I found Evans’ Turn Out The Stars track to be quite interesting. Here we have all three players drift into what seem like private meditations which nonetheless intersect and even swing. Evans plays his solo in octaves, replacing his old practice of spelling out harmonies with attempts at more economical telepathy with his colleagues. Eventually they settle into a clear 4/4 pulse, but even here each musician spends more time letting the beat breathe than locking it down.

In J. Kern’s Yesterdays track, Bill Evans’ musical interpretation of this classical tune, like his personality, has a questioning quality, visually represented by his famous posture at the piano: Hunched forward, his nose an inch or so above the keyboard, he looks intense and engaging with his music. In general, his line is sectioned into brief phrases of a bar or two in length, and as he plays, he is constantly in search of ways to relate the shorter fragments. He is particularly fond of reiterating a figure several times, higher or lower. This interest in rational melody is central to his work. Evans once said: “Just learning how to manipulate a line, the science of building a line, if you can call it a science, is enough to occupy somebody for twelve lifetimes.”

As demonstrated in Evans’ unique version of Monk’s Round Midnight, and J. Kosma’s Autumn Leaves, we learn of another aspect of Evans’ work and that is the use of his left hand. We have seen how Bud Powell and the beboppers usually dropped the older practice of stating every beat – that is, of establishing a ground beat with the left hand. Throughout Top of the Gate Evans carries this trend even further, so that in effect the left hand no longer has a dynamic function. Its task, in Evans’ playing, is purely harmonic: the chord in the left hand is there to supply a bottom over which can be laid a harmonically complementary or contrasting line. That the left hand has a harmonic rather than a rhythmic function is made apparent in the fact Evans usually sustains the left-hand chord. The beboppers, in contrast, did not, but rather used sharply chopped chords placed for rhythmic effect.

Bill Evans’ Legacy Is Immensely Consequential 

Because Evans was less concerned with rhythm than most jazz pianists of his day, is one reason why he most often liked to work with bass and drums. Bill was very much a European player, whose approach was thoughtful rather than directly emotional.

To his friend Gene Lees in Down Beat, Evans went further in questioning whether his classical training helped or hindered his artistry: “You try to express a simple emotion – love, excitement, sadness – and often your technique gets in the way…I’ve always had good facility, and that worries me. I hope it does not get in the way.”

This penchant Evans had with reflecting, often shading into resignation, gives his work a considerable consistency, which could usefully be broken by other moods. But as Bill Evans: Live At Art D’Lugoff’s Top of the Gate album admirably validates today and for decades to come, despite this weakness that preoccupied him so intensely – Bill Evans has been, and will remain, the most influential of modern jazz pianists.

Danny R. Johnson is San Diego County News’ Jazz and Pop Music Critic. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Entertainment, Music Tagged With: Music


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